BALTIMORE WISDOM PROJECT prevents violence and uplifts justice for East Baltimoreans.
BALTIMORE WISDOM PROJECT prevents violence and uplifts justice for East Baltimoreans.
We are a values-driven company rooted in restorative justice. Chief among our values are our commitments to preventing inequalities, cultivating peace, elevating compassion, actualizing anti-oppression, and realizing liberation for historically marginalized people. We are also committed to the trauma-sensitive mantra of "do no harm." We advance peacemaking through family-centered holistic education. We are interested in addressing overlapping and interlocking injustices and behaviors. We are lifelong learners. Everywhere that we work is a laboratory for ongoing learning and practice about how best to be in service to others. Rather than being fixers, saviors, and correctors who only intervene when people commit harm or offense, we are peacemakers and carers dedicated to preventing harm by working with youth and families to build ongoing systems of accountability, compassion, and contemplation that transform whole communities and cultures.
At the center of our values is our affirmative engagement, which we call "salutogenesis." Salutogenesis is an approach to human health that examines the factors contributing to the promotion and maintenance of physical and mental well-being rather than disease (pathogens or pathogenic behavior). We view people as whole and work to help them maintain wholeness, and this holistic approach is key to our work. The people with whom we partner are the best assets (not deficits) in their own uplift and we are always finding ways to enhance their knowledge and gifts. We always promote 25 distinct forms of affirmation as we guide community members to elevate their behavioral health despite stressful conditions.
We are a Black-led organization that believes in culturally sensitive engagement. We think-through the language that we use with community members so we do not simply parrot the manner in which they speak to achieve a shallow sense of "relating" with them. We favor direct, caring, truthful nonviolent communication.
We don't wish to give the impression that arming with guns within communities struggling with mental health issues and trauma is okay. A 2022 UCLA study found an increase in firearm suicide among young Black adults. People who struggle with mental illness and trauma are more likely to be victims and survivors of violence than they are to be perpetrators. Teaching disarmament and educating community members in trauma-informed care is good mental healthcare.
We shape whole-community, gender-inclusive credible messaging for truly lasting peace and safety.
Our work is about eliminating and preventing patterns of violence, and not just reducing and interrupting violence. Thus, we are violence preventers and eliminators, and not just violence reducers and interrupters.
We have found that violence often occurs within sectors of society in which struggles for resources are acute. We have also found that there is a direct relationship between inequalities and violence through systemic injustices. Thus, preventing violence and ending systemic inequalities go hand-in-hand for us.
Many of our procedures and practices elevate a conscious, unequivocal commitment to safety and security. For example, in our transportation services, we do not merely drop off individuals; we watch them to make sure that they enter the door of their location safely.
We encourage community members to carefully consider where and with whom community members associate and the relationships that community members forge. We encourage everyone to think-through complex issues of consent and boundaries. We guard against sending mixed messages and working at crossed-purposes. Providing full and purposeful nonviolent messaging is key.
When engaging with youth and families, we don't wish to give the impression that some forms of violence, violent crime, or peer mistreatment are okay while others are not okay.
Even when we must defend ourselves from imminent harm, we never celebrate such action. Self-defense must be limited and non-excessive. We view nonviolence as perpetually and habitually necessary.
Further still, we do not present false narratives that only, for example, state that a certain kind of person is best suited (or "credible") to engage with community members. We urgently need everyone to become effective violence preventers and eliminators.
Wisdom Projects, Inc. is grounded in the Wisdom Education movement. To learn more about this movement, please obtain and read Dr. Theodore Richards' Creatively Maladjusted: The Wisdom Education Movement Manifesto (Homebound Publications, 2013).
We consciously center Black liberation, Indigenous liberation, Latina/o/x liberation, women's liberation, queer/trans/GNC/enby liberation, and economic justice in all that we do. We believe strongly that there can be no truly lasting peace, community healing, community education, community safety, and community wellness without this liberation, justice, and equity. Foundational values like ending income inequality, body autonomy, and pro-choice reproductive freedom are very important to us even when our day-to-day work may not always involve advocacy about these issues.
We believe strongly in cultural sensitivity and cultural responsiveness. We immerse ourselves with the community and are sensitive to their practices, customs, and worldview.
At the same time, we tell community members upfront that we are NOT culturally essentialist. Cultural essentialism leads to either the romanticization or pathologizing of communities. In other words, if we detect harm and violence, we do not merely say, "It's just their culture" or valorize unsafe actions. Such a stance enables harm in the community.
When confronted with adverse behaviors that contravene optimal living, health, wellness, and safety, we discuss problematic behaviors with community members, suggest alternatives, foster peace and wellness, and talk through remedies in empowering ways that encourage ongoing training in restorative justice and peacemaking.
We never shame and blame.
Here are our guiding imperatives:
Along with caring for the education and health of human youth and families, we believe that many of our greatest lessons are gained by a close connection with the natural world, including wilderness, plant life, and non-human animals. This belief animates our commitment to environmental justice, life science, sustainability, conservation, and urban ecology.
Many of the people with whom we work are impacted by trauma, mental health issues, and socio-economic disadvantage. Thus, we provide healing-centered, evidence-based, culturally-responsive, and clinically-informed trauma-informed care with a carefully considered understanding of the role that power and privilege plays in the lives of everyone that we serve, including ourselves.
We never reduce people their traumas even when we recognize their challenges.
We view people as whole and as assets and seek to maintain wholeness and uplift their asset-driven capacities.
De-escalation, mindfulness, conflict transformation, restorative justice, disability justice, sensory awareness, affirmation, anti-oppressive Social and Emotional Learning, and character development are very important to us.
We help youth and adults manage conflict, build peace, become leaders, work appreciably in teams, embrace good health, and think critically as they learn how to address everyday problems that they face as individuals and communities. Our work fosters strong self-esteem, focused problem-solving skills, sound judgment, and best practices for considerateness, team-playing, and wise citizenship.
Most of all, we want to respond and engage compassionately, to help people feel good about themselves and others, and to both model and foster peacefulness and caring in everything we do.
Click here for a description of our approach to mindfulness called community participatory mindfulness™.
We are blessed to have been awarded three SEL Innovation Awards and to be a part of the NoVo Foundation's SEL in Action family. For us, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is a healing system in which children and adults are encouraged to express and manage their feelings while becoming accountable young leaders in their communities. We celebrate the updated 2020 definition of SEL from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). We also believe deeply in an equity and justice-centered approach to SEL education and mentoring that does not only push for competency at the expense of compassionate, culturally responsive, healing, and restorative engagement
We offer extensive community counseling, peer counseling, and support groups within all of the communities that we work. Community, peer counseling, and support groups uplift people by empowering them to become active agents within their own advancement through self-reliance, self-care, community bonding, and community care.
Copyright © 2024 Baltimore Wisdom Project of Wisdom Projects, Inc. - All Rights Reserved.
All program images used with permission of the subjects. | Stock images are licensed. | Some photographs are deliberately blurred to protect the identities of subjects.
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