Values and Practices for Healing and Justice
A Values-Driven Company
We are a values-driven company. Chief among our values is our commitment to compassion, anti-oppression and liberation for historically marginalized people. We are also committed to the mantra of "do no harm." Even as our work is rehabilitative, we foster accountability so that individuals do no harm to themselves or others. We also value the notion that, "There is no hierarchy of oppressions," as the poet Audre Lorde said. To that end, 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 about how best to be in service to others.
Wisdom Education
The mission of Wisdom Projects, Inc. is to reimagine education and reimagine the world by enhancing the lives of youth and adults with holistic education, intercultural understanding, and anti-oppressive, liberationist thought leadership.
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).
Guiding Imperatives
Here are our guiding imperatives:
Learning from the Natural World
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.
A Focus on Healing
Many of the people with whom we work are impacted by trauma and socio-economic disadvantage. Thus, we provide evidence-based, culturally-responsive, and clinically-informed restorative practices, trauma-informed services, and healing-centered engagement with a carefully considered understanding of the role that power and privilege plays in the lives of everyone that we serve, including ourselves. Disability justice and sensory awareness are also 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.
SEL Centered
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 new 2020 definition of SEL from the originators, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). Our work centers the updated definition and the original core competencies of SEL:
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.
STEM Learning and Integration
Much of our programming teaches Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) . We are particularly focused on life science, environmental justice, urban ecology, and computational math. When we deliver scientific content, we always locate both the academic outcome and the holistic outcome so that the students integrate knowledge about the environment, bodily systems, and nature with healthy living, physical well-being, and environmental justice. Our STEM activities are hands-on, involving playful discovery with 4D models, microscopes, living plant species, and culturally responsive math problems.
Restorative Practices and Restorative Justice
Contemporary restorative practices are rooted in Indigenous, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern approaches for finding community and managing conflict. Restorative justice refers to communal approaches for rehabilitative and preventative care that help community members come together, rethink punishment, ensure humane accountability when errors are made, and make amends in the wake of offense.
Trauma-informed, clinically supported, and evidence-based restorative practices extend out from these roots within the community traditions of people-of-color. They are much more than interventions. They are preventative care that help bring and keep communities together to continually reify their health and wellness.
The restorative practices that we deploy in the field include both preventative care and interventions involving circles, conferences, communal agreements, de-escalation measures, community counseling, character development, conflict management, behavioral management, classroom management, harm reduction, peace education, nonviolent communication, anti-recidivist training, bullying prevention, and community storytelling exchanges. These activities not only benefit us when conflicts arise; they also help us maintain and enhance our everyday processes of empathy, compassion, and contemplation.
Transformative Justice and Transformative Care
Our work is deeply rooted in transformative justice and transformative care.
Rather than being fixers, saviors, and correctors who only intervene within conflicts involving individuals' offenses and alleged criminalities, we are peacemakers and caretakers committed to building ongoing systems of accountability, compassion and contemplation that transform whole communities and cultures.
Guiding Questions
In our work we keep asking and answering the following questions:
Mentoring, Advising, and Community Counseling
We infuse community counseling into every area of our educational services by always offering life-affirming mentoring, advising, resource-sharing, care, and support to the youth and adults in our programming.
Mindfulness
Evidence-based, carefully-researched mindfulness and mindful movement are key in our holistic educational services.
Rooted in ancient Asian, Indigenous, African, and Middle Eastern practices of meditation, mindfulness refers to contemplative traditions that help us do the following:
Emphasizing the secular nature of the work, we infuse our work with the following practices:
The ABCs of Healing
In our work, we keep coming back to an ever-fluctuating collection of words and phrases that typify our values and practices for restorative mindfulness. These words and phrases are not a rigid method or a prescription. Rather, they guide us as we first listen to the communities with whom we work and then offer education, facilitation, and navigation based on the community’s needs and traditions. Think of these “ABCs” as the prompts and phrases that stimulate our work.
Accountability: Encouraging taking responsibility for harm and making amends.
Acculturation: Engaging in a culturally responsive, culturally sensitive, and culturally fluent manner.
Affirmation: Creating, explaining, actualizing, and reifying positive expression and systems, including the following:
Agreement: Making amends, reconciling, and deliberatively contracting to remedy for justice.
Apology: Expressing, owning, valuing, and taking responsibility for one’s role in harm.
Behold: Feeling fearless, inquisitive, or open to new possibilities (contrasted with “behave”).
Big Time: Demonstrably prompting (e.g.: calling out “Stop!”) to move another to safety.
Boundaries: Setting and recognizing limits to knowledge and action for humility and safety.
Breath: Actively breathing to regulate one’s bodily and thoughtful response to stimuli.
Calm: The flowing, ongoing state of serenity required for compassion and contemplation.
Care: Demonstrating and maintaining authentic, positive regard for others.
Circle: Gathering equitably—facing each other—to share feelings and manage conflicts.
Community: Centered, whole, and integrated groupings in which everyone is uplifted.
Conference (1): Group or individual discussions that give space and time to work through problems.
Conference (2): Advanced circles to share feelings, manage conflicts, make agreements, and make amends.
Connect: Fostering positive relationships that recognize the specialness of another.
Consequences: Recognizing the role that natural and imposed outcomes play in accountability.
Consult: Offering advice and support to empower others to do the same (occurring before “critique”).
Contemplation: Mindfulness—meditation using breath and visualization to behold self and the world.
Compassion: Demonstrating the highest form of sensitivity and kindness for others.
De-escalation: Fostering a calm, focused, peaceful, and mitigating state in the face of provocation.
Empathy: Valuing and caring for others.
Flow: Encouraging ongoing, reifying, ever-deepening states for affirming engagement.
Focus: Attention, clarity, or pinpointing the center or height of importance.
Forgiveness: Demonstrating the highest form of accountability, apology, and agreement.
High Road: Making an ethically just decision even when another does not.
Let Go: Relinquishing the need to focus on a matter for the sake of de-escalation.
Listen: Giving full attention and honor while connecting with others (contrasted with “label”).
Model: Exemplifying the best of what can and should be to others.
Peace: The highest, most nonviolent state of compassion and contemplation.
Represent: Embodying the best values and practices of self and community.
Respond: Controlling one’s impulses contemplatively (contrasted with “react”).
Sensitivity: Being aware of contexts, responses, feelings, and needs.
Story: An authentic delineation of who, what, where, when and how to support a view.
Trust: The highest form of self-reliance and reliance on another.
Arts Education and Integration
The BWP believes that arts education and integration are powerful avenues for the effective, culturally affirming delivery of our educational services. Arts integration refers to a collection of approaches for using fine and performing arts to uplift the learning of academic subjects. We use creative human movement, music, visual arts, multimedia, drama, and storytelling as methods to stimulate and sustain scholastic enrichment.
Systems for Direct SEL Services
These are the systems that we frequently offer in our direct services and support:
Click here for the "Top Areas of Concern for Restorative Practices and Mindfulness" that fuel our work.
Click here for "Six Forms of Presumed Pain," a handout that helps us begin the vital work of mitigating, pinpointing, and differentiating between the kinds of conflict that arise within our lives.
Contact us for a fuller explanation of our values and practices.
We are a values-driven company. Chief among our values is our commitment to compassion, anti-oppression and liberation for historically marginalized people. We are also committed to the mantra of "do no harm." Even as our work is rehabilitative, we foster accountability so that individuals do no harm to themselves or others. We also value the notion that, "There is no hierarchy of oppressions," as the poet Audre Lorde said. To that end, 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 about how best to be in service to others.
Wisdom Education
The mission of Wisdom Projects, Inc. is to reimagine education and reimagine the world by enhancing the lives of youth and adults with holistic education, intercultural understanding, and anti-oppressive, liberationist thought leadership.
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).
Guiding Imperatives
Here are our guiding imperatives:
- Listen before labeling.
- Connect before correcting.
- Respond before reacting.
- Consult before critiquing.
- Peace not violence.
- Go inward before going outward.
- Circle before boxing.
- Open arms not closed fists.
- Empathy, care and sensitivity for everyone everywhere always.
Learning from the Natural World
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.
A Focus on Healing
Many of the people with whom we work are impacted by trauma and socio-economic disadvantage. Thus, we provide evidence-based, culturally-responsive, and clinically-informed restorative practices, trauma-informed services, and healing-centered engagement with a carefully considered understanding of the role that power and privilege plays in the lives of everyone that we serve, including ourselves. Disability justice and sensory awareness are also 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.
SEL Centered
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 new 2020 definition of SEL from the originators, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). Our work centers the updated definition and the original core competencies of SEL:
- Self-awareness: Know your strengths and limitations, with a well-grounded sense of confidence, optimism, and a “growth mindset.”
- Self-management: Effectively manage stress, control impulses, and motivate yourself to set and achieve goals.
- Social awareness: Understand the perspectives of others and empathize with them, including those from diverse backgrounds and cultures.
- Relationship skills: Communicate clearly, listen well, cooperate with others, resist inappropriate social pressure, negotiate conflict constructively, and seek and offer help when needed.
- Responsible decision-making: Make constructive choices about personal behavior and social interactions based on ethical standards, safety, and social norms.
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.
STEM Learning and Integration
Much of our programming teaches Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) . We are particularly focused on life science, environmental justice, urban ecology, and computational math. When we deliver scientific content, we always locate both the academic outcome and the holistic outcome so that the students integrate knowledge about the environment, bodily systems, and nature with healthy living, physical well-being, and environmental justice. Our STEM activities are hands-on, involving playful discovery with 4D models, microscopes, living plant species, and culturally responsive math problems.
Restorative Practices and Restorative Justice
Contemporary restorative practices are rooted in Indigenous, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern approaches for finding community and managing conflict. Restorative justice refers to communal approaches for rehabilitative and preventative care that help community members come together, rethink punishment, ensure humane accountability when errors are made, and make amends in the wake of offense.
Trauma-informed, clinically supported, and evidence-based restorative practices extend out from these roots within the community traditions of people-of-color. They are much more than interventions. They are preventative care that help bring and keep communities together to continually reify their health and wellness.
The restorative practices that we deploy in the field include both preventative care and interventions involving circles, conferences, communal agreements, de-escalation measures, community counseling, character development, conflict management, behavioral management, classroom management, harm reduction, peace education, nonviolent communication, anti-recidivist training, bullying prevention, and community storytelling exchanges. These activities not only benefit us when conflicts arise; they also help us maintain and enhance our everyday processes of empathy, compassion, and contemplation.
Transformative Justice and Transformative Care
Our work is deeply rooted in transformative justice and transformative care.
Rather than being fixers, saviors, and correctors who only intervene within conflicts involving individuals' offenses and alleged criminalities, we are peacemakers and caretakers committed to building ongoing systems of accountability, compassion and contemplation that transform whole communities and cultures.
Guiding Questions
In our work we keep asking and answering the following questions:
- How do we not only intervene when conflicts arise, but also create and sustain culture-wide systems of shared equity, justice, and care that prevent inequities, marginalization, harm, and violence?
- How do we not only uplift people of color, girls, women, boys, men, LGBTQGNCNBI people, disabled people, low-to-no income people, and people at-risk for violence, but also transform, champion and situate their leadership as essential to the lifeblood of their communities?
- How can our systems—meaning, our actions, structures, procedures, policies, and practices—reflect our anti-oppressive, compassionate, and contemplative intentions so that we continually operationalize peacemaking and caretaking in communities?
Mentoring, Advising, and Community Counseling
We infuse community counseling into every area of our educational services by always offering life-affirming mentoring, advising, resource-sharing, care, and support to the youth and adults in our programming.
Mindfulness
Evidence-based, carefully-researched mindfulness and mindful movement are key in our holistic educational services.
Rooted in ancient Asian, Indigenous, African, and Middle Eastern practices of meditation, mindfulness refers to contemplative traditions that help us do the following:
- Create and foster calm, peace, and nonviolence;
- Facilitate the use of regular, sustained active breathing for stress management;
- Increase resiliency in the wake of stress, anxiety, and trauma;
- Reduce bias by building capacities to calmly consider the welfare of others;
- Increase capacity for compassion and empathy;
- Build our awareness to matters around us and beyond our egos;
- Center our selves on the tasks at hand;
- Embrace the present movement;
- Consider matters non-judgmentally;
- Regulate our emotions;
- Sharpen attention;
- Heighten focus; and
- Enliven the senses.
Emphasizing the secular nature of the work, we infuse our work with the following practices:
- Mindfulness of Breathing (Ānāpānasati): Calming and focusing through active breathing.
- Insight Mediation (Vipassanā): Seeing things as they actually are.
- Loving-Kindness Meditation (Mettā Bhāvanā): Visualizations fostering benevolence and forgiveness.
- Fire Ritual (Agnihotra, Homa Jajnavidhana, Homam or Goma): Building peaceful inner and outer awareness.
- Mindful Movement (like Systema and beyond): Movement forms that heighten calm, focus, awareness and empathy.
The ABCs of Healing
In our work, we keep coming back to an ever-fluctuating collection of words and phrases that typify our values and practices for restorative mindfulness. These words and phrases are not a rigid method or a prescription. Rather, they guide us as we first listen to the communities with whom we work and then offer education, facilitation, and navigation based on the community’s needs and traditions. Think of these “ABCs” as the prompts and phrases that stimulate our work.
Accountability: Encouraging taking responsibility for harm and making amends.
Acculturation: Engaging in a culturally responsive, culturally sensitive, and culturally fluent manner.
Affirmation: Creating, explaining, actualizing, and reifying positive expression and systems, including the following:
- Acknowledging: recognizing another's presence, efforts, or contributions; admitting truth with kindness.
- Accepting: making favorable; bestowing unequivocal regard.
- Advising: caring enough to recommend the best bath in a kind, supportive way.
- Approving: saying "yes" to safe, beneficial things to boost esteem.
- Clarifying: explaining or making something less confusing in a kind, supportive way.
- Consenting: offering a kind of approval that emphasizes that it is safe to proceed.
- Consoling: giving solace, comfort, support, and demonstrable care in the wake of loss or trauma.
- Encouraging: giving hope or recognizing efforts to promote further good work.
- Helping: offering specific, tangible forms of aid or assistance.
- Giving: presenting someone with something tangible that represents one's care.
- Inspiring: igniting a "can do" spirit that boosts another's sense of promise in their own abilities.
- Listening: caring enough to pay careful attention while being sensitive and empathetic.
- Motivating: providing a reason to do well or better.
- Offering: providing aid before someone asks for it and being sensitive to another's need.
- Reassuring: promoting or restoring confidence while relieving anxiety.
- Receiving: accepting in a way that honor's another's goodwill.
- Recognizing: honoring another's presence, efforts, or contributions.
- Soothing: making calm, giving comfort, and de-escalating in the wake of anger, frustration, or anxiety.
- Supporting: demonstrating the kind of loyalty, reliability, and dependability that engenders trust.
- Praising: calling out the things that are done well.
- Protecting: ensuring that someone is safe, healthy, and defended from harm.
- Thanking: expression appreciation for beneficial acts.
- Validating: confirming or corroborating high regard or worth.
- Valuing: expressing that oneself or another has high value or worth.
- Welcoming: actively including someone within a specific space and time; affording great opportunities.
Agreement: Making amends, reconciling, and deliberatively contracting to remedy for justice.
Apology: Expressing, owning, valuing, and taking responsibility for one’s role in harm.
Behold: Feeling fearless, inquisitive, or open to new possibilities (contrasted with “behave”).
Big Time: Demonstrably prompting (e.g.: calling out “Stop!”) to move another to safety.
Boundaries: Setting and recognizing limits to knowledge and action for humility and safety.
Breath: Actively breathing to regulate one’s bodily and thoughtful response to stimuli.
Calm: The flowing, ongoing state of serenity required for compassion and contemplation.
Care: Demonstrating and maintaining authentic, positive regard for others.
Circle: Gathering equitably—facing each other—to share feelings and manage conflicts.
Community: Centered, whole, and integrated groupings in which everyone is uplifted.
Conference (1): Group or individual discussions that give space and time to work through problems.
Conference (2): Advanced circles to share feelings, manage conflicts, make agreements, and make amends.
Connect: Fostering positive relationships that recognize the specialness of another.
Consequences: Recognizing the role that natural and imposed outcomes play in accountability.
Consult: Offering advice and support to empower others to do the same (occurring before “critique”).
Contemplation: Mindfulness—meditation using breath and visualization to behold self and the world.
Compassion: Demonstrating the highest form of sensitivity and kindness for others.
De-escalation: Fostering a calm, focused, peaceful, and mitigating state in the face of provocation.
Empathy: Valuing and caring for others.
Flow: Encouraging ongoing, reifying, ever-deepening states for affirming engagement.
Focus: Attention, clarity, or pinpointing the center or height of importance.
Forgiveness: Demonstrating the highest form of accountability, apology, and agreement.
High Road: Making an ethically just decision even when another does not.
Let Go: Relinquishing the need to focus on a matter for the sake of de-escalation.
Listen: Giving full attention and honor while connecting with others (contrasted with “label”).
Model: Exemplifying the best of what can and should be to others.
Peace: The highest, most nonviolent state of compassion and contemplation.
Represent: Embodying the best values and practices of self and community.
Respond: Controlling one’s impulses contemplatively (contrasted with “react”).
Sensitivity: Being aware of contexts, responses, feelings, and needs.
Story: An authentic delineation of who, what, where, when and how to support a view.
Trust: The highest form of self-reliance and reliance on another.
Arts Education and Integration
The BWP believes that arts education and integration are powerful avenues for the effective, culturally affirming delivery of our educational services. Arts integration refers to a collection of approaches for using fine and performing arts to uplift the learning of academic subjects. We use creative human movement, music, visual arts, multimedia, drama, and storytelling as methods to stimulate and sustain scholastic enrichment.
Systems for Direct SEL Services
These are the systems that we frequently offer in our direct services and support:
- Anti-bias training for people of diverse genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, abilities/disabilities, and more.
- Systems for building ongoing culture-wide mutual care, aid, and support.
- Systems for building ongoing accountability and responsibility measures.
- Systems for building policies and practices for supportive peer relations.
- Systems for affirming, supportive, and equitable management and leadership.
- Systems for morale building and sustaining healthy cultural and organizational climates.
- Conflict transformations (analysis, management and resolution of disputes and discord).
- Conflict interventions (circles, conferences, and communal agreements).
- Behavioral transformation (management and support) for children, youth, and adults.
- Classroom transformation (management and support) for students.
- Anger management, emotional regulation, and impulse control.
- Peace building and anti-violence skill sharing.
- Leadership consultations for youth and adults.
- Community storytelling exchanges.
- Post-incarceration re-entry consultations.
- During-incarceration support services.
- Anti-recidivist skill sharing.
- Career planning and job readiness training for youth.
- Diversion programming.
- Health navigation for accessing care.
- Intercultural peer mentoring.
- Community counseling.
- Character development.
- De-escalation techniques.
- Team-building services.
- Bullying prevention.
- Peer mentorship.
- Harm reduction.
Click here for the "Top Areas of Concern for Restorative Practices and Mindfulness" that fuel our work.
Click here for "Six Forms of Presumed Pain," a handout that helps us begin the vital work of mitigating, pinpointing, and differentiating between the kinds of conflict that arise within our lives.
Contact us for a fuller explanation of our values and practices.