We believe water is a Human Right and that everyone deserves to have access to clean affordable drinking water. We are working with We the People Detroit’s Water PEEPS project to ensure community voices are heard by decision makers and to hold them accountable. We are recruiting Water Ambassadors to give public comment on water affordability issues. 

If you’re interested in serving as a water ambassador please contact us as contact@thewisdominstitute.org, with an email subject Water Ambassador. 

We never want to be in the position where we are facing water shutoffs ever again!  We have a lot of work to do to get there!

Art of Listening/Listening Partners

The Mission of the Listening Partners program is to curate sacred spaces where African American womxn come together to connect and listen to each other’s needs, goals, and challenges and triumphs. Their combined wisdom, acquired through lived experience, serves to support each other’s healing journey with the goal of living whole liberated lives. Listening Partners trained in the Art of Listening, hold sacred space for each other, and the community to realize empowerment and healing justice. 

The Wisdom Institute believes in empowering the lives of African American women and girls.  We also believe that everyone, especially women, deserve to be listened to and to have the right of an audience without judgment.  

It is a fact that listening, without judgment, is more important now than ever. Listening has the power to release us from oppressive attempts to make us invisible and unheard. Effective listening deeply connects both parties, makes us visible, and births the power to live whole and liberated lives. Instead of “blowing up, we can stand up and deal with the pressure.” 

Do you have a listening partner?  Can you step up and outside yourself to be a listening partner to your sister(s)?  “Freedom is never free, and listening skills, similarly, require training in order to be effective.  Answer the call, sister.  Step in the circle for one another, and “listen to a soul.”

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Pursuing Our Ideal Future 

Passing the Torch Preserving the Flame

PTPF was created in 2006 by the Institute’s Executive Director, Gwendolyn Winston to support identifying and honoring grass root women’s leadership and programming launched during the Affirmative Action Statewide Campaign.  In 2012 PTPF was a Martin Luther King Day Detroit and Building Movement observance honoring African American women of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Council (SNCC) who ran Freedom Schools in Mississippi during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.  Seasoned grass root women leaders will choose younger activists to answer a call to accept the torch and preserve the flame of leadership that will not be extinguished.  PTPF assures that women’s voices are heard at the vital nexus of women’s dignity.  It is the practice of grooming multigenerational power. 

PTPF is placemaking, community spaces that invite humility, listening with ideas, values and transparency in order to eradicate “traditional”  negative power dynamics so that the work moves forward—effectively, efficiently, with the stealth of revolutionary love.

A network of womanist healing practitioners, artists, and activists has come together as a participatory community.  We hold that healing justice requires us to walk this journey decolonizing our thoughts and beliefs — being audacious and bodacious in claiming the relevancy of womb-centered lives. To find out more about Passing the Torch Preserving the Flame, sign up to receive more information.