WHO WE ARE TODAY

We are a peacemaking community and space located in Baltimore, MD., bordering St. Peter’s Cemetery.

Mission: Jonah House is a sanctuary space for activists and creatives. We commit to strengthening community through food justice, education, and peace building.

Vision: Jonah House envisions a world that resists oppression through creativity, spirituality, sustainability, and acknowledging community autonomy. We believe justice and peace emerge when space is held for collective healing, community restoration, and food sovereignty.

OUR ROOTS

Jonah House has historically been an intentional, peace-and-justice community located in Baltimore, Maryland, grounded with these roots:

COMMUNITY

At Jonah House, we cultivate community – with each other, with our neighbors, and with every being who shares our habitat – to witness and manifest life’s interdependence.

Jonah House is a community committed to worldmending. We strive to be a source of healing by building beloved relationships, beginning in the home, and radiating outward into the world. We live intentionally, sharing work and resources equally. Prior to the Pandemic, we provided goods to our west Baltimore neighborhood in the form of a weekly food distribution program. We also have offered hospitality to people from all over the world engaged in work to heal our homes, our communities, and the earth.

SPIRITUALITY

At Jonah House, we cultivate a shared contemplative life that draws on the world’s wisdom traditions, and engages with suffering, both personal and collective, to encourage wholeness, justice and joy.

Jonah House is a community committed to soultending. We are interfaith and spiritually inclusive. We have practiced meditation and other forms of prayer. We have also brought our soul-work into the streets, participating in faith-based public witness.  Jonah House has hosted a weekly house church, in which people of various faiths examine and discuss scriptures, pray together, and share an agape love feast.

STEWARDSHIP

At Jonah House, we cultivate the land and nurture relationships between people and all of the earth’s inhabitants.

Jonah House is a community committed to caretaking. Historically, we were charged with the task of maintaining St. Peter’s Cemetery, a once-neglected Catholic graveyard in west Baltimore. As part of this work, we also cared for gardens and fruit trees. The produce we harvested ended up on the community table and was distributed through the food pantry. We try to live sustainably by gardening according to organic principles, being mindful of our consumption of resources, and attuning to the rhythms and needs of the habitat in which we dwell. We teach others to do the same. Our practice of stewardship also involves the thoughtful use and care of our tools, machines, and home.

ACTIVISM

At Jonah House, we cultivate justice, peace, wholeness, and joy, affirming the sanctity of all beings.

Jonah House is a community committed to peacemaking. Initially founded in 1973 by peace activists working to end the Vietnam War, since 1980 the community has been engaged in efforts to abolish nuclear weapons and realize a world without war. In the spirit of nonviolent resistance, Jonah House actively opposes violence, social injustice, and oppression. The community has hosted student groups and partnered with other activist communities to create a more peaceful and just world.