How to Sustain a Positive Masculinity Program
This is the second article in a mini-series about how to put our free 100+ page program guide, the Next Gen Manual, into action. The first article was about how to get boys to show up in the first place. Now, we’re going to discuss how to leverage this into a school-wide journey towards culture change.
One of the privileges of my work as Next Gen Men’s Youth Program Manager is that I get to have conversations with the leaders of change in schools across Canada and the United States. In the years since #MeToo, I’ve seen a question increasingly materializing among the best schools: how do we sustain positive change?
If you’re reading this, you probably know why schools should be talking about positive masculinity. You might already be starting to put this into practice.
So let’s talk about what’s next.
Plan for things to go wrong.
All young people screw up. But because we live in a culture that exacts clear expectations about what it means to be a man, the harm enacted by boys and men is often compounded by systemic inequality. It lands harder, and is amended less often.
New York Magazine recently published The Story of a Cancelled Teen, an article centred on the experience of a 17-year-old who shared a nude photo of his girlfriend at a party, and ended up being violently and irrevocably ostracized by his high school peers.
The article wasn’t perfect; it received a ton of backlash online. But it did demonstrate the collision of inequality and vigilantism that can take place in a system that is unprepared to address when and how boys cross the line.
“In coercion culture, there are two primary outcomes when someone messes up: either acknowledge that it happened and someone gets punished, or else ignore that it ever happened at all. But there is a third possibility in the path of restorative justice.”
The way forward is restorative justice. Restorative practices need to be developed ahead of time, and this means taking on some critical questions. Do you know the blind spots of your administration, like what is going unreported? Have you examined the shortcomings of your discipline policy, like who is overrepresented? Have you made a plan for how to respond to allegations or transgressions with compassion, protect victims and heal in community?
Figuring out your stance for when things go wrong gives you an opportunity to put the values of your positive masculinity program into practice right when they matter most.
Build up peer leadership.
One of the hardest moments from when Next Gen Men directly ran after-school programs was always around the end of our 10 weeks together: we would inevitably get the question, “Will you be back next year?”
The best answer we could usually give was: “We hope so.”
By contrast, one of the most exciting things about handing the free Next Gen Manual directly to schools is the possibility for impactful programming year after year—whether through an embedded educator or youth worker, or through the empowering possibility of engaging teenage boys—NGM alumni, per se—as mentors for their younger peers.
Think about it. Where are younger students learning what is expected of them as boys? Where are they practicing the attitudes, language and behaviour that will define them as young men? Where are they figuring out how to fit in with the status quo, and deciding if there are parts of it worth resisting?
It’s from their peers and near peers.
“Most boys said that in their peer groups, being strong or macho and being gay or girly were viewed as mutually exclusive. ‘There’s no middle ground to people,’ one boy said. ‘You’re either strong or you’re gay. There’s nothing in between.’”
Empowering student leaders—whether they are in the final grade at middle school or coming back from high school for volunteer hours, or anything else—unlocks the positive development of young men.
Make a plan for program evaluation.
Program evaluation is a critical element to scaling and sustaining your impact. It’s also an entire field of academia and a deep rabbit hole, so we’re going to share two elements to keep in mind.
The first kind of evaluation is formative evaluation. Similar to gauging students’ work throughout a unit of study, formative program evaluation is about gathering ongoing feedback to improve the program as it unfolds. An example of this would be debriefing sessions afterwards with a few students.
The second type is summative evaluation. The purpose of summative evaluation is to understand a program’s impact among its stakeholders. It may be guided by the objectives that the program was seeking to achieve, or focus on the experiences of program participants themselves. Examples include quantitative data like the amount of disciplinary actions over the duration of a school year, or qualitative data like pre- and post-program surveys of participants.
Being committed to program evaluation helps you improve the program in order to resonate more deeply with your participants; and gives you key information to demonstrate its impact with decision-makers.
Work towards a whole-school approach.
When Next Gen Men’s youth programming started, it centred on the idea of individual transformation and the potential impact of a boy having the opportunity to broaden the realm of possibility for what it means to be a man.
As the years went by, we started thinking also about institutional transformation: how might that impact grow if an entire school deepened the way it thought about boys and masculinity? If, rather than solely within an after-school program, boys had opportunities for compassionate growth in trouble in the principal’s office, in the midst of a classroom lesson, in sex ed classes or counselling sessions?
The power of a whole-school approach is that it wraps around its students, laying the foundation for boys to be part of and lead not just their own growth but the transformation of an entire culture.
At that point, the possibilities are endless.
Have a deep bench.
Putting together a school program of any kind is a massive undertaking, let alone building student leadership, designing program evaluation or adopting a whole-school approach—on top of all the work that educators already take on. You know what they say: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
We aim to go far.
Having a deep bench is a reference to having a number of talented backup players on the bench in sports like basketball. In this context, it means colleagues who can share the load, pick up the slack, and carry on. It means administrators who understand the importance of combating toxic masculinity, and school wellness teams who see the connections between boys’ mental health and traditional norms of masculinity.
This is why we put together Next Gen Mentors, a training program for schools who are ready to lead the way on positive masculinity, and educators who want to make a difference—with a minimum of two participants from each setting in order to start building the capacity for the years to come.