Minecraft + Mental Health: A Discord Server for Boys
If you’ve been following Next Gen Men for a while, you probably know that when school stopped at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we didn’t stop in our mission to support and empower the next generation of men. We got to work—and we got online.
Throughout the summer of 2020, we built NGM Summer Camp, an eight-week pilot with about 15-30 young people based on the values of traditional summer camp (shout out to RBC for helping make it happen by being our sponsor!). That summer, we tried everything. We learned that juggling doesn’t really work online, for example. We learned that Dungeons & Dragons, however, does.
It resonated so much with our small group of youth that we brought it into the school year.
Three years later, NGM Boys+ Club has become a model among youth-serving organizations and the home base for a network of hundreds of young people across Canada. They use the server every day to hang out, share what’s going on in their lives, and join weekly events.
Here’s what you should know about it.
Our positive youth community acts as a buffer against mental health struggles.
Boys continue to account for three quarters of youth suicides in Canada. This is in part because one-third of boys think society expects them to be strong and ‘suck it up’ when they feel sad or scared. More often than not, cultural norms of masculinity is at the heart of boys’ mental health crisis.
A key strategy for youth suicide prevention is the establishment of welcoming, caring, respectful and safe peer environments. Evidence shows that despite an explosion of apps and online content on mental health, vulnerable youth are not connecting to these assets—the critical gap in the ecosystem is connection.
That’s what we do.
More than two years ago, a 14-year-old boy defined the NGM Discord server as: “the safest and most uplifting community on Discord for guys and nonbinary youth.”
As the youth might say: Pause.
Guys + safe + internet. Those are three words you rarely see in a sentence together.
Positivity, inclusion and support are the baseline of how the youth interact with each other in this space. Any time a young boy is struggling, he can reach out and know that he will be held with care and sensitivity by a community of trusted peers.
Over the years, they have talked about getting bullied and falling behind in school. They have navigated questions about their sexuality and coming out to friends or asking crushes out. One of them wrote in when he found out his parents were getting divorced. A few of them have reached out while in the waiting room before surgery (they’re all ok!).
Each time, these young people have experienced the solid foundation of a group of peers in which they are known and loved.
The impact of that truly cannot be understated.
We role model positive masculinity with teenage boys—and we see them do the same.
Our Discord server isn’t about being perfect, it’s about being yourself. The elements of ‘toxic’ masculinity that often define male-only spaces—like being overly competitive, objectifying girls or making jokes about those who are vulnerable—happen most often when boys feel like they have to wear a mask.
When boys know they are safe and will be accepted just for being themselves, however, they don’t feel the need to one-up each other with increasingly transgressive memes or exaggerated tales of sexual context. Because that’s not really who boys are.
One of the tools on our Discord server is a bot that makes it possible to write completely anonymously. The number of times youth have used it to share about vulnerable parts of their lives? 150 times since we added it nine months ago. The number of times they’ve abused the bot’s anonymity to be inappropriate or harmful? Zero.
They still make mistakes. And when that happens, we turn to the community norms of upholding respect and not making jokes about violence. More often than not, other youth enforce the rules themselves. They know what they’re capable of and what kind of community they want to be a part of.
If you think about it, what we’re doing is building an alternate reality. No, not VR or AR, but a reality of masculinity where even the most tough, ready-to-fight, disinterested-in-equality boys can maintain an alternate version of themselves in a space that is defined by respect and inclusion. Even if they feel the need to buy into toxic masculinity elsewhere to protect themselves, there’s still a part of themselves that doesn’t.
It’s an alternate story, it’s an antidote, it’s a seed. Whatever you call it, it’s nurturing better possibilities within the next generation of men.
We have a simple and effective signup process.
For the first two years of the Discord server, parents and guardians had to fill in a registration form. What started happening, though, was youth participants were inviting their friends…who were both immediately interested and then immediately turned off by the prospect of having to ask their parents.
After listening to their needs, we embarked on a half-year side project with a pair of lawyers from Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, one of Toronto’s most respected law firms, to develop a set of policies and procedures to make it possible for youth to sign themselves up.
While parents can still sign up with the registration form on our website, any male-identifying/non-binary/masc-exploring young person can also join the Discord server using the link: nextgenmen.ca/discord. They land outside the front gate of the server, where we introduce ourselves, walk them through the code of conduct and privacy policies, and do a voice call screening to verify that they are genuinely between Grades 7-9.
While we care a lot about fostering new connections, our highest priority is the safety of the young people already in our community (read: no trolls and no predators). Our system takes care of both.
This transformational project is sustained by grassroots donors.
Within a few months of starting this project, we knew the Discord server was so impactful that it needed to be made freely accessible. Nurturing a positive community, introducing new members, upholding rules of respect and engaging youth in meaningful relationships—none of those things happen without the time and effort of the Next Gen Men youth team.
I’ll leave you with two calls to action. I promise to continue our transformative impact on the lives of masculine-exploring youth if you promise to do one of them. Deal?
First, share the project with someone you know. Send nextgenmen.ca/club to parents or guardians, or nextgenmen.ca/discord to a young person in Grades 7-9.
Second, support Next Gen Men by becoming a Next Gen Menber. 140+ others contribute a monthly or annual amount to change the way we see, act, and think about masculinity—sounds like a pretty sweet club to be a part of.
Teenagers are used to the short term—sports teams, school programs, summer camps and other impactful spaces are all tied to specific times and places. NGM Boys+ Club has the potential for unprecedented impact as it grows alongside young people themselves.
The 12-year-olds who joined us in 2020 are now getting their driver’s licenses. We’ve promised them that this community will always be there for them. We need your help to keep that promise.
So if you believe in our mission, we need you to join the grassroots community that sustains our long-term work with the next generation of men.