This year, engage your masculine-identifying students in an impactful, engaging and meaningful session on healthy relationships and consent culture. This will be one of the most important conversations you have this year. Participate anytime throughout the month of March 2024.
Since 2021, Next Gen Men has worked with schools across Canada and the U.S. to offer the Future of Masculinity Summit, a unique opportunity for boys and nonbinary students to explore the impact of positive masculinity within their lives and communities. Schools participate throughout the month of March—Women’s History Month—using Next Gen Men’s session resources to engage the next generation of men in the movement for gender justice.
Masculine-identifying youth need supportive spaces for self-exploration to grow into their best selves. All too often boys want to do the right thing but feel constrained by social pressures, dismissed or invalidated because of the rigid narrative of what it means to ‘be a man.’
Participants in the Future of Masculinity Summit experience a safe space to explore what they think of those messages, how they can find their own voice, and what they can do to become change-makers in their own lives, relationships, and communities.
Register your information in the form below. In January, you'll be invited to Next Gen Men's learning platform, which will provide you asynchronous access to this year's session recordings and supplementary resources. This access will be available for free until the end of March 2024. Get in touch if you have any questions!
Participants rated their experience with the Future of Masculinity Summit sessions an average of 4.1 out of 5.
91% of participants said they were able to build stronger connections with their peers.
98% of Future of Masculinity Summit participants felt safe and welcome within their group.
81% of Future of Masculinity Summit participants said they would tell a friend what they learned.
84% of Future of Masculinity Summit participants said they found the sessions meaningful.
72% of participants said they were able to explore masculinity on a deeper level within their conversations.
“My favourite part was the talks we had and how so much people put their thoughts. I will never forget being able to share my feelings with a group of people I trust.”
— Past Future of Masculinity Summit participant
“Something I learned from the summit is that we need to talk more about stereotypes and what they could make people feel because it could harm their mental health.”
— Past Future of Masculinity Summit participant
“What I loved the most about the summit were the topics it covered and how open it was. The people in the sessions were all very kind and open to all comments and opinions. The topics were very interesting too…I learned a lot and I’m grateful that I got the chance to attend something like this.”
— Past Future of Masculinity participant
“One takeaway that I have from the summit is there are people in this world that will actually understand me. There are always people who will listen to me. Sometimes when we have things we don't want to tell our families, there will always be others there for us. For that, I am really glad.”
— Past Future of Masculinity Summit participant
You’ll be emailed access to Next Gen Men’s learning platform, where you’ll find this year’s workshop made up of a series of recorded facilitation videos that introduce key concepts, and prompt activities and breakout discussions.
Whenever works best for your school, gather your group of students together to watch, participate and engage in the session, while you hold space for the in-person interactive elements.
The overarching idea is that there is expertise and facilitation coming from Next Gen Men, but students don’t get bored staring at a screen.
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The facilitators don’t need to have expertise on healthy relationships or consent—that’s Next Gen Men’s contribution. We ask that you:
Participate as an engaged listener—this is not a time to check emails while students figure it out for themselves.
Hold space for in-person breakouts—you may need to take the lead on facilitating a simple activity, reiterate a discussion question, prompt students to share their thoughts, and/or synthesize the conversation.
Help keep students positively engaged—students will create a respect agreement at the start of the summit and you may need to help them uphold it.
Help Next Gen Men with evaluation—we rely on teachers to help grab students’ feedback at the end of your participation.
Grades 7-9 is the focal point of our work with and resources for schools, which has to do with best practices in the field of engaging boys in positive masculinity. Young adolescence is a time in which they are starting to think about the kind of young men they are going to be, for example, but they haven’t entirely made up their minds. It would certainly use the session for younger or older students; it would just require some adaptation to ensure that it relates more closely to their developmental stage and/or life experiences.
We design our programming with specifically masculine-identifying youth in mind. That being said, all-gender student groups are welcome to participate and wouldn’t be completely out of place. Essentially you would be making a trade-off where you gain diversity of perspectives as well as logistical simplicity of including all students, and you lose a bit of the precision and shared experience of having a group of masculine-identifying students.
The limit for how many participants would depend on staff availability and how many students you want to hold in that space. We typically aim for around 10-15 participants in a group so that the session can be as engaging and interactive as possible.
Definitely. We’ll be sending out access information in late January and early February.