Transparency
Report

For those who are familiar with Next Gen Men, you might know a transparency report is a new thing for us. If NGM itself is new to you, we recommend that you start by reading our about page.

In 2020, we decided to double-down on being a social enterprising nonprofit, rather than begin an application for charitable status. This decision was not made lightly, nor was each path inherently right or wrong as we saw potential success in both directions.

It came down to trade-offs, as most things do. The trade-off we chose was one where we enrolled people, not institutions like the government, foundations, or philanthropists to predominantly sustain our vision and mission. Often charitable outcomes are something someone wants for someone else—however, we see a future where boys and men feel less pain and cause less harm as a future that boys and men want for themselves. 

We won’t write off becoming a charity someday, but for now, this feels right for us. In lieu of the potential comfort of filing T3010s and undergoing costly audits (although we do undergo annual review engagements with a third-party accounting firm), we commit to being transparent with you about how we’re doing and where we’re going. Because after all, you’ve got skin in the game.

Here’s where we’re at across NGM’s key constituents.

Youth

In March of 2020, we were ‘de-platformed’ (no, we didn’t get #cancelled) from running after-school programs. We moved the offline, online, and predictably…it sucked. The youth hated it, we hated it. We pivoted to Discord for a virtual summer camp and learned how to create and hold space online with 12- to 14-year-old boys during a global pandemic—a project that lives on as NGM Boys Club. 

We also saw youth struggling. So we pumped out card decks Cards for Masculinity and Boys Will Be _, as well as an online course, Raising Next Gen Men, to help parents, educators, and others who had the extraordinary energy and will to support youth as they grappled with dreams deferred.

In the fall of 2021, we had high hopes of returning to school-based programming—our Youth Program Manager even relocated from southeastern British Columbia where he was riding out the first waves of the pandemic back to Toronto in anticipation of being among youth. Alas, we continue to build and iterate online.

Community

In the early days, moving our NGM Circles online was one of the ‘easiest’ things. Not easy in the sense of sitting across from someone who was just as scared and anxious as you, but at least technologically capable to register, login, and 90% of the time unmute when speaking. We ramped these early NGM Circles up to twice per week just to be there for our community as we collectively said WTF?!

As we shifted into living at work and 24/7 child-rearing at home, we built a private online space to be there for each other asynchronously. Eventually, some of our community partners eagerly started lining up in-person events through the summer lulls, only to be pushed back into the all-too-familiar Zoom gallery view. Together, online, we remain.

Workplaces

2019 was Equity Leaders’ best year working with male-dominant industries, Q1 2020 was our best quarter. Good thing, as eight months of work was wiped from the calendar while we all figured out how to learn and unlearn online. Thankfully we built enough equity (pun intended) with people that individuals and organizations came back to us when they were ready, and better yet, embraced our new B.O.O.K. Club offering that anchored discussions among male leaders while social media siloes divided people.

Programmatic grants we had relied on for years went by the wayside. Thankfully, emergency government support helped fill the gap. Our Next Gen Menbership doubled as people rallied around the constant need for positive masculinities, healthy relationships, mental wellbeing—and our willingness to continue to respond to that need, pandemic be damned.

The last couple of years have been rough. Our community and supporters helped us weather it. We hope that we might have helped you get through it too.

Thank you.

Fundraising Milestones

$5 per month, or $10 here and there, doesn’t seem like a lot…but when you put everyone’s contributions together, it adds up!

Next year, and years henceforth, we'll have more to share about milestones reached, but we’re most excited to share that we've reached 100 Next Gen Menbers! Our goal is to someday realize 1,000 ‘true fans,’ as Kevin Kelly coined it, and we can proudly say that we’re 10% of the way there. So cheers to you all.

 Revenue

Next Gen Men has two main sources of income: contributed revenue and earned revenue. Contributed revenue comes in through grants, donations, and sponsorship. Earned revenue comes through our products and services. New through the pandemic was a government subsidy, as well.

Just over half of our earned revenue is made up by our Equity Leaders programming for workplaces, while the remainder is made up from general consulting on masculinities, paid youth programming (with schools and sports organizations), product sales, and Next Gen Menbership.

Next Gen Menbership proceeds don’t support any of our earned revenue projects—solely under or unfunded youth initiatives like our free NGM Boys Club or our pay-what-you-can NGM Circle events, in order to keep them accessible.

Prior to the pandemic, Next Gen Men had seen our earned revenues (primarily led by Equity Leaders) make up a bigger and bigger proportion of our overall income—2019 saw 68% contributed revenue and 32% earned revenue (from being more or less 100% contributed revenue until 2017).

By the end of 2021, only 48% of our income came from contributed revenue (including government subsidies), while 52% was earned revenue.

In 2020, we received just over $68,000 across two grants through the federal government’s Emergency Community Support Fund (ECSF) which allowed us to iterate our online youth offering to become a fully free model limiting the barriers to entry to having a device and internet access (both out of our hands, but important to understand that we are far from digital equality in Canada!).

Due to pandemic stressors, we also applied for government assistance in the form of the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) like many other organizations and businesses, as well as through a partially forgivable loan from the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA).

We are grateful to the federal government for these supports, and ultimately to you as taxpayers as well. This support bought us time to innovate, leverage our agility and dedication to meeting boys and men where they’re at—pandemic be damned—and pivot towards sustainability while keeping our small team employed.

 Expenses

The graph represents a rough breakdown of how we spent our money in an average month in 2021. Overhead includes expenses such as software and licenses, insurance, professional fees (accounting), office supplies, and professional development.

Next Gen Men does not break out its staff time into program costs, since we all wear many hats contributing to success across the organization.

More importantly, our staff are our most important investment. Transformation does not occur outside of relationships, which means our people are the engine driving our vision and mission forward. As of the end of 2021, the six full-time employees were all earning between $40,000 and $60,000 a year (including the Executive Director)—which falls within the average of comparable organizations, according to Charity Village.

In a distributed team of <10, it is hard to be fully representative of the communities we occupy and serve, though it remains top of mind. One of our four values is equity—to remove barriers—so we need to work to ensure that everyone sees themselves in the work of engaging boys and men around gender and equality. We all play a role in patriarchal systems.

Our Governance Committee maintains a skills matrix for not only the Board of Directors but also the Committee Members. This skills matrix covers diversity of thought, but also demographic identifiers to ensure that we are inviting stakeholders from across racial, sexual, age, and gender identities to guide our vision and mission.

We are also committed to a Board representation of <30% self-identified women. There’s an odd tension in this as women disproportionately make up the volunteer sector, yet are underrepresented at Board tables of for-profit organizations. We do see some value in the inverse being true at NGM, where self-identified men are taking ownership of transforming gender norms and inequities (and not tasking women with the work).

A Spanish language masculinities podcast—¿Por qué NGM? ¡Porque Danny Perez es amigo de NGM! We first met Danny during one of our online NGM Circles. The beauty of bringing our community conversations online was that time and place weren’t as constricting as they once were—allowing an audio producer about to launch a podcast on machismo ni Latin America, Oreja Peluda, to join from Ecuador. One thing our fledgling Podcast Network needed was audio production help, and Danny obliged, resulting in the best season of Modern Manhood to date!

You can learn more about the origins of B.O.O.K. Club on its dedicated webpage, but it is a very intentional initiative engaging the dominant group (men in male-dominant industries) to read Beyond Our Own Knowledge (B.O.O.K.) through personal narratives and systemic critiques of under-represented voices. This embeds a commitment to an intersectional practice of learning and unlearning, not only for the people we serve but for NGM itself.

Before the holidays, our NGM Boys Club facilitators were approached by one of our longtime less-active members, a 12-year-old who is deaf. He was wondering if we would be willing to meet with him to discuss how to make the Discord server more accessible for youth who are deaf and hard of hearing.

Together, we made plans for a better space for him and others like him. We debriefed his past experiences, we tested bots that could transcribe speech to text from the voice channel and brainstormed ideas for more diverse and accessible events.

Each NGM Boys Club event description is now accompanied with an emoji tag to indicate its level of accessibility; and voice channel discussions are accompanied by text chat participation and engagement as well.

The goal for NGM Boys Club—as written by a 13-year-old member—is to be the safest and most positive community on Discord for guys and nonbinary youth to hang out, connect, get support and discuss important topics. That's only possible if we build our capacity to be uniquely inclusive and accessible, especially by those who might face barriers in other spaces.

It also appears that roughly one in three youth registration forms for NGM Boys Club cite some form of neurodiversity. We find this very interesting as it is not on our materials anywhere, and will be keeping an eye on this trend!

 Youth

If 2020 was the year we collided with the pandemic, 2021 was the year we dug in our heels to sustain our online youth programming in ways that had never before been done.

The youth team committed to making our NGM Alliance Discord server freely accessible and used it to bring boys and nonbinary youth from across North America together for the first-ever virtual Future of Masculinity Summit.

“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 feeling with a group of people I trust.” — Future of Masculinity Summit participant

Our young adolescent members continued to carve out a unique corner of the internet—a space for boys defined by support, inclusion and positive masculinity. We followed up our popular Cards For Masculinity prompt cards with a deck of affirmations called Boys Will Be _, launched our Raising Next Gen Men online course, upgraded our Next Gen Mentors initiative with a comprehensive program guide, and deepened our relationships with countless schools and community partners.

“Thank you for being such a great role model for my 11-year-old and nurturing the best in him. It really helped him cope with the isolation of the pandemic and helped him develop some new capacities within himself.” — NGM Alliance parent

Most of all, we worked tirelessly to support the wellbeing of boys themselves—by engaging and connecting with them day in and day out as they weathered the second year of a worldwide pandemic.

 Community

Our community is a brave space to connect with other members passionate about building empathy and equity in themselves and in the world. We offer a supportive environment to learn and unlearn together. We facilitate monthly NGM Circle events, host Inner Circle, an online forum and provide opportunities for connection for people of all genders and backgrounds.

In 2021 we hosted 12 online NGM Circle events with over 350 attendees from within Canada and around the world. People joined us from our major hubs—Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and Toronto—but also from the gorgeous great lakes (St. Catharines) and the Rocky Mountains (Canmore, Fernie), to south of our border (Seattle, Los Angeles), and our friends overseas (Bangkok and Sydney)!

“I came away from this with a renewed sense of hope and inspiration—it was so meaningful to engage with a group of people that live their values and are also willing to share their struggles and challenges. Thank you for creating a space for this to happen!” — NGM Circle attendee

Discussions focused on everything from what we’ve learned and unlearned about how to ‘be a man’ (or gender more broadly), to its connections with the legal system, friendships, parenting, the world of outdoor travel, self-improvement (as a concept, and as an industry), radicalization, homophobia, and more.

Our Inner Circle community forum hosts conversations on topics for about 200 members (at any given time!). Topics are broadly organized by category: Health & Relationships, Workplaces, Sports & Media, and News & Politics. Members in our community have shared that it has been impactful for them to have a place to learn and unlearn messages about gender and masculinity in particular. They’ve had conversations that are challenging, heartfelt, and vulnerable.

"Whether or not you meant to, I also believe this will also be an important modelling opportunity for others on communicating through our hurts, and how to do that in an open, honest, and kind way." — A community member

 Workplaces

Back in 2017, Next Gen Men launched Equity Leaders as a social enterprise to mobilize men in male-dominant industries to engage in gender equity, and broader diversity and inclusion initiatives. Suffice to say, that mounting mobilization ground to a halt in 2020.

However, being the resilient bunch that we are, late that year we introduced a new offering, Beyond Our Own Knowledge (B.O.O.K.) Club—you guessed it, a book club.

Aside from a handful of webinars on men’s mental health at work during the pandemic, and our first-ever virtual adaptation of our Equity Focused Leadership program with Inter Pipeline, this club sustained our mission to mobilize men at work.

“When I first joined B.O.O.K. Club, I saw it as an opportunity to grow and learn new perspectives. Something that would better equip me to understand issues in diversity and inclusion. Being several reads in, I can say that B.O.O.K. Club is much more than that. To meet and engage with other men in thoughtful and challenging discussions has been enriching on a personal level. The books are thought-provoking and the facilitator-guided discussions are exceptional.” — B.O.O.K. Club participant

By the end of 2021, we were five official cohorts and over 250 participants deep, with organizations like Clio, Best Buy, RBC, Deloitte, Imperial Oil, and more, sending groups of male leaders to participate. The future is bright for stretching beyond our bubbles while learning—and unlearning—to be better leaders.

Our B.O.O.K. Club reads last year included a Métis memoir on homelessness and addiction, a look at systemic racism and its costs to us all, a transgender memoir on transitioning, and a map of cross-cultural communication.