7 Impacts of NGM in 7 Years
By Jake Stika
November 18th, 2014. Seven years. Wow.
My undergraduate degree took me six years after switching majors and schools two years in, so Next Gen Men is officially the longest thing that I’ve committed myself to voluntarily (I’m not counting grade school) outside of getting out of bed (most days).
And it’s not just the brand, logo, or organization—the mission still deeply resonates with me.
Even after all these years, the vision of a future where boys and men experience less harm and cause less pain still gets me fired up. Not to mention the wonderful people I get to do this work alongside continue to inspire me.
Whether that’s Jonathon rolling up his sleeves to really meet the youth where they are (read: building a Minecraft server), Sarah taking difficult and important concepts and making them digestible across our social media, Trevor wading into spaces where people don’t want hear about advancing equality and winning them over by using phrases like ‘hunky dory,’ Veronika being the most supportive Swiss army knife (building community, project support, volunteer engagement, facilitating en français—she does it all!), or Brett quitting a career and starting a new one with NGM because he wanted to be a positive influence on the next generation.
We’re celebrating NGM’s birthday this year by reflecting on the achievements that have gotten us steps closer to reaching our vision.
1. Youth (est. 2015)
It all started with (and continues for) the next generation.
NGM co-founders, Jermal, Jason, and I, wanted a different story of what it means to ‘be a man’ than what we had inherited. A new story that offered many positive masculinities to aspire to, and encouraged self and community care that supports mental health and wellbeing. A plot that shielded boys and men from lives of social isolation by fostering healthy relationships with friends, partners, and colleagues. A universal story built on gender equity acknowledging both the privileges and pitfalls of patriarchy.
Our youth programs are where we first started to rewrite the script on what it means to be a man. Since we ran our first youth program in early 2015, we’ve reached over 4,000 of the next generation of men. I repeat, over 4,000(!!!) boys and masc-identifying youth have discussed positive masculinities, healthy relationships, mental wellbeing and gender equity through NGM’s programs, workshops, and presentations across 45 schools and youth settings we’ve had the pleasure of visiting. In addition, we’ve worked with over 400 educators through professional development, presentations, or training.
Check out some of our report cards:
2. Community
Eventually, we knew we needed a community to rally around and get excited about our youth work (read: y’all!). Over the first couple of years we heard ‘I wish I had something like this when I was a kid’ from our peers so often that we decided to create spaces for conversations around gender and masculinity for adults.
NGM Circle (est. 2016)
First conceived as ‘Wolf Pack,’ the now more aptly named NGM Circle was born of the fact that a lot of people (mostly women) were talking about men, and men’s groups were talking with men (to the exclusion of others), but nobody was talking for, with, and about men among all genders. Almost 2,500 attendees over 100 NGM Circle events later we’re confident that we’ve expanded beyond our own circle of influence.
“I come 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!”
A sense of community is a powerful thing—individually it may feel like we can’t change much about the world, but when we come together and learn from each other our feelings of hope are reignited. We’re proud that NGM Circle has become a regular space for people of all walks of life to meet, share, and learn. Our goal after every event is that attendees leave feeling hopeful with actionable things they can do to make their corner of the world slightly better and supported by the NGM community that shares their vision.
18,000 Pebbles
Social media is a vanity metric. However, we cannot diminish its role in starting and furthering discourse in today’s world. As such, if your cause is not on these platforms, you may be missing an opportunity to move your mission forward.
Over the years, NGM has seen our platform as a space to invite folks into our vision. This has resulted in an audience of over 18,000(!!!) subscribers, followers and friends across our newsletter and social platforms (anyone else long over Facebook?). Yes, some of them are the same people across multiple channels, but this group represents 18,000 opportunities to talk about engaging men and boys and when even a handful of them like, share, comment, or tag others—the ripples become waves.
3. Workplaces (est. 2017)
Speaking at the UN in 2018 – no big deal.
Pssst. I have a secret to tell you. *whispers* Nonprofit is a really tough business model. Not to say that other models aren’t hard, but there are some unique constraints.
Start with the name, nonprofit—a misnomer! You need profits in order to reinvest and grow! It really should be something like not-for-dividend (I know it doesn’t have the same ring). So in 2017, my entrepreneurial background kicked into gear to go find us some profit so we could further deliver on our mission.
Believe it or not, Equity Leaders was launched before #MeToo. Call it prescient, but we were definitely buoyed by the moment. It was originally conceived as a problem-solving initiative aimed at a problem identified in male-dominant sectors—men are largely absent in their roles advancing gender equity.
We’ve run our Equity Focused Leadership program with a tech startup that became a unicorn, a 40-year-old company reinventing itself as a startup, as well as a company leading the energy transition and undergoing a private equity acquisition aligning to new ESG (environmental social corporate governance) directives.
As a facilitator, you sometimes see the agitation of folks who want the silver bullet, the button to push, the lever to pull to ‘make it better.’ This program is impactful as you can see it start to click for them over the duration that when they have a new lens of unconscious bias, power and privilege, gender norms, upstander intervention, and being an ally—they start see their day-to-day business issues differently.
4. This Is What It Feels Like (2017)
Inspired by, and in partnership with, Terra Lopez’s This Is What It Feels Like auditory art installation in California, we decided to bring awareness of street harassment to the streets of the Calgary Stampede, AKA the ‘Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth.’ A scene full of yipping and hollering in the summer heat.
The project saw over 650 people experience the installation based on 97% of Calgary women’s experiences of street harassment. Suffice to say it built people’s empathy for the receiver.
Not only that, this project inspired our friends Men Edmonton to create their own TIWIFL installation and may even result in a virtual reality experience in the near future. When you publicly take a stand, it gives others the permission and courage to follow.
In some ways TIWIFL is more relevant than ever—with the return to ‘normal’ life post-COVID there has been an increase in street harassment. It’s why we partnered with the City of Calgary in 2021 to help build a #CaringYYC.
5. Network Building
The Foundation for a Cross-Canada Movement
In 2019, we were honoured to be tapped on the shoulder by the Canadian Ministry for Women and Gender Equality (WAGE) to begin to lay the foundation for a national network on engaging men and boys in gender justice. This involved travelling from coast-to-coast-to-coast (I may have jumped a status or two with WestJet on this project) meeting with and collaborating with others tackling gender-based violence and advancing gender equity across Canada.
We met with stakeholders serving women and girls, Indigenous healers, multicultural communities, and 2SLGBTQ+ service providers to talk about the roles of men and boys in making Canada a safe and prosperous place for all.
We hope to continue this work as we inch towards a post-COVID world in order to further connect practitioners, build capacity, share research, and build legitimacy of this budding field.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
NGM Podcast Network (est. 2019)
Of course in this day and age NGM needed a podcast, but before we went off and started our own, we met German, host of the Modern Manhood podcast. He’s now one of our Board members and Modern Manhood became the first member of the Next Gen Men Podcast Network, AKA NGM PodNet.
This is a personal favourite from the 🔥🔥🔥 new season:
The second was none other than our Youth Program Manager’s own Breaking the Boy Code. Fun fact: NGM actually helped Jonathon buy the equipment to start BTBC long before he worked at NGM. The insight and depth of the boys on his show never cease to bring tears of hope to my eyes.
Such as this beautiful episode for World Suicide Prevention Day:
Producing podcasts is hard work and takes talented people which can be hard to find, which is why we’re so lucky that we found Danny Perez all the way in Ecuador. More accurately, Danny found us as he was launching his Oreja Peluda (Hairy Ear, as in there’s something you need to hear but there’s stuff in the way) podcast on masculinity and machismo in Latin America. Thus becoming the third member of the NGM PodNet—it doesn’t hurt that he’s an audio engineer either. 🤩
I can understand just a percentage of this, but you can see the quality of the audio Danny is putting out in this trailer:
Finally, we were blessed to have Samantha Nzessi and Remoy Philip of California and New York respectively bring the MASKulinity podcast to our collective. Samantha and Remoy are invaluable in keeping the PodNet organized and putting out high-quality transformative audio.
Check out this oldie with NGM Co-founder Jason Tan de Bibiana:
P.S. Want to get to know the hosts of these shows better? Check out Cold Takes on YouTube for conversations around what’s happening right now through a lens of masculinity.
6. Tools
Raising Next Gen Men (est. 2018)
Originally developed as a full-day Saturday in-person training, Raising Next Gen Men is a course for parents, teachers, coaches, and youth workers who want to know boys better. Less of a ‘how to swim’ and more of a ‘what am I swimming in’ the course helps challenge assumptions, deepen understanding, shift attitudes, and take action for and with the young men in their lives.
This course was too important and too big for the small groups that could gather in proximity in the spaces generously donated to us on Saturdays to run them. So we moved online. Now hosted on Thinkific, Raising Next Gen Men is transforming hearts and minds when it comes to boys across North America and even overseas.
Talking Tools (est. 2020-2021)
To achieve our vision, it cannot just be Next Gen Men hosting and facilitating these conversations. As much as we’d like to be, we’re not at your family dinner table, in your sports team’s locker room, or roasting marshmallows around your campfire—though those are exactly the spaces conversations around gender and masculinity should be happening.
Enter Cards for Masculinity (est. 2020) to spark 50 questions to spark conversations on topics of self, health, peers, relationships, and culture. Since launching we have sold over 1,700 decks(!!!) far exceeding out expectations.
Not to be outdone, Boys Will Be _ (est. 2021) is our follow-up with eight prompts and 42 affirmations to encourage what boys already are rather than what they shouldn’t be.
7. Survived a Freaking Global Pandemic
Oof. I didn’t have a pandemic on my life’s BINGO card, did you!?
I have to take a moment here to say how incredibly proud I am of the team at Next Gen Men. Spring of 2020 was a scary time. There was a monster in the world that none of us had experienced before, and leadership was lacking (*cough* Trump *cough*). People were dying, businesses were closing, and toilet paper scarce.
I must acknowledge that at Next Gen Men we were extremely privileged in the sense that we stayed healthy and at home. That being said, the way we did our work was rocked. I said to the team: “Positive masculinities, healthy relationships, mental wellbeing, and gender equity didn’t go away, we just need to find new ways to serve those needs.”
Boy did we ever.
NGM Alliance (est. 2020)
We were de-platformed. Not in the alt-right sense, but in the sense that we used to run after-school programs…and ‘after,’ ‘school,’ and ‘programs’ had all taken on new meanings. Understandably in the chaos, schools set aside service providers (rightfully) from the calculus of supporting youth. However, that didn’t mean that we didn’t want to support them, and that they didn’t need support.
So we met them where they were. On Discord. With NGM Alliance. Pandemic or not, 12- to 14-year-old-boys are and will be online. Which, for many parents, is a dark and scary place. We’ve been reading and hearing a lot about MRA’s, incels, and radicalization. Not to mention the ills of screen time.
In our learnings it’s not that you are online that puts you at risk. It’s what you do online that does. Boys and young men need valuable alternatives to the usual unmoderated, unsupported, and unanchored corners of the internet.
We even had TikTok-er Bentellect and YouTubers Jay Canada and TD Barrett join for sessions of Cards for Masculinity with the boys. Here’s what TD had to say about his visit to NGM Alliance:
Fast forward to 8:35
Inner Circle (est. 2020)
NGM Circle used to happen in 5 communities across Canada (Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Medicine Hat, and Toronto), but in spring of 2020 everyone needed community wherever they were. The internet can be a beautiful tool to transcend time zones and geographic boundaries.
The problem with events run at certain times though is that it’s synchronous. As a distributed organization since day one, we know the power of asynchronous connection! So we built a private space for our Next Gen Menbers to keep the conversation going between events.
It’s a space driven by NGM’s values daily as we talk the talk and figure how to walk the walk towards being the Next Gen Men we aspire to be…aaand the occasional food recipe from our resident foodie Roger (shout-out!) and lame dad joke from yours truly.
Join the Inner Circle by becoming a Next Gen Menber today.
B.O.O.K. Club (est. 2020)
Beyond Our Own Knowledge is what B.O.O.K. stands for.
As a voracious reader I am well-aware of the power of adopting a new perspective to change how we view and do things. I also know that when it comes to the world of leadership and business, too many of the books that make the rounds are authored by the male, pale, and stale identities (no shade – I’m both male and pale, on my way to stale).
That is not what society is demanding of leaders today. Whether #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, or Truth & Reconciliation, society is clamouring for leaders that put psychological safety and a culture of inclusion on the forefront in an increasingly uncertain world.
To be able to do that for all the people we lead and hope to lead, we need to flex our empathy muscles in understanding the systems at play and the stories of how folks with lived experiences not like our own or that of the dominant narrative experience the world.
The books we’ve read so far
Looking back is not for the faint of heart. We’ve achieved a lot, but the work ahead still looms large. You know what they say, patriarchy wasn’t dismantled in a day.
What I’m most proud of is that I see our values in action throughout these accomplishments. We’ve been curious in learning and unlearning how we do things, and continually striving to do them better. We’ve been empathetic in building bridges as we can’t do this work alone. We’ve been courageous in doing the unexpected and unique as a nonprofit. And equity remains at the root as everything we do is towards removing barriers.
So I hope you stick with us. As I like to say, we’re seven years into a 10-year overnight success story. The next few are going to be exciting!
For those of you who are one of our 80+ Next Gen Menbers, thank you. I would not be writing this reflection without your vote of confidence and monthly investment in our vision and mission.