Next Gen Men has always valued talking with youth rather than about youth. It deeply influences our program development—for example, our trailblazing of youth programming online originated in conversations with young people at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It shapes how we share stories of our youth work—the Breaking the Boy Code podcast, as another example, revolves around boys’ voices. In this spirit, we began a dialogue with some of our youth participants in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic to better understand boys’ feelings, stresses, well-being and everyday experiences so that we could continue to support their well-being.
Participants belonged to Next Gen Men’s Discord server, NGM Alliance, an ongoing project to support the well-being of masculine- identifying youth in middle school and high school that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. While this shared context limits our ability to generalize the survey sample, it also offers a unique glimpse into the perspectives of a particular group of young adolescent boys who spend time online.