The Men’s Project can tailor co-facilitated workshops for staff and/or students that draw on The Man Box research, our Modelling Respect and Equality Program as well as speakers from our Just Voices program. To engage staff and/or students and promote learning, the workshops would include interactive activities and draw on different types of knowledge including lived experience.
The messages delivered during workshops can be adapted depending on the contexts and objectives that we will identify in partnership with your school leadership. For example, at schools we have presented to students about The Man Box and vulnerability. The messages and activities raised self-awareness around habits/preconceptions related to masculinities as well as highlighting that change can be driven by everyone.
The Just Voices Speakers Program is a Jesuit Social Services program that brings inspiring speakers from diverse backgrounds, communities and cultures to classrooms, workplaces, community and church groups, public events and festivals.
The Men’s Project collaborates with Just Voices to raise awareness, start conversations, and promote positive behaviour change around issues of masculinity in our society.
With this approach speakers from diverse backgrounds can speak authentically of their lived experience, for example as someone who has experienced family violence, had body issues or mental health problems, or has not fit in the traditional masculine stereotypes. This has proven to be extremely powerful and engaging for audiences.
Wise Guys is an Australian male behaviour change program that delivers evidence-based education to young men aged 11 to 18.
Using a strengths-based approach and the current Man Box research, this program delivers a series of lessons to help participants gain essential skills, and to empower them to identify the impacts of long-standing gender stereotypes on themselves and others, and to actively question and challenge these attitudes and stereotypes. Further, it aims to help young men develop more positive forms of masculinity and build respectful relationships with others.
Most boys grow up to be productive, healthy and responsible members of society.
But some boys drop out of school early. Their family relationships are dysfunctional. They fall in with the wrong crowd. And they end up in trouble.
They cycle in and out of crisis services and the justice system, at immense costs. And as adult men some of them end up being responsible for the most horrific crimes – murders, violence, and acts of extremism.
While we are learning more about the pathways these boys take to end up at the margins of society, our current responses are too often inadequate or too late.
There is a need to develop new ways to identify those at risk between the ages of 8-14 and to support them to remain in school and out of trouble. Present practice is that intervention programs of this nature only begin when boys already are in trouble. Often this is too late. The Men’s Project will focus on these boys Before It Starts.
We will lead work to identify, understand and respond to boys aged 8-14 before the first signs of trouble often present.
The Men’s Project recently collaborated with leading girls’ rights agency Plan International Australia and Promundo, a global leader in engaging men and boys in promoting gender equality and preventing violence, to produce a guide for parents to help boys embrace healthy, 
positive masculinity.
The guide offers parents nine simple, practical tips to talk to their sons about healthy masculinity, and encourage positive beliefs and behaviours from an early age, including: how parents can use play to define positive values, challenge gender stereotypes, be clear about consent and more.
Nine ways to encourage healthy masculinity
Download the tip sheet Raising sons to embrace healthy, positive masculinity.
