2025 Healthy Masculinities Grant Recipients
Beginning in 2023, NMW.O launched a Healthy Masculinities open grant cycle, which emerged from the work of the New Mexico Healthy Masculinities Community of Practice (HM CoP) and the development of the NM Healthy Masculinities Toolkit. It also stemmed from NMW.O’s 2017 research, The Heart of Gender Justice in New Mexico, in which a key recommendation from communities around the state was the need for healthier masculinities and gender roles.
We are in a crisis of masculinities and gender, with profound impacts on children, families, and communities. Working toward healthy masculinities and reimagining our gender frameworks are essential to gender justice and healing. Our understanding is that healthy masculinities are nonviolent and find strength in being vulnerable. They center on connection, compassion, emotional awareness, humility, and respect. Healthy masculinities result from intentional work to understand one’s privilege and power; to learn how unhealthy masculinities play out in our families, relationships, communities, society, and world; and to practice behaviors and support efforts that counter domination, inequities, and violence. In this vein, the Healthy Masculinities Grants support self-identified men and male-identified youth, as well as multi-gendered groups, to engage in healthy masculinities work in their communities, including focused on exploring gender norms, healthy relationships, consent, patriarchy, the impacts of colonization on gender relations, and more.
The Healthy Masculinities grant program is not currently accepting applications. To receive updates about funding opportunities through this program, sign up for our newsletter here.
Alas de Agua Art Collective
Communities Served: Santa Fe County. Alas De Agua Art Collective is an intersectional grassroots space providing resources and opportunities for artists of color, Native artists, immigrant, undocumented, and queer artists who have historically and currently been marginalized and not afforded the same resources as other groups. Alas de Agua engages multi-gendered school-aged groups in healthy masculinities poetry and art-making workshops, and hosts BIPOC men’s poetry nights in the Santa Fe community.
Enlace Comunitario
Communities Served: Bernalillo, Sandoval, Valencia Counties. Enlace Comunitario transforms the lives of domestic violence survivors in Central New Mexico’s Latine/x and immigrant communities through culturally and linguistically specific intervention services and prevention-focused community outreach and education. Their Youth Leader Development & Artistic Expression programming centers connection, joy, and gender-affirming healthy relationships and healthy masculinities amongst immigrant teens and teen survivors of domestic violence.
New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs (NMCSAP)
Communities Served: Statewide. NMCSAP provides education, support, and advocacy to address all aspects of preventing and responding to sexual violence in NM from an anti-racist, anti-oppression foundation. As part of their healthy masculinities work, NMCSAP holds a prevention-forward workshop series for prevention programs across New Mexico, which addresses topics such as: Queer and Trans masculinities as a site of sexual violence prevention; and masculinities within specific cultural contexts.
Solace Sexual Assault Services
Communities Served: Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Rio Arriba Counties; Cochiti, Kewa, Nambe, Pojoaque, San Felipe, San Ildefonso, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Tesuque Pueblos. Solace’s mission is to prevent sexual violence and empower survivors of all violent crimes through restoring dignity, strength, and resilience. Their Education and Prevention Department provides sexual health education to all Santa Fe Public Middle School students. Solace’s healthy masculinities programming promotes social norms that protect against violence, provides opportunities to empower marginalized communities, and creates protective environments. Through media literacy, role play, games, and group discussion, they invite students to unpack myths about rape and consent, examine how hyper-masculinity is shaped, and how it contributes to sexual violence.
Together for Brothers (T4B)
Communities Served: Bernalillo County. T4B envisions health and health equity for boys and young men of color (BYMOC), as well as their families and communities. They partner across New Mexico with BYMOC and allies to build power, demand justice, and create change. T4B’s seasonal programming engages self-identified BYMOC in project-based cohorts for art making, biking, civic engagement, community safety, cooking, leadership, and outdoor recreation. Their programming focuses on affirmative consent, assets, boundaries, communication, and expectations around healthy masculinities and relationships.
Valencia Shelter for Victims of Domestic Violence (VSS)
Communities Served: Catron, Socorro, Torrance, and Valencia Counties; Isleta and Laguna Pueblos. VSS aids individuals and families affected by domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse in their journey to do the hard and heart work of healing, finding justice, creating stability, and building new lives free from the effects of violence. Their Family Peace Initiative (FPI) Offender Rehabilitation program supports participants who identify as male and have chosen to commit violence toward their partners or family members by providing education, addressing unresolved trauma, and challenging cultural and generational stigmas that cause men to choose violence. The FPI program identifies and addresses emotional, psychological, financial, physical and/or verbal forms of violence, and provides group and individual counseling sessions and case management.
Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women (CSWANW)
Communities Served: Bernalillo, Sandoval, Cibola, Valencia, Santa Fe, McKinley, San Juan, Taos, Rio Arriba, Otero, Lincoln Counties; all NM Tribes, Native Nations, and Pueblos. CSVANW’s mission is to stop violence against Native women and children by advocating for social change in our communities. They prioritize healthy masculinities in Native communities through their Engaging All Relatives programming, in-school workshops with middle and high school students that explore healthy relationships, empathy, and challenge harmful stereotypes. Their broader community offerings integrate traditional teachings, crafts, and storytelling guided by elders. By blending traditional teachings with modern approaches, their programs aim to cultivate self-awareness, healthy relationships, and thriving communities.
Fathers New
Communities Served: Bernalillo, Cibola, Rio Arriba, Sandoval, Santa Fe Counties. Fathers New Mexico’s mission and purpose is to provide support, resources, and skills to promote healthy and responsible fathering in young families. They nurture connections between the father, the family, and the community to promote self, family, and community health. Their FUTURE MEN Project (FMP) provides early adolescents who identify as male with an opportunity to explore masculinity, relationships, hopes for the future, and more with their peers.
Resolve
Communities Served: Bernalillo, Rio Arriba, San Juan, Santa Fe Counties. Resolve’s mission is to prevent violence by building skills and inspiring individuals to be agents of personal, community, and cultural change. Resolve offers Children’s Violence Prevention Workshops for elementary students of all genders in the Santa Fe and Pojoaque Public Schools. These workshops allow whole school communities to develop tools to support each other around identifying feelings, expressing boundaries, seeking support, and creating a culture that doesn’t adhere to harmful gender norms.
Tewa Women United (TWU)
Communities Served: Six Tewa speaking Pueblos in Rio Arriba and northern Santa Fe Counties. Tewa Women United is an inter-tribal, multi-cultural, multi-racial, intergenerational collective of women who reside in the Tewa Pueblo homelands of northern New Mexico. Every day, Native women and girls are centered in TWU’s work to challenge domination and oppression, addressing the root causes of violence, health, and social justice disparities. Their shared work is to end all forms of domination and exploitation, which is rooted in violence against women and girls and our Mother Earth. TWU’s healthy masculinities youth programming incorporates outdoor adventure, cultural teachings, and facilitated discussions, reinforcing the importance of community, self-reflection, and leadership.
Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico (TGRCNM)
Communities Served: Statewide. Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico is the only agency in the state that exists to provide services and advocacy for, and education for and about, the transgender people of New Mexico, along with their families and loved ones. In addition to their gender affirming trainings, TGRCNM also delivers direct services from their drop-in center in Albuquerque and facilitates social gatherings for the wider trans and gender nonconforming community, creating safer spaces and increasing community engagement.
Vital Spaces
Communities Served: Santa Fe, Taos, Los Alamos, and Bernalillo Counties
Vital Spaces focuses on centering and amplifying Black voices in Northern New Mexico as well as collaborating with Indigenous artists, artists of color, and Santa Fe’s artist community as a whole. In 2023, Earthseed Black Arts Alliance, a program of Vital Spaces, launched their now ongoing summer camp, “Bond of Brothers,” a one-week youth program by, for, and led by Black men and Black masculine-identified people. Their continued summer youth programming is designed to foster self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and positive identity development in young men from historically marginalized communities.