Healthy Masculinities Grant Recipients

Alas de Agua Art Collective
This project includes weekly BIPOC Men’s Poetry, Monologue, and Art workshops at the Alas de Agua Art Collective space on the Southside of Santa Fe, along with monthly pop up events at different venues throughout the city, facilitated by male identifying BIPOC facilitators. The workshops will explore cultural issues around both toxic masculinity and healthy masculinities including investigating the reality that we are all on the spectrum of healthy and unhealthy masculinity. This will include private inner work in a judgement free zone allowing individuals to look into the shadow self and the layers of everyday behavior that go unchecked. Ultimately this work is an act of decolonization and reconstructing the healthy masculine.

Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women (CSWANW)
Through this project, CSVANW will host a series of focused conversations to directly engage Indigenous male-identified youth, adults and elders. They will resource participants for their time and expertise with a goal of supporting their ongoing healing, while also cultivating an understanding of healthy masculinities through an Indigenous lens. The focus areas of these conversations will be informed by the New Mexico Healthy Masculinities Toolkit. Each of the focused conversations will center the experiences of 10 Indigenous male-identified youth, adults, and elders. CSVANW will create two trauma-informed focus groups to gather information and input from participants to inform advocacy initiatives needed on the tribal, state, and federal levels.

Earthseed Black Arts Alliance
Earthseed’s Summer Camp will be the first of its kind in Santa Fe County, providing one week of programming for Black and bi-racial self-identifying adolescent boys. The program promotes, explores, and supports healthy masculinities in a New Mexican context by creating a safe container for these youth to strengthen their knowledge of self in a culturally relevant space amongst peers. The talking circles, guided conversations, and activities will be rooted in exploring the three themes of understanding patriarchy, structural racism, and masculine expressions of protection. These conversations will also be taken outside the classroom and inserted into hikes, river play, sports, and movement, activating a more profound, embodied sense of conceptual understanding within the group. Some elements of hip hop, such as freestyling and ciphering, are inspired directly by the traditional call-and-response culture of Indigenous African communities in Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo; countries where the transatlantic slave trade kidnapped countless of our ancestors. Acknowledging ancestral legacy adds depth, relevance, and impact to programming and provides counter narratives to how “men” should behave, speak, dress, and move.

Fathers New Mexico
The FUTURE MEN Project (FMP) provides early adolescents who identify as male with an opportunity to explore masculinity, relationships, their hopes for the future and more, in a small group of their peers. The affinity groups meet weekly, during the school day, and throughout the school year. Within that “safe space”, participants are introduced to and have vigorous discussions about issues like: gender expectations, healthy relationships, sexuality, challenges they are experiencing and other issues that are not explored in other settings. At the end of the school year, each FMP group implements a service learning project that was decided on and collectively planned by the group. The FMP work is culturally relevant, and each topic is designed to challenge societal messages while empowering each individual to identify familial, ethnic, and cultural characteristics and identities that make them proud. Participants are primarily people of color. The groups are encouraged to explore the fact that they often interpret being identified as “at risk” as a consequence of their ethnicity. Guest speakers are people of color and the service learning project is to support an aspect of a community that groups member identify themselves as being a part of. The exploration of interpretations of ‘culture’ and what ‘community’ is inspire participants to invest in their personal priorities.

New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs
This project includes a prevention-forward workshop series for existing and aspiring prevention programs across New Mexico. This series will bring in local and national presenters to address topics including: How to increase our ability to engage men and boys in our school and community-based prevention sessions; how to meaningfully collaborate with programs already working with men and boys to integrate sexual violence prevention messaging; Queer and Trans masculinities as a site of sexual violence prevention; masculinities within specific cultural contexts; restorative and transformative justice movements; how to engage in healthy masculinities prevention efforts along the Social-Ecological Model. This series will also be rooted in an anti-oppressive and anti-racist lens.

Solace Sexual Assault Services
Solace’s Education and Prevention Department provides sexual health education to all Santa Fe Public Middle School students. The programing promotes social norms that protect against violence, provides opportunities to empower marginalized communities and creates protective environments. Through media literacy, role play, games, and small/large 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. They turn words into actions by identifying strategies for bystander intervention. They use media literacy skills to de-construct messages that promote sexual violence and denigrate women. Their multi-session program examines how rigid gender norms are shaped and how they contribute to sexual violence.

Tewa Women United
This project focuses on offering their braided curriculum at the Santa Fe Indian School. The project includes a summer session of Sengipaa Ing Vi Po to complement the Butterfly Wings gender specific cohort. For the young men and masculine presenting or self-identified young people, they will bring in farming mentors from their communities to share some historical context of gendered roles around farming in their communities and also how those have and are shifting with the revitalization of farming and seed saving in our communities. Tewa speakers will be invited to share hunting and fishing time with young men and discuss this and the changing roles around what it meant to be a provider for their ancestors and what it means to be a provider now. They will do rattle making, bow making, and belt making. They will hold a healing through clay session and what it means to be a nurturer and protector of Earth Mother.

Together for Brothers (T4B)
This project includes T4B’s Summer, Fall, and Winter cohort model working with self-identified boys and young men of color (BYMOC) in project-based cohorts for art making, biking, civic engagement, community safety, cooking, leadership and outdoor recreation. The Leadership project and cohorts will continue to focus on new and younger BYMOC to become involved with T4B and community, including cohorts focused on specific populations like African/Black, or language communities including Dari/Farsi and Spanish speakers, as well as focusing on healthy masculinities and relationships in those contexts. Through the cohorts, the focus will be on affirmative consent, assets, boundaries, communication and expectations, and healthy masculinities and relationships. T4B’s “leadership ladder” means that most impacted BYMOC are Youth Leaders and Youth Consultants, Youth Organizers and Project Managers, as well as represented in the staff.

Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico (TGRCNM)
Through this project, TGRCNM will provide activities for transmasculine individuals of all ages including social activities where they can be their authentic selves and enjoy community space. Their transmasculine group has begun utilizing a drum circle and sound therapy as a means of group therapeutic care. They also strive to integrate the needs and desires of the individuals they serve based on their life experience, culture, and accessibility needs.

Valencia Shelter for Victims of Domestic Violence
This project includes Valencia Shelter Services’ Family Peace Initiative (FPI) Offender Rehabilitation program. The FPI 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, group and individualized case management, and educates male clients via the 52-week FPI program curriculum that gives male clients the tools and support to choose, build, and sustain a life free from violence. The FPI curriculum includes classes on parenting, boundaries, healthy relationships, childhood trauma, emotional regulation, and substance use. Bringing male clients together in a discussion style psychoeducational group, provides a safe space for them to explore reasons why men feel the need to choose violence. Common themes include behaviors taught by their fathers, trauma that changed how they interact with the world, the idea of what makes a man a man is concentrated in being hypermasculine without the ability to show weakness, and the warping of the idea of Machismo.