2024 Healthy Masculinities Grant Recipients
Beginning in 2023, NMW.O initiated a Healthy Masculinities open grant cycle, which emerged from the work of the New Mexico Healthy Masculinities Collaborative (HMC) 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 our 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 toxic 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 healthy masculinities, healthy relationships, consent, patriarchy, the impacts of colonization on gender relations, and more.
The Healthy Masculinities grant program is not currently accepting applications. Read more about our current grantee partners below!
Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women (CSWANW)
CSVANW is hosting a series of focused conversations to directly engage Indigenous male-identified youth, adults, and elders in conversations informed by the NM Healthy Masculinities Toolkit. CSVANW resources 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. Additionally, CSVANW hopes to host trauma-informed focus groups to inform advocacy initiatives needed on the tribal, state, and federal levels.
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. Within a “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 typically explored in other settings. At the end of the school year, each FMP group implements a service learning project that is decided on and collectively planned by the group. The FMP is designed to challenge societal messages while empowering each individual to identify familial, ethnic, and cultural characteristics and identities that make them proud.
Resolve
Resolve plans to provide Children’s Violence Prevention Workshops for elementary students of all genders in Santa Fe and/or Pojoaque Public Schools. The opportunity to connect with children in public schools allows Resolve to reach youth who may already experience violence in their homes or be exposed to harmful gender norms. Notably among children under 13 boys experience a higher rate of sexual abuse than girls, yet are less likely to disclose it, due to early messaging around boys needing to be tough. 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)
TWU will continue to offer and train facilitators in their “Weaving Courage: All Genders Healthy Relationships” curriculum, engaging students and community members in Northern New Mexico in culturally relevant teachings around sexual health. Moreover, participants in TWU’s healthy masculinities and gender justice programming are advocating for a re-design of the Española skate park into a safe and accessible space for people of all genders and mobility levels.
Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico (TGRCNM)
TGRCNM facilitates social gatherings for the wider Trans and Gender Non-Conforming community, creating more safe spaces and increasing community engagement. 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. Additionally, their 52-week FPI program gives male clients the tools and support to choose, build, and sustain a life free from violence via a curriculum that includes classes on parenting, boundaries, healthy relationships, childhood trauma, emotional regulation, and substance use.
Enlace Comunitario
Youth Leaders at Enlace Comunitario will use the Healthy Masculinities Toolkit to catalyze health-centered conversations and health-focused activities as a part of their Breaking the Cycle prevention programming. They hope to engage youth around: the meaning of healthy masculinities to them, and how it plays out in their daily lives; and how it can challenge toxic narratives around gender(ed) roles, etc.; and the role healthy masculinities can play in school health curricula development. In addition to presentations and outreach activities, Enlace Comunitario’s prevention team hopes to create and design an art mural reflecting intergenerational themes inclusive of healthy masculinities tenets.
New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs (NMCSAP)
NMCSAP is providing a prevention-forward workshop series for existing and aspiring sexual assault prevention programs across New Mexico. This series rooted in an anti-racist and anti-oppression lens will include local and national presenters to address topics including increasing engagement with men and boys in 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; and how to engage in healthy masculinities prevention efforts along the Social-Ecological Model.
Solace Sexual Assault Services
Solace’s Education and Prevention Department provides sexual health education to all Santa Fe Public Middle School students. The 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 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 deconstruct 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.
Together for Brothers (T4B)
T4B’s seasonal programming engages 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 seeks to support young BYMOCs in becoming involved with the community and focusing on healthy masculinities and relationships in their contexts. The cohorts focus on affirmative consent, assets, boundaries, communication and expectations, and healthy masculinities and relationships.
Vital Spaces
In 2023 Earthseed Black Arts Alliance, a program of Vital Spaces, launched their pilot summer camp, “Bond of Brothers,” a one-week program by, for, and led by Black men and Black masculine-identified people. The camp brought together 12 Black adolescent boys from Santa Fe County in a container created for camaraderie, personal growth, mental health awareness, physical activity, creative expression, and joy for a group of Black boys. One hundred percent of participants reported never having had a Black man in a teaching position, so the impact of having seven Black men visiting their workshop space to teach, direct, lead, and guide them through activities was profound. All staff engaged with the Healthy Masculinities Toolkit and were grounded in a transformative and liberatory framework.