ANTIGONISH: A StFX professor who is assisting to lead a project aimed at helping school-aged boys develop healthy masculinity says to receive over $1-million in funding is a dream come true.
“It’s kind of still sinking in, to receive that kind of funding in support,” Chris Gilham told The Reporter in an interview Nov. 17. “I want to really emphasize there has been a lot of focus on me and my name, because the team asked me to be the representative that received it, but Moe Green is really the driver and founder of the program, he’s the godfather, the champion, if it’s anybody that were to be receiving the recognition, it’s him.”
On Nov. 10, GuysWork, a pilot project aimed at developing a transformative school-based program for male-identified students across elementary, middle, and high school grades, received $525,000 from Marci Ien, the federal Minister for Women and Gender Equality.
Karla MacFarlane, the provincial Minister responsible for the Advisory Council on the Status of Women Act, announced an additional $525,000 from the Province of Nova Scotia.
“About 10 years ago, GuysWork started in the Halifax area as a result of a challenge that was being faced in the high schools,” Gilham said. “We had these Youth Health Centres and they were intended for teenagers and adolescents who were trying to seek help and they were very successful for those who were girls but they found that guys weren’t attending them.”
The program is designed to help boys navigate the intense pressures and expectations around masculinity that shape their identities as men, with an ultimate goal, both in the short and long term, to have better mental and physical health, resulting in having healthier relationships with those around them.
Gilham explained there’s a whole curriculum for Grades 6-9, and each grade has about 10, hour-long lessons.
“There’s usually two facilitators and groups of upwards of 15 guys sit in a circle and engage in activities and conversations to attempt to nudge them to think about really important topics in their lives,” he said. “Like their relationship with substances, consent, pornography, misogyny, homophobia; there are a lot of topics they cover in this healthy living program just for guys.”
While the pilot project saw approximately 150 Grade 7/8 students in 15 schools across the province participate, Gilham indicated they had terrific uptake throughout the Strait Regional Centre for Education and Cape Breton-Victoria Regional Centre for Education in particular.
“We had the most groups I would say on Cape Breton Island and in this area here around StFX,” he said. “Universally, one of the common themes, after the program ended, the guys would find the facilitators, who worked in the school, and they would ask for another guy’s group, because it was only 10 sessions.”
With the assistance from both the provincial and federal governments, the project will now expand into more schools and other provinces throughout Atlantic Canada.
“The key part of this funding for us, is that throughout all of it, we’ll be doing an evaluation of the program,” Gilham said. “So we’ll be collecting data to be able to say, what are the impacts and outcomes of this program on the guys on a number of measures that are important to us.”
Supporting the evaluation efforts will be StFX computer science professor Derrick Lee.
From what they heard from participants, Gilham suggested many indicated GuysWork was the best class they had ever taken in school.
“It’s key for people to understand that part of the issue young guys are facing is a result of the intense pressures they face around them from our culture and sometimes they face it from their own families,” he said. “But they face it a lot from pop-culture, porn-culture, advertising, movies and music, and they face it from other guys.”
It’s this kind of idea, Gilham said, of these traditional male stereotypes; to be strong, to not show weakness, teasing and taunting to look cool, that unfortunately for some guys, includes holding power over folks who don’t identify as a traditionally male in their eyes.
“So that may be A-typical guys, guys in the LGBTQ2+ community; definitely girls and women,” he said. “So what we’re trying to do is help the guys see those pressures kind of force them to perform masculinity as it were.”
Suggesting they act in ways that they think will help them become accepted within the group, he said, what they want to do is help them recognize these forces are at play, to get them to think about how they’re not being true to their good and normal, natural, caring selves, and get them to return to that.
“We gave them a survey before the program started and after it finished and the survey was about their traditional, male stereotypes and what we found out, after the program there was a statistically significant drop in those traditional male stereotypes. Which is a huge success,” Gilham said. “Because there’s research going back 20 years, men who rigidly ager to traditional male stereotypes, they end up having poor long term physical and mental health outcomes and they’re more likely to be the perpetrators of inter-personal violence.”