I'm not sure what it's like in other countries but in Australia there is a massive gap in Men's health programs and supports. In fact 75% of people who take their own lives are male with 65,000 attempts each year. The majority Men.
Getting older, having kids and all the other life issues inbetween started really weighing down on me and as I spoke to others there was a real disconnect in what was available in the community.
Ontop of the suicide attempts domestic violence is increasing in my community with the number of men as abusers continuing to rise. Now many will focus on the make perpetrators but I like to do a few things differently.
I like to look at the cause.
No one wakes up one day and targets their family, not after spending most their lives doing for their families. Something along the way happened to cause it.
When I ran for office I wanted to make this a core issue and focus on addressing the cause. ALOT of men made contact and one more so than others. A member of the police force who wanted to progress this topic also. I didn't want to give him false hope as candidates can leverage off community members to increase their polling popularity. As this was an important topic to me also I asked that he wait until the election was over so I could help him more thoroughly and put together a project. I don't need to be elected to get this done and I didn't want to string him along with media and press conferences only to be pushed out at the end of the election. No, we were going to progress this.
Ontop of that I had been getting plenty of messages from people to "work faster" on the solution.
For those reading my post for the first time, I do alot of pro bono work building orgs, programs and services that benefit the community. Also helping with seed funding and getting them operational.
We finally got around to meeting in person outside of COVID restrictions and it was my kids 4th birthday. I like to bring her too these important meetings it helps set a community standard that kids are welcome and builds family inclusivity as well as provides my daughter with a learning experience of the world.
In my opinion a lot of issues can be resolved by actually allowing kids to attend work/events/meetings with their parents. It gives the other a break and reduces stress which is often a key cause of domestic and family violence.
I asked to have an email sent of what ideas they had and I would work from there, quite often it is only a small idea that needs to be expanded on. Which I was able to do.
However, the more I wrote the more I expanded on what that serives might look like and then I realised we urgently needed to do community consultation with men in the area so we could flush out more ideas and what they wanted.
I popped my few paragraphs together asking about his thoughts on running some community engagement sessions.
The response speaks for itself, its important for me to be guided by the community in this work. If I am not it is not a true project and it will not benefit anyone, I see this quite alot people move into the sector and try to dominate and take ownership of programs, projects and ideas. All that happens is they fall over because you lose the vision and purpose.
Not to mention, this project is for this community member and they will be the one engaging with media, political leaders, organisations, funding bodies etc. If they are not guiding the project it makes it harder for them to promote, engage and operate. I am at their service.
Community Engagement
So I wanted to throw a question to the men of Hive.
I'm about to kick off some community engagement sessions and I thought it would be helpful and interesting to see what you would recommend go into a mens health program.
There aren't any boundaries or limits - in development common themes will be derived from the feed back but it is about being open and honest.
What would you use or attend?
For reference some of the things that we jotted down that she available in the local area are
-Shooting range
-camping
-Pub nights
-footy match
-family fun days
-hiking
-mens cycling
-poker nights
-boating
-fishing
-gaming nights
-car shows
And more are being added, I think it will be interesting to see if men around the world have different focuses or are similar?
What are your suggestions