The Man Cave

The best part of our job? When boys we've worked with years ago come up to us. 🙏 Our School Workshops see us working with teenage boys across multiple programs and often multiple years. The boy who sent us this DM first took part in a Man Cave workshop when he was in Year 9. We went back to his school earlier this year, he's now in Year 12, and recognising our Facilitators, he came up to us to tell us about all the progress he'd made in his own life and the impact it was having on the people around him. Legend.

We are hiring Casual Facilitators in Victoria! 🥳 The role of a Man Cave Facilitator is to co-facilitate full-day workshops with groups of teenage boys in high school. In this role, you will engage with young men through interactive activities and discussions, fostering a positive and inclusive learning environment. In addition, you will collaborate with The Man Cave team by participating in rigorous pre- and post-workshop conversations, where we thoroughly prepare and reflect on each session’s outcomes to continuously enhance our impact. Learn more and apply: https://hubs.la/Q02VYbCQ0

Loved this pic of our workshops taken by Trinity Grammar School, Kew - kinda looks like a heart 🫶 Pictured are two of our facilitators Leeson and Paddy running some icebreakers with the boys at the start of the day. 

The power in providing boys with positive male role models 🙏

That's a wrap on the Board of Boys (BOB) experience for 2024 🎬 Recently we closed the Board of Boys program, gathering with all of the boys and their parents and guardians, from all over Victoria, at our Headquarters in Melbourne. Funded by Movember, this 12-week mentorship program worked with 10 teenage boys to strengthen their social connections and mental health through three in-person workshops and eight online Twitch streams. Success for the boys meant improving emotional awareness, utilising the tools we use in our school programs and building stronger social bonds. For our team, it was about keeping the boys engaged, adapting to online formats, and involving parents in the process. We’re super proud of what we accomplished and where the boys ended up. They showed real growth, and parents noticed better communication and emotional wellbeing in their sons, which they shared in our closing workshop!

Our CEO Hunter Johnson joined Sky News to talk about the funding we’ve received from the Australian Government 🙏 This funding, announced last week by Amanda Rishworth MP, is enabling us to reach tens of thousands of teenage boys in high schools across Victoria and New South Wales, whom we would not have been able to work with previously due to funding constraints. Thank you to Sky News and Ashleigh Gillon for having us on!

Deeply grateful to the Albanese government for providing funding to subsidise our preventative programs for young men 🙏 Today at Brunswick Secondary College, the Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth MP announced The Man Cave would receive funding, alongside two other organisations, to trial activities that focus on influencing and changing attitudes and behaviours that may lead to gender-based violence by encouraging healthy, respectful relationships among school-aged boys. This is a landmark investment in the future of masculinity in Australia - and it enables us to run our programs in hundreds of classrooms across Victoria and New South Wales that we would not have been able to reach otherwise. This is a fantastic start to funding prevention. Thanks also to Claudia and Brunswick SC for being incredible hosts and to Harry, Marko, Jethro and Campbell, Year 11 and 12 boys, for being absolute legends - they wowed everyone with their eloquence, insights and conviction. Thanks to the funding from the DSS, we’re back at Brunswick SC later this month to run programs with their Year 8 boys! Great to be joined by Peter Khalil MP as well, a long-time supporter of the Cave and the Brunswick area.

🙏 Grateful to have the support of our amazing community of schools! 🏫 Our programs are a series of whole-day experiences that encourage participants to explore the concept of masculinity and to build healthier relationships with themselves and those around them. To learn more, visit our Programs page on our website - https://hubs.la/Q02TzlJJ0

The post-it note that sparked a decade of growth for The Man Cave ✍️ “We’ve got someone coming in to run wellbeing workshops with the girls but we’ve got nothing for the boys. Can you come up with something?” An urgent 2014 email, sent by a contact to Hunter Johnson and Jamin Heppell, two would-be social entrepreneurs in their early 20s, with an opportunity to work at Frankston High School. It accelerated an idea they had been working on, and for the next month they stayed up every night, designing the skeleton of a program they decided to call The Man Cave. They ran six 90-minute workshops with the school’s entire Year 9 cohort over the course of two days, and just as they were about to leave, they noticed a post-it note with writing on it that had been left behind. They showed it to the same contact who’d reached out a month earlier. “The turnaround I saw in him was unbelievable. He got anonymously voted as the school’s biggest bully last week. Today he was the complete opposite.” That’s when Hunter and Jamin, two of The Man Cave’s co-founders, knew they were on to something special. Ten years on and our programs have positively impacted the lives of 80,000+ teenage boys, providing them and their communities with impactful programs, role models and resources.

The Man Cave is taking bookings for our School Programs in 2025! 🏫 Our programs are a series of whole-day experiences that encourage participants to explore the concept of masculinity and to build healthier relationships with themselves and those around them. To learn more, visit https://hubs.la/Q02TcM5Z0 *Note, the boy pictured is not the boy quoted.