Both in our shelter and through our community outreach, empowerment is at the core of everything Nellie’s does — teaching women and their children how to build self-confidence, build knowledge, and strengthen her ability to make decisions for herself.
And while the focus of our work has always been around prevention and empowerment for women, after more than 50 years it’s time for us to advance our work to include men and boys. “To date, our outreach work has always been focused on women and girls,” explains Program Director Jiin Yiong. “But we recognize that to break the cycle of violence, we also need to involve men and boys in a proactive and healthy way.”
Enter the Coaching Boys Into Men (CBIM) program: an evidence-based violence prevention program that trains and motivates high school coaches to teach their young male athletes in healthy relationship skills, mental health practices, and that violence never equals strength. After being recruited into the program by Interval House Hamilton last year, 10 members of the Nellie’s team attended a two-day training session to learn more about the program, how it works, and how they can in turn recruit and train coaches to facilitate CBIM with their athletes. Included in this group of trainees were our Executive Director Ingrid Graham, as well as Jiin.
“Having our senior management team attend the training allows us to all understand the program well and be able to pitch the program effectively to partners,” says Jiin. “There’s a strong commitment from the top-down to make this program a successful part of our service offerings.”
Jiin explains that while Nellie’s already runs workshops on healthy relationships for women in our community, it’s critical that we now turn our empowerment lens to teaching boys as well. A key part of the CBIM method is to meet boys where they are — which, for so many, is on sports teams, where they are often exposed to more stereotypical ideas of masculinity. “It’s so important to give them this space where they can understand that it’s okay to be angry, and also learn how to channel their anger so that it doesn’t impact anyone else,” Jiin explains.
Now that Nellie’s staff members have been trained in the CBIM program, the next step is to develop a work plan of how to integrate this program into our current offerings, and to connect with local schools and community centres to help us bring this program to Toronto youth coaches. To break the cycle of gender-based violence in Ontario, we believe it’s critical that we include boys and young men in our prevention work — but we can’t do this without your support. “We currently have no specific funding to support this program and help bring it into the Toronto community,” Jiin says. “It’s so important that we start teaching boys about gender-based violence in a proactive way.”
If we want to break the cycle of violence, we have to invest in prevention. Donate today to help us bring programs like Coaching Boys Into Men to youth across our community.