Facilitating change: personal journeys of male facilitators in gender and masculinities programming with adolescent boys

The Gender Lab (TGL) has learnt that young facilitators of gender norms change programs for adolescent boys experience transformations of their own. Having centred lived experiences of gender and masculinities in interventions towards norms change to redefine masculinities since 2017, this practice note holds TGL's enquiries of these transformations in the lives of young cisgender heterosexual male facilitators of The Gender Lab Boys Program. The note captures facilitators' stories of employing vulnerability, humour and local slang to connect with adolescent boys through a program to redefine masculinities, and the reflections on their own masculinities that these efforts evoked. The note attempts to sift evidence of ongoing relational re-constructions of masculinity between the young men and the boys from these stories, revealing shifts in facilitators' own performances, expressions, and exercises of gender and masculinities alongside their negotiations with the pressure of masculine norms across contexts. This work hence suggests that working with boys as role models could be an intervention for young men towards discovering a changed narrative of masculinity in their lives. The tensions shared by the facilitators, including living intervention values across spheres of life and facing isolation as men in feminist masculinities work, lead the note to call for compassionate spaces to hold the experiences of facilitators of norms change work on gender and masculinities.