The Author

I run programs for young adults. Housing, employment, life skills, mentorship — the practical scaffolding that holds a life up while someone builds it.

I came to this work from the inside. As a young man I was homeless, for long enough that it could have set the direction of everything after. What changed it wasn't a program. It was an older man who paid attention at the right moment, and then stayed. I went back to school, then to university, then into the business world and finally, into this work. I know what the right support at the right time is worth, because I got it. I also know what its absence costs, because I've met the version of my life where nobody showed up.

Today I'm Chief Administrative Officer of a youth services nonprofit. The title sounds like distance from the work. It isn't. Young people come through our doors every day — for housing, for job training, for a driver's license, for help with anxiety that's making everything else impossible — and I talk to them. Not in a clinical capacity. I'm not a therapist and I don't pretend to be. I talk to them roughly the way that man talked to me.

I also talk to my staff, every week. They're with these young people daily, and they see the patterns long before any data does. When a new phrase starts turning up in conversations, when the same specific kind of stuckness starts repeating across a dozen different young men, my team knows first. A lot of what ends up on this site started as something a frontline worker mentioned in passing.

That's where the Healthy Manhood program came from, and it's where this site came from. The young men we work with are being handed a set of instructions for being a man that doesn't work — instructions that leave them lonelier, angrier and more anxious than when they started — and they're being handed them by people with something to sell.

They deserve a better answer than the one they're getting. They also deserve a better answer than "stop reading that."

So I write one. Every essay here is built on what actually happens in that building: what young men are carrying, what they've been sold, and what has been shown to work instead.