Dumbo Feather – February 2019

NATHAN SCOLARO: Maybe begin

by telling us a bit about where the

Man Cave is at right now.

HUNTER JOHNSON: For sure. We’ve been working on training up and

sending relatable and charismatic young male facilitators into high

schools. Guys who are really diverse in their backgrounds, from your

classic Melbourne hipster to salt-of-the-earth country bloke to a former

child soldier. And as you know it’s a very interesting time for masculinity. We’re getting lots

of people coming to us, saying, “I had no idea this existed. I wish this was around when I

was younger.” So at the moment we’re growing at a decent rate, focusing on our impact with

communities instead of just scaling for the sake of it, and training our facilitators who can

relate to the wide range of young men in communities across the country.

So collectively, our team has worked with about 50,000 young people across

Australia now and about 10,000 specifically through The Man Cave. And we’ve been

able to identify the different things that work well in holding space, understand the

archetypes in a room, the power dynamics, the behaviours. So we’ve created this

blueprint for them to fast-track their facilitation abilities, based on what we’ve observed.

Then we have monthly meet-ups and also quarterly retreats, which are very experiential

and that’s where the real rites of passage work comes in. Our facilitators have always got

their journals at workshops, so afterwards they’re reflecting on what they did well, what they

didn’t do well. We encourage internal reviews as much as possible as a way of learning. So

There are certain nuances that definitely resonate

more with boys. We ran a program in Bendigo

recently with over 100 year nine boys and year nine

girls. And the emotional difference between the girls and the boys was huge. The girls were

engaging, articulate and good at challenging ideas, whereas the boys sat there and didn’t

really know what to do. We decided to split them for a session and just have a discussion.

We asked them, “What are the pressures that your gender feels that impacts your ability to

be your authentic self ?” For the young women it was the stuff we knew: “If I speak up I’m

bitchy or I’m bossy. The boys always take up space and they don’t even say the right things.

And they shut us down.” And the boys were like, “I just get told I’m a pussy or I’m gay if I’m

not acting a certain way, if I’m not manly.” We then asked them to write down the pressures

on Post-It notes, and when we got them back together the boys would read out the girls’

and vice versa. And even then the boys were so stuck in their own experience whereas the

young women could empathise with the challenges of the boys. So I think there are slight

differences with how you facilitate genders, especially with men and at a younger age.

There are very clear archetypes that you’re going to encounter in a classroom setting, like

the classic jock who is looking for power and who probably also feels very trapped in that

identity. We were in this school in Lilydale recently and there was this kid we were told to

look out for. As soon as we walked in, he yelled out “Gaaaaay!” I stopped the program and

And what does the

training that you do with

the facilitators look like?

Is the essence of the facilitation any different to what it

might be working with adult men, or even women?

we’ve created this model which is really just

about working with and understanding the

human condition, and creating space to

care for these teenage boys who often haven’t

known it’s possible to talk, or had the language

to talk, or the permission.

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HUNTER JOHNSON

DUMBO FEATHER