0:00:00.9 Louis Marvin: Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center on Understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual Abuse and assault. I'm Louis Marvin, and I'm a project coordinator at the NSVRC. NSVRC is a division of Respect Together. This episode is part of a series on partnerships that reach and support men who are survivors of sexual violence. Today, Jim Struve is joining me to talk about MenHealings partnerships with local rape crisis centers.

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0:00:48.7 LM: Jim is the Executive Director of MenHealing. Hi, Jim. Welcome back to the podcast.

0:00:52.9 Jim Struve: Thanks Louis. Good to be with you.

0:00:56.2 LM: Yeah. You and Sharon and Prado from the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. Talked to me back in June 2021 for our series that we were doing then on working with male survivors. So catch us up, what have you and MenHealing been up to since then? 

0:01:12.4 JS: Okay. Well, thanks for the opportunity to be here and to share what we're doing. It's been really interesting. Last couple of years, especially. One of the things in other organizations may be affected in the same way, but we were based on completely doing in-person events and then COVID hit. And so we really had to reconfigure ourselves on a dime, so to speak and figure out what do we do for our services when we all of a sudden we're being blocked from in person. So we very quickly, probably like a lot of others, learned how to use Zoom and learned how to do things virtually. And now that COVID has decreased, hasn't ended fully, but decreased. We've been really balancing how much do we continue to do virtually and how much do we go back to doing in person. And the main part of what have we been doing since 2021 is trying to leverage and deepen some of our virtual work so that we can reach more people.

0:02:15.3 JS: And that's been become much more of our thrust. That leads us into collaborations as well as how do we work with people on the ground instead of being always the ones who have to come in from outside and do the work and then leave. So three things that we've done that are new and different since 2021 has been, we started online virtual support groups so that men who we've worked with can continue their healing because our weekends of recovery are built on creating connections and creating community. And then people go home and lots of people get isolated, go back into their kinda distance from each other. So our support groups that which have been doing since 2021 are now providing extended ways for people to stay connected. And we've been doing them primarily for men who've been through our weekends. And we're now this year gonna start expanding and do support groups for men who have not been to a weekend yet, but are needing to start their journey.

0:03:20.8 JS: And we want to expand and begin to provide partner groups because partners, allies, family members really are so often left outta the equation for needing the help. And we'll talk some more as we are here today, but our support groups, we've trained men that we've worked with to become peer leaders. So they can be peers leading, working with peers, and then we provide the supervision. So that's been really exciting. The second thing we start a podcast series called Just Healing. We now do weekly podcasts to reach new audiences, talking about social justice issues related to healing from sexual harm and men's issues. And then third lastly the new area. We started to develop curriculum to reach incarcerated individuals and people who can't get past the bars to come to a weekend and do the service, don't necessarily have internet service. So we've discovered, again, since COVID tablets are being used in prisons, and we have now developed curriculum that can be uploaded on tablets to correctional facilities and reach men about sexual harm.

0:04:34.4 LM: Those are great things. I'd like to pick up on several of them, and thanks for catching us up and talking about your work. I know you mentioned the weekends and that to me is the program that I think of when I think of MenHealing those Weekends of Recovery. So could you talk more about what those are and what people can expect from attending a weekend of recovery? 

0:05:00.3 JS: Yeah. The Weekends of Recovery. It's a program we've been doing since 2001. Last September we just had our 102nd weekend recovery, and they bring men together in person for starting on Friday and ending on Sunday afternoon. And the whole point is to provide an experience of connecting with other men, sharing with other survivors. One of the most powerful things about the weekends across the board, how many men, when they show up on Friday, say, I've never met another survivor before, or, "Oh my God, I had no idea there was others like me." And then we can, by being together in a shared space, can develop the sense of community. The weekends are really built around empowerment. So from the very beginning, we engaged men who come and helping to create the safety guidelines, the safety boundaries for our time together.

0:05:57.4 JS: We do lots of skills work, helping people work about somatic aspects of their experience. How to do skills for managing difficult emotions, anxiety, etcetera. We have small groups that allow people to have more of a closer family setting beyond the larger community, larger community being 24 to 28 men, and in the small groups, there's an opportunity for people to share in a structured way, whatever they want about what happened to them with their sexual harm and their journey. And then one of the things that people are most surprised about with the weekend is by Saturday evening, we're focusing on joy and play. And we're helping people learn how to be alive and be sharing and be experientially interacting with each other. On Sunday we don't deny the fact that people are leaving going back home. So we focus on bridges to home and how you could take with you what you've learned.

0:06:55.9 JS: And as I mentioned, now we have the support groups that allow people to stay connected and continued. One of the things that we wanna do more of in the coming year especially, is because it's getting harder and harder for people to find airline flights to go away, to faraway retreat centers to pay the money, the retreats. So we want to begin to work collaboratively with agencies on the ground, in communities all over the country, where we can bring a couple of our staff to work with staff from an agency to do something in a community of people who are living closer by. And some of those may be single day rather than three day, but beginning to really work with all the realities of how much time people can get away. What's the factors of not having to travel so far, building connections in the roots in their own community. And then hopefully with that, what we'll do is also begin to spread where other agencies can carry on and continue to do more of the work rather than just relying on us to be the one that provides that service.

0:08:04.5 LM: Thanks for spelling it out like that. That really leads me to kind of the key aspect of our podcast series, which is about forming partnerships. And I know that you and MenHealing are looking to partner with local Rape Crisis Centers on these adaptations to some of your programs that you've been talking about. Like you mentioned instead of the Weekends of Recovery, thinking about doing Days of Recovery and different things that you can offer in local communities. So I... And I know that you've started, you've already done this, you've already done some partnerships with local programs. And so could you tell us about how you've partnered with those local programs before and what you hope to do in the future? 

0:08:50.0 JS: Yeah, although I'm presenting it as a new idea. In reality, we first began to do some similar kind of partnerships back around 2011. So we have been doing it for a while. One model was being able to go into when there's a conference, sexual assault or some kind of men's issues. We had a couple of experiences. San Diego was one that comes to mind right now where we'll come in the day before the conference and do a day long event for survivors, and then we'll probably do workshops or presentation at the conference as well. So that's one place. Anybody listening to this podcast, if you are doing conferences or doing events like that, one idea is to contact us and see could we come in and work with you to have a pre-conference day of recovery or healing experience on site. We'd really be open to that.

0:09:45.4 JS: The other way is we've starting in 2014, we began to be approached by agencies that had gotten some kind of funding source and they wanted to contract with us to come into their community and do an event. 2014, the Canadian government in Ontario provincial government in Canada, gave some money to a local counseling center to begin to work with First Nations men because most of the First Nations men had never been receiving services. So we came in on two different occasions and helped to do on the ground weekends of recovery. And in both situations we would bring three of our staff and then we'd come in and having had some orientation with three agency staff, and then there'd be six of us to co-lead the weekend together. We could do a training day while we were there, co-lead so they people from the agencies would directly get the skills what we're doing.

0:10:47.1 JS: We did a similar thing in upstate New York where we went into a place where rural men were not getting much services. And then right before COVID hit, we got a contract with the Boston Area Crisis Center to come into Massachusetts for several years in a row. It was a four year project to do two days of recovery for men in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the second year of the four year program, the federal government withdrew the money and took all the money away for funding for projects like that and some budget cuts with the new administration. And so that got cut, but the model was still there of our doing that, where we did do a couple of same thing, bark staff and then healing staff collaborated about that same time right when COVID was happening. We set about and we actually wrote a day of recovery training manual.

0:11:42.6 JS: So we now have that in hand. And that's what we're gonna hopefully do in the next stage, is we have a training manual that gives all the orientation for how we do the work, the protocols, the scripts, the segments. And we're hoping now if we can get agencies at the local level who have funding or could help us, we can go in and actually use the training manual for work beyond the day of recovery to help people carry it on and begin to do it. And we might be able to have a relationship where we can continue to provide supervision and consultation. One last thing, the important thing about some of the days of recovery is local communities can find whatever facility will most be appropriate for the audience we're serving. So that allows the flexibility. We could come in and do something on a college campus at an event center.

0:12:37.8 JS: We could come in and do something in the local community at a community center. Some agencies may have on site facilities to do it. The day of recovery doesn't require all the matters of overnight lodging, all the cafeteria etcetera. And people can have the safety of being able to arrive and then go back to their own home at night. So there's a lot of flexibility with what days can do, and really excited about leveraging that to be a more active part of our service work. And it begins to spread out how many people could do the work back to what I said before not just having to depend on us.

0:13:18.8 LM: That's great. That's a great expression of just the benefits of partnership generally. I think so yeah. That's nice to hear that you're thinking about your work in that way and that I heard pre-conferences contract work, and then also this ongoing consultation and offering the manual of what you've learned and what you've done over the years to spread out that work. And just the benefit of people being able to be in their own communities and working with a local agency as a strategy for identifying location and doing things that make the program even more relevant to a local community. I think that's all exciting to hear. I know that you're also offering those virtual support groups and you mentioned those earlier and that those are another opportunity for local programs to partner with MenHealing. So how does that work? How does a local program work with you? How do the support groups work? Yeah, tell us about this other resource that you're offering.

0:14:26.9 JS: Well, that's a simple avenue that a lot of agencies may be wanting to do services for men, but they don't have enough men to get a group started or they can't get the critical mass to get some going. Where we can plug in and really help with that is we now on our website, www.menhealing.org, we have a homepage for our support groups project and there's sign up to get on the wait list for these support groups. And they're done virtual. So people from any place in the country can sign up and begin to get tied into a support group. We try to set them up where they're time zone friendly in terms of when they happen, but we're hoping that's gonna be a big service to local agencies that would like to do work. Just can't find the critical mass to be able to have enough people.

0:15:20.2 JS: So you can tie into our network of support groups. And then what that may lead to in some cases is then you begin to find more people in your community that might lead to an agency continuing to do a support group through their auspices on site. And/or just decide it's more helpful to keep them tied in with us to do people. One of the things that's exciting about the support groups that I mentioned before, we trained survivors to be pure leaders. And what we're finding with that is how much that's contributing to their own healing. To be able to be a point where they can help and give back. And where they really are doing it in a non-hierarchical way because they've been there too. They know what it's like to be scared. They know what it's like to be anxious, they know what it's like to stay with it and go through it.

0:16:12.1 JS: And by now they have hope and healing. So they can transmit that and be really mentors and role models. And then we just supervise the peer leaders so they can keep doing the work. And that leads to sometimes the mentoring to find people in local communities that might wanna start grassroots groups and support groups. One of our orientations is movement building. So again, the more we can create movement rather than bringing everything back onto our territory, the more we can support things being decentralized rather than bringing things back to the mothership, so to speak. That's really in our DNA is to keep promoting, spreading it out, getting more people involved and, the support groups as well. I know when I was helping to do support group at Salt Lake City, how scary it was for some people to show up physically on site.

0:17:05.0 JS: Who's gonna see me in my car, who's gonna see me going into the building, whatever the virtual groups really allow some access that may be a barrier for people who wouldn't go in person. And now you can just do it virtually. That creates the courage, it creates the visibility to then maybe be able to go to a place in person. So I'm really excited about the possibility with getting more support groups and how that can help groups that are strapped for money and funding and tying into something like this maybe more cost effective and efficient.

0:17:41.3 LM: Yeah, I think that's really smart. I think a lot of people would probably think of, oh yeah, you can expand, reach and you can have a group without it being tied to how many people can you gather in a specific geographic area. I think a lot of people might think immediately of the cost effectiveness of getting to a virtual group versus flying somewhere like you were saying earlier. And then I, yeah, I think that's really smart to also think about. There's an element of privacy that would appeal to a lot of people who might otherwise be concerned, like you said, about someone seeing me go into a specific location in my car. And yeah, so that, I think that's great. Thanks for walking us through all of that. And I'm really glad that you talked about the peer leaders again, because I wanted to come back to that.

0:18:31.2 LM: And I think that's such a great model. And I love how you shared the kind of the MenHealing ethos around what that means to you to spread out the work and to do movement building. And you said earlier something you said, I think 102 there have been 102 weekends of recovery. So you've worked with a lot of people. I'd love to hear more about the peer leader model. How many people, if you know offhand are involved as peer leaders and how does... How else does that impact the way that the group or that your group is able to offer those services? 

0:19:08.5 JS: Well just a little bit about the history of how kind of this all came to be. Back in around 2018, '19, there was a project at Yale University that wanted to offer support groups for survivors who had never had access to therapeutic services before. So they were trying to get that program going, primarily servicing men who were sexually diverse LGBTQ audience. And they were having trouble finding survivors to train. I got approached by them at the time and I said, well, that's an interesting idea. Let me reach out to men in our community. And so for the first time I began to contact men and recruited about 18 men who'd been through our programs and said, would you like to be trained to be peer leaders for this program that's gonna be operating out of Yale? And they signed up, we were excited, and it was such a positive experience for them.

0:20:04.3 JS: They got such good training and feedback. When the grant ended in 2021, the men were saying, well, what do we do now? We don't wanna quit, but the grant was done. So that's when we decided with coming outta COVID, why don't we start peer support groups and just use as many of those men as want to, to become peer leaders with us? 'Cause they'd been through our weekends. So about 10 or 12 of the men decided to continue. We did extensive training to supplement the training. They already had set up the structure for those support groups for alumni. And then a lot of them have continued since all the groups are co-led by two peer leaders to do it. And then this past year when we were thinking about doing partner groups, we decided to do another training. And because we now every couple of years we have partners come to our advanced weekend or they're invited to come.

0:21:02.6 JS: So we recruited some partners and some new alumni, and we now have over 30 peer leaders trained to be able to do groups, partners and alumni. And so the partners groups will have peer-led partners and the alumni group will have peer-led survivors and our community groups peer-led survivors as well. But we have over 30 peer leaders at this point. And like I said, the feedback is they're gaining something by the experience of giving back as well and doing those groups. We have attendance from our support groups currently, people as far away as Japan. We've had people come through our weekends from Australia, New Zealand, England, Germany. Some of those alumni are active with us. So we have lots of potential to be able to meet people beyond time zones and and borders of countries with the virtual support groups.

0:22:01.7 LM: Jim, I think these are all great opportunities for local programs to partner and I appreciate you coming to talk about MenHealing and the different ways that you have been and are interested in partnering with local programs. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about today with our listeners? 

0:22:18.9 JS: No, I just advise or recommend people check our website. We've got a free subscriber list. We send out newsletter with information about activities. We also have produced 140 videos of men telling their stories or other aspects of the issue of sexual harm. We have a YouTube channel, they're all linked with our website. Our podcast series is weekly. Check those and stay in touch and expand your involvement with the resources that we're already offering.

0:22:53.2 LM: Thanks for this, Jim. It was great to talk with you today. And thanks for listening to this episode of Resource on the Go. For more resources and information about understanding, responding to and preventing sexual assault, visit our website at nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc-respecttogether.org.