Saturday, February 1, 2020

Grow Boys Global- Our First Partnership


We are excited to announce that Grow Boys has initiated its first global partnership with PEEM PEACE School in Lagos Nigeria, West Africa. The school's headteacher and founder, Ese Dodokior contacted us through mutual colleagues and is very interested in working with Grow Boys in support of the young boys in her school. She describes her school as a private school with fifty-two students. She states that,
We believe in raising a generation of Godly children is a priority. Our Motto is God is our strength. We believe that all children are very unique and special in their own way. Here we promote social intellectual, physical and emotional development.
The challenges of operating a school in Nigeria on a shoestring budget, and without the various sorts of supports and equipment that we enjoy in Canada are humbling to be made aware of. That Ese has pulled her school together and is capably and caringly providing a high-quality education to her pupils is inspiring to say the least.

This project is very exciting to Grow Boys Global for many reasons, but primarily, it will prove that the Grow Boys concept and foundational reliance on the HOPE Wheel perspective are transformational and scalable anywhere in the world. As our good friend, Michael Josefowicz says, "if it can be made to work in a village in Africa, then it can be made to work anywhere."  This morning Ese and I had our first brief dialog around what point to jump off the curb in support of her boys at PEEM Peace School.

The Grow Boys belief has always been that our HOPE Wheel model is more than integral enough to form a solid foundation for any effort in support of boys throughout the world. Michael Josefowizcz's post from 2012 proves that scaling the Grow Boys model has been front and center for a long time. Now is the time for Ese to take an audit of the sorts of protective factors her boys experience in the local context and compare those to the risk factors within the same environment. In the HOPE Wheel context, we can then juxtaposition these realities on the HOPE Wheel, and more specifically in the related directions under the heading of Respect, Understanding, Relationships, and Responsibility. This is the beginning of our scaffolding into action to reduce and eliminate risk factors while in turn growing the exposure to protective factors... all in the local context of Ese's community in Lagos, Nigeria.

This is just the beginning, and where this goes will completely depend on the vital audit of risk and protective factors that exist currently in the local context. Stay tuned as we grow this project together in support of happy, healthy, well-adjusted boys in Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa!

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Grow Boys- How Will We "Grow"

It's 2020, a new decade offering the potential to be hopeful and optimistic about the evolving world and our places within it. 2020 is our ninth year of creating and offering a conference designed to connect boys to the concept of HOPE as framed by our structural model, the HOPE Wheel.


We call what we do Grow Boys, and we feel extremely confident that our philosophical platform can support any effort in any location to raise healthy, happy, and well-adjusted boys from pre-birth to 100+ years old. We are framing 2020 as a year of growth and movement toward directions that excite us and create opportunities to scale and transfer what we do.

We have experience.

We have insight.

We have research.

We have the will.

Now it's time to make connections.

I am excited to announce that we are in the initiation phase of work with a small group of passionate and creative supporters of youth in Africa. Our good friend for years, Michael Josefowicz in Brooklyn, NY, USA is a catalyst for this connection that includes key individuals on the ground in Africa challenged by the imperative to raise good boys with the intent that they will become the leaders that do well by doing good things in their local village communities. The desire is for these boys to become respectful, educated, collaborative leaders who will support their villages in sustainable, ethical, and responsible ways... that they become "elders" for their people who will, in turn, support others as they have been supported.

Grow Boys to many is understood as a one day conference in May in support of hundreds of fifth-grade boys in Red Deer, AB, CAN. It has always been more than that though, and we feel that now is the time to make that obvious and purposeful. In 2020 we will make the effort to guide others interested in nurturing the happy, healthy, well-adjusted boys and men we need in the world today, and we'll teach the rest about why this is such a critically important effort for them to support.

Stay tuned for exciting things to come fro Grow Boys everywhere.

See you on May, 14, 2020!