The past several weeks since we completed the in school portion of the Changing Male Conversations Project Ron Kelly and Don Gunton have spent much time working on the evaluations and preparing reports.

There was some really great feedback from the young men about what they experienced as participants in the CMC. When asked if participating in CMC would affect some of their future choices 61% of the grade 7’s and 39% of the grade 9’s said that it would, and one of the comments was “It will affect my future because I will understand more about healthy relationships. The young men also told us that they wished the program was longer so we could spend more time talking about each topic.

We are very pleased that the participants found the program to be worth while and are excited to do it again next year with a new group of young men.
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We would like to thank the United Way of Pictou County for partnering with us on this project as well as to staff and administration of West Pictou Consolidated and North Nova Education Centre for all their help making this year’s sessions such a success.

​The CMC sessions have now ended up as of May 2, 2016. 

Two grade 9 classes of boys at North Nova have completed 8 sessions each.  In the last few sessions, discussions occurred on a number of topics identified by the young men. 

The topics included:

• How to talk to parents about difficult things
•  Violence and fight culture
• Well-being and mental health
• How to stay healthy
• Strategies on how to resist peer pressures

​The topics generated by grade 7’s included:

• Sexual diversity
• How to consider the feelings of others
• Hygiene
• Fitness
• Puberty
• Expressing feelings & how to speak more confidently
• How to deal with peer pressure
• How to deal with life situations
• How to be a man of integrity

Although we didn’t have enough time to discuss this array of topics in any real depth, we did ‘cycle’ them back into previous CMC sessions and made connections with

• The ‘Male Script’,
•  ‘Your personal code’, 
• ‘How you want to be known’ and
• ‘How you would like your daughter to be treated’.

We hope to include some of the suggested topics in the sessions for the Fall term of 2016 and the Spring term, 2017.
 
As of May 11, the student evaluations will have been completed and we will be working on the feedback in the following months. Some of the ‘results’ of the evaluations will be shared when they are available, specifically the learnings that the young men have identified after attending CMC.
 
Don and Ron would like to thank Cathy, Sterling, the Board of New Leaf, the United Way of Pictou County, the School administrations and of course, the Grade 7 boys at West Pictou Consolidated and the grade 9 boys at North Nova.

​We would also like to thank everyone who has taken interest in CMC.  It has been an exciting and rewarding experience to have planned and delivered this portion of Changing Male Conversations.  We look forward to the next 10 months of this pilot project.