Thank you.
Hopefully it's not too confusing. I appreciate the accommodation to be able to do this because this demonstrates the values that we bring to working with men.
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That was Ottawa Senators defenceman Marc Methot, and we're grateful for his involvement in the campaign.
This video features Alex Néron of Railbender Tattoo Studios.
[Video Presentation]
As you can see, our starting point for working with men is that men are part of the solution. Our target audience, since we've begun, has been young men aged 13 to 18. We employ two complementary strategies that work in tandem.
The first and the heart of the project is a workshop series with young men, led by male facilitators, that helps young men recognize both subtle and overt forms of violence against women and then gives them practice in responding to those situations. They often come up with situations that they've actually seen, and we work with those. What we're doing there is closing the gap between the values of respect and the good intentions that many men have and their ability to actually put it into practice, their ability to say or do something in the moment.
The second piece is an online awareness campaign that sets the conditions of success for the project. Our social media streams are full of male positive conversational space that you won't find a lot of on the Internet when it comes to men's roles in ending violence against women. This is how both men and women get to know us and trust us, which allows us to do the more face-to-face work. On our website we ask men to pledge how they will act to end violence against women. This breaks down some of the isolation and trepidation that men often feel about speaking up.
Three promising practices have come out so far. It's early, but what we know is that MANifest change is based on male-to-male relationships. We know that men listen to other men. We know that young boys and young men are influenced by coaches and mentors. By tapping into that, it allows us to challenge and explore what it means to be a man. It allows us to look for positive definitions of masculinity and replace restrictive and violent definitions of masculinity.
A great example of this is that we've trained the staff of a local community health centre who are in a long-term mentoring relationship with young men. They deliver the program and it's embedded in their programming, so the relationship piece is key.
Secondly, MANifest change needs the expertise and accountability that comes with partnering with women-led organizations. We're hosting the project in a coalition of women-centric organizations. That means that the voices of survivors and the expertise of those who support survivors of violence are front and centre when we engage men. It's absolutely necessary to do the work with sensitivity and professionalism and to complement the work that's already happening.
As an example of how that accountability and sensitization works, our male volunteers are invited to the same volunteer appreciation parties, public education events, and professional development opportunities alongside our member groups that serve women, so there's an important cross-fertilization happening there.
I need to emphasize that organizations such as ours that serve women experiencing violence are responding to violence in progress. They are responding to the after-effects of violence. It's urgent, and resources for this type of prevention work cannot come out of their pot of money. Prevention has the possibility of greatly reducing the strain on those responsive systems, but we cannot pull resources from responsive systems into prevention.
Third, MANifest change is community driven. Our volunteer workshop facilitators and community volunteers bring the workshops to athletic programs, school clubs, drop-in centres, university courses—