Weekend Adventure

Journey-Men Groups

About Mentoring

Journey-Men Groups

Information for Parents

Information for Boys

Volunteer Opportunities

Journey to Manhood is an engaging, innovative, and safe program that helps boys gain the skills and insights they need for their journey to manhood. We help boys:

• Discover and live their dreams
• Assert themselves without violence
• Express their feelings constructively and with clarity
• Maintain integrity, accountability and self-respect
• Become healthy, happy, and powerful adult men

The program begins with a Rites of Passage Adventure Weekend (RPAW) where positive qualities such as integrity, courage, respect, passion, and leadership are modeled by more than 35 well-trained adult male staff. Through a series of carefully facilitated processes, each boy discovers something of the tremendous magnitude of his own humanity. Boys are challenged in new ways, supported in new ways, and find that they can respond in new ways. They find their own integrity, courage, respect, passion, and leadership and they discover that they can access these qualities and put them to work. It is an exhilarating, life-changing experience that many say they will never forget. But it is only an initiation—a beginning.

Over the months that follow, young men work with mentors and their peers to build on what they gained during their RPAW. Our groups are planned to meet every other week. Boys receive support and the chance to support others. They are empowered to learn for themselves and to be part of others’ learning. They discover their own form of leadership, give voice to their truth, risk experiencing and expressing their feelings, and are affirmed for the unique gifts that they bring to the world.

Why Journey to Manhood?
There are men today who are powerful role models, men who live with a deep and passionate commitment to their lives, their work, and their relationships. We believe that each boy can become such a man and we help boys equip themselves to get there.

Journey to Manhood staff create an environment of great safety where boys can reach new levels of honesty and self-awareness. Through a series of exciting and challenging processes, boys learn for themselves lessons that will serve them for a lifetime. They emerge with new tools and techniques for communication and self-discovery, strong bonds of camaraderie and friendship, and a deepened and strengthened sense of trust and self-respect.

Whether a boy is confident on his path or struggling, he will find Journey to Manhood opens new opportunities for more clarity, power, and zest for life as he transitions from child to adult.

About Journey to Manhood
Journey to Manhood is a program modeled after the work of Boys To Men Mentoring Network and provided by Threshold Passages, a progressive, non-sectarian, non-partisan, non-profit organization.

Journey to Manhood is staffed by dozens of committed and trained volunteers and professionals that have undertaken their own journeys of personal development. Our staff create a safe, strong, supportive environment that both nurtures and challenges boys.

We know that a boy’s family and friends give him critical support and guidance. Our job is to supplement that support and to give him opportunities to learn and grow that are not available in schools or other youth programs. Boys find an opportunity through Journey to Manhood that they can find nowhere else.

Journey to Manhood, has three components:

1. A Rites of Passage Adventure Weekend, which is facilitated by a staff that exceeds the number of boys going through the weekend. Weekends begin Friday evening and end Sunday afternoon. RPAWs are scheduled annually, and are limited to 20 participants. All staff members are required to submit to state and national level background checks.
    
2. Follow-up mentoring, where boys continue to meet with their peers and with adult mentors. This portion of the program mixes outdoor recreation, physical activity, and focused, facilitated discussion to help boys continue to develop themselves as men. The RPAW graduates (we call them JourneyMen or JMen) meet for at least one year following their RPAW. These groups are intended to be ongoing; JMen can attend as long as they want up to their 18th Birthday. Once 18 years old, he is recognized as an adult and can continue with TPI as a mentor (after passing a background check).
    
3. After they have received appropriate training, Jmen have the opportunity to serve as staff on a future Rites of Passage Adventure Weekend. Here they practice their leadership and serve as role models for other boys.

Sign Up Now
Journey to Manhood is accepting applications from 12 to 17 year old boys from all walks of life. We encourage and strongly support diversity and accommodate special needs. Learn more about the next weekend program.