Modern day Mr. Rogers
A Q&A with a community builder, a new Michael Lee restaurant and more
How do you define masculinity? What about healthy masculinity?
As a parent of a boy, I often think about the troubling trends of young men falling behind in school, work and relationships (though family status isn’t a requirement to care about kids).
In today’s edition, I have a Q&A with a Raleighite on an actual solution that supports teen boys growing into healthy young men and shows how intergenerational mentoring supports the overall social fabric of our community.
And keep scrolling for:
Catch up quick: M Restaurants’ latest restaurant in Cary, an iconic park’s need and more.
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Thanks for being here! —Sarah Day
TALKING WITH… JORDAN BOWMAN
Building up boys to men
Jordan Bowman thinks a lot about Mr. Rogers.
The cardigan-donning guy we know best from PBS is Jordan’s hero, and Mr. Rogers came up a few times when I talked to the serial community builder.
Specifically, Jordan thinks about how to create more people like Mr. Rogers in the Raleigh area.
Jordan is the executive director of Journeymen Triangle, which was recently featured — on PBS — as an organization that’s helping boys and men define healthy masculinity for themselves in a supportive and safe community.
“When I think about healthy masculinity, I think of folks like Mr. Rogers. How do we create more Mr. Rogers in Raleigh and in the Triangle? How do we inspire those values in young people?”
We jumped on a Zoom call to talk more about Journeymen Triangle, a bench that creates connection and getting doers together for coffee. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
SDOW: How do you describe Journeymen Triangle to someone who hasn't heard of it before?
Jordan: We're a mentoring organization for teenage boys. Our tagline is Forging Independence, Resiliency, and Emotional Maturity.
We exist at the center of the question ‘what is healthy masculinity?’
When we ask that question to the teenage boys in the program, we're not saying, ‘here's our answer,’ we're saying ‘you need to be thinking about this.’ You need to be thinking about your future, you need to be thinking about becoming your own individual.
We help them through that process with intergeneration group mentoring and rites of passage adventure weekends, which are three-day nature-based retreats in the woods, where they are challenged physically, mentally, emotionally.
SDOW: How did you get started with this in 2009? How did you feel like this was something that you wanted to do and you wanted to focus on?
Jordan: I went to a similar program when I was a teenager.
My dad told me we were going camping, and he told me a little bit about it, but when I got there, these guys were asking me deep questions, existential questions, like, ‘what kind of man do you want to become?’
And I first remember thinking, I don't know about all this, but I gave it a shot. I remember meeting mentors, adult men who could mentor me in ways that my dad didn't know how to.
I tell people one of the greatest gifts he gave me was a community of mentors. It changed my life.
As I was in school and learning about business, entrepreneurship and nonprofits, I was like, why don't I just build this for more young men like me?Why don't I build a program and really run this thing? So I'm a product of it. I would call myself a second generation.
SDOW: Why do you think that it's needed now? I’m thinking about the context as a local community and why you think that this is needed for boys in this age group.
Jordan: I'd echo what Richard Reeves says, he runs the American Institute on Boys and Men. He talks about how it's not a zero-sum game. Like, supporting girls doesn't hurt boys, and supporting boys doesn't hurt girls, so I'll start with that.
But then I'll say that specifically teenage boys are struggling. There's a vacuum of purpose and identity for them. When you look at the national statistics, they’re less likely to graduate from college.
They're less likely to be out of work in their prime working years, and they're twice as likely to be single.
Young men are falling behind in the workforce, in academics, and in love. And there might be a lot of reasons why.
We exist in the space of ‘what do we know will help?’ Providing young men with positive male role models has a tremendous impact on their trajectory.
We also know that there's a lot of men out there that are struggling and lonely, wanting to give back and feel purposeful. If they're engaged as mentors, the whole community rises together.
Men can be useful to young men, and then young men have guides and mentors who aren't telling them what to do, but are saying ‘Hey, you might consider this,’ or they're asking deep questions about their future, knowing that they've been in their shoes 10, 20, 30 years ago.
Yeah, they're struggling. They're falling behind in a lot of ways, and we're one of the solutions that are, creating opportunities for them to get it together, figure out who they are.
SDOW: You were talking about your experience and how there is a lot that a parent can give their child, but no parent can be everything to every child. That's my mindset of why community is important.
What's your perspective on community, and especially intergenerational community? Why is it important for young people in the Raleigh area?
Jordan: There's this concept that there's no such thing as other people's children. That concept has been really important to me.
What's the role of a mentor? What's the role of a neighbor? What's the role of an elder in the lives of young people?
I think in our modern day, a lot of young people are being taught how to be adults by the internet. They're seeking belonging, like any human would, and they're finding it, sometimes in really negative ways, from people who would prey on their pain.
Teenagers or adolescents are learning about their own independence, right?
That whole phase is about ‘who am I?’ They're often pushing away from mom, from dad. … This is developmentally appropriate. He needs to figure out who he is outside of the family context that brought him to where he is.
And that's where we step in as mentors. Especially as intergenerational mentors, we represent big brothers, uncle figures and grandpa figures for these young men.
We're not disciplinarians, we're that kind of sacred role of mentorship, walking alongside them. You're not authoritarian, you're not like, you can do this, you can't do this, you're saying: Sounds like you made that choice. What's the impact?
Their relationship with us is how they relate to the bigger context outside of their immediate circle.
SDOW: Are there types of teen boys that you typically serve? Is there a typical person who you think: this person could really be helped by Journeymen?
Jordan: We think, looking at the statistics and then going to the schools, talking to principals and working with boys directly, is that every boy is at risk right now.
There's something specific about this moment where boys are falling behind and boys are particularly at risk for dropping out of school or the workforce, or romantic relationships, and for finding belonging with a group like gangs or online communities.
Anyone can join and be a part. A lot of young men come to us from well-off families who have two parents at home, who say ‘I realize that my young man needs an opportunity to learn about himself and to grow, and to socially and emotionally regulate with a group.’ …
Then we work with kids who might be, like, I hate the word ‘at risk,’ but they have more things working against them. Maybe it's a single-parent household, or it's lower socioeconomic class. Those individuals, particularly ones who don't have strong male role model in their life, whether that's dad or someone else, they get a lot out of the program, because we're meeting a huge gap.
There's a opportunity when those boys are in group together. Something really beautiful happens when they come together, and there is peer learning and peer support.
I think what makes our model a little unique. We're a little more open and think that that diversity makes us more potent.
SDOW: What makes a good mentor for Journeymen Triangle? Say somebody's reading this, and they're like, this sounds cool, so… How do I do the thing?
Jordan: I love the name of your thing, Just Be Yourself, that's really what we say. You really just need to show up, you need to just be yourself. 50% or more of mentoring is saying ‘I'm gonna commit.’
I think a lot of men are kind of afraid of being mentors, and I get that. It's like, ‘that was a long time ago,’ ‘I have trauma for my teenage years,’ ‘I don't know if I'll be relevant or helpful.’
My encouragement is that it is your responsibility to show up in the lives of young people.
We need good men to do this. We see what happens when we don't have models of good men in leadership.
We go through a background check, we're gonna train you, we're gonna teach you our model, but really it's someone who's invested in supporting the development of young people who isn't coming from a really specific way of, ‘I want to mold someone this way.’
Be open-minded, be willing to ask good questions. We're not not an organization that, like, you're on stage, and you have all this advice. It's more so doing life together, doing life alongside young people and asking them good questions.
If someone comes in with a chip on their shoulder, or a thing they need to say, they're not a good fit. But if you're a man who has learned some things, who has faced some hard lessons in their life, then you're a good candidate to become a mentor.
In rites of passage, we talk about when you face your pain, it will become a gift. And so we expect men to do that, to actively work on their own personal development. We want our mentors to be engaged and bettering themselves. That and show up, and that's it.
SDOW: What's next for Journeymen Triangle?
Jordan: Right now, our program, our community group mentoring circles, happen twice a month. We have a summer program going on right now, which are more fun.
The boys stay in this program for three or four years, and then a lot of them will come back and become a mentor when they turn 18, as you might have seen in the (PBS News Hour) piece, right?
We want to grow that program and continue giving guys that deep opportunity at having a sustained community.
We also want to expand in the schools. We're in four schools (Cary High, Wake Young Men's Leadership Academy, Mount Vernon Middle School and Mary Phillips High School) and we're in talks with another two schools.
I would love to see in 10 years every eighth grade boy has a rites of passage opportunity, moving into high school with a community of men who are saying, ‘hey, we're gonna give you some more freedom and some more responsibility.’
Our biggest bottleneck is mentors, because it takes a while to train and develop them.
We could really expand as we grow our mentor base, so part of my drive is encourage the whole region to say, ‘hey, mentoring matters.’
Will corporations give people paid time off to mentor in the middle of the school day? And then, engaging people who are interested in volunteering 4-6 hours a month to do that.
SDOW: This is not Journeymen, but I remember hearing that you did a project called the Connection Bench. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Jordan: Yeah, Connection Bench was a design project for a nonprofit in Dallas called Better Block.
The concept was build a piece of public infrastructure that helps solve the social isolation and loneliness problem. Big topic.
Me and my friend (Danny Krafft) who got an engineering degree iterated on a couple of ideas, and we ended up with this fully functional connection bench design that's available online for anyone to download. You can get it cut with a CNC milling machine.
If folks have access to that, you just need three pieces of 4x8 plywood, and you can build this thing with no power tools. You just need a mallet and a friend. The license is Creative Commons, so anyone can create it.
It was a fun experiment in thinking about how do people interact together in common spaces and public spaces.
I’d love to see Cary, the City of Raleigh put a bunch of these in our parks. They were built here, they're designed here, we won third place in the national design competition.
SDOW: So what makes the Connection Bench different from a regular park bench?
Jordan: Most park benches, you sit next to someone and you face away. And oftentimes when you're at a park, you see someone sitting at a bench, you avoid that bench, right? You're like, oh, I'll go sit at the other bench.
This bench explicitly invites connection, you're facing each other. It's a play on the French tete-a-tete bench, which in the old days was for courting.
This one's for building a friend, a connection. We created enough space where it's not super intimate, but it is a little vulnerable.
You sit down and someone else sits down across from you, and in the middle of the bench, there's a puzzle. As you put the puzzle together, it forms a facilitation prompt, which is like, ‘what are you grateful for?’ or something else.
It's a passive facilitation opportunity where they get to connect on a deep level in a way in which they would have never done that if they didn't see this cool and interesting bench.
SDOW: That's cool! What haven't I asked you about, Jordan, that is on your mind, especially about being a doer in Raleigh and Cary, what you would like to see from the community?
Jordan: The third thing that I'm working on that's anchored in your world of community building and doers is the Community Leaders Drinking Coffee group (signup linked).
We have a group of people on our listserv who work in nonprofits, executive directors, board members, government leaders, small business owners who all would identify with the phrase “community leader.” We do a Zoom meeting once a month and an un-conference twice a year.
BRING YOURSELF:
➡️ Donate, volunteer or learn more about Journeymen Triangle
Thanks Jordan!
COMMUNITY NEWS
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