By Vani Sanganeria, EdSource
Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling on 10,000 young men to serve as mentors, coaches and tutors through a new campaign called the California Men’s Service Challenge.
The statewide initiative, announced on Tuesday, is the latest in an executive order directing agencies to address mental health in boys and young men.
“We have an epidemic of loneliness, and so much of that is manifesting and metastasizing online in very profound and consequential ways, and last week only underscored that further,” said Newsom on Tuesday, referencing the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah university campus.
In California, boys and men age 15 to 44 die by suicide at three to four times the rate of women, often by firearms. Almost half of female homicide victims are also killed by a current or former intimate male partner.
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Over the course of a year, the state will partner with youth organizations, including Improve Your Tomorrow, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Mentor California, and the American Institute for Boys and Men, to recruit and train them as mentors for young boys.
“The goal is to create consistent, positive relationships where men model integrity, empathy and community engagement while helping young men develop confidence and purpose,” Josh Fryday, the state’s chief service officer, told EdSource.
Fryday said the initiative will include ongoing one-on-one and group mentoring, tutoring or reading programs, service projects, coaching youth sports and guiding young men through college and career exploration. It will be supported by California Volunteers, the state’s $275 million program for community service and civic engagement.
For youth organizations like Mentor California, which have long wait lists of young boys seeking mentors, the campaign is a crucial opportunity to model healthy relationships early in a boy’s life, said Marcus Strother, executive director of Mentor California.
“We want mentors who are vulnerable and are ready to share their story,” said Strother. “And part of that comes from us in leadership roles, we have to train them and help them understand what it means to step into a young person’s life and really build a relationship with them.”
Strother said he noticed that the young men he worked with seemed to have taken a turn for the worse after the Covid-19 pandemic. Boys lost crucial years of social development, particularly those in middle and high school, and then struggled to socialize in person, understand how to build good relationships, or even to find the words to describe how they were feeling, he said.
According to research by child and adolescent psychologists, boys’ mental health has also been slower to recover from lockdowns compared to girls’.
“We haven’t done a good job of teaching our young men how to understand their emotions and talk through them,” Strother said, “and that it’s OK to be by yourself, but it’s not OK to get lost in that loneliness.”
During the announcement, Newsom referenced a recent poll showing that 1 in 4 young men between the ages of 15 and 35 said they felt lonely “a lot of the previous day.” Adolescent boys are also about 50% less likely than girls to seek mental health services for depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts, in part due to social stigma against seeking help.
In August, Newsom ordered the California Health and Human Services agency, alongside programs like the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, to find ways to “support the mental health and help-seeking behavior” of boys and young men, although he did not include any new funding or programming as part of the initial executive order.
Jason Laker, a professor of higher education and researcher in men and masculinity studies at San Jose State University, said the service campaign is an important first step toward meeting the needs of young men.
“Boys are struggling for attention, and they desperately need people in their life who are there to support them and uplift them,” said Laker. “And you need to make sure that these mentorships are giving them productive learning — not that they’re rooted in stereotypes.”
Laker, who was a dean at Saint John’s University, a men’s college in Minnesota, said he often counseled young men to break out of their own cycles of violence or anger. He said the approach worked not simply because he was a male role model, but also because he applied research-based techniques to build trust with young men. He’d ask the right questions, use accessible language, and learned to identify adverse childhood experiences — such as excessive school discipline — that tend to affect young men.
Laker said the initiative should similarly challenge harmful norms of masculinity by training mentors in practices of care and compassion that boys are most receptive to.
“Someone who wants to mentor a Black boy, for example, needs to understand why it may feel dangerous for him to express strong emotion,” Laker said. “You need to learn how to give him a safe place to do that.”
Fryday said the state will partner with behavioral health experts through state agencies like the Department of Public Health, as well as the American Institute for Boys and Men, to help guide the mental health goals for the initiative. Strother said that Mentor California, as well as other listed partners, will also train mentors to be culturally responsive to the diverse experiences of California’s boys.
“Once we start showing that there is a different way for us to move as men,” Strother said, “then our young men will begin to show up.”
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