The “Beyond the Mirror’ focus sessions have been funded by Global Fund for Children (GFC) from their Healthy Masculinities funding pot. 

They recognised that a lot of funding in the “healthy masculinities” space has focused on white males and this only increased after the making and airing of programmes like Adolescence and A Mother’s Son. Furthermore governments and media peddle a narrative that boys, particularly working class boys are being left behind, often at the expense of ‘minority communities’. This has led to a focus on them in education, employment and more. Inevitably Black men and boys become invisible in the ongoing conversations whilst being hyper visible outside of them.

GFC, having worked with ARC on previous projects, approached us to explore whether we would consider running a project with Black boys through a lens of healthy masculinities.

ARC was very open and honest; we do not have the length and breadth of experience for such a project. We are in reality a team of women and non-binary (assigned female at birth) people.

The fact the majority identify as Black doesn’t make us experts where Black men and boys are concerned, in much the same way being Black doesn’t automatically mean you are anti-racist. We concluded we needed to start ‘further back’ than a project. We needed to listen and learn from Black men and boys and we needed to start small. 

That brought us round to the idea of a focus group; what don’t we know or understand? What could we learn? Due to our great social media connections, we landed on Romain Muhammad. After a few conversations, we knew we’d found what we were looking for in a main facilitator for this group. 

We also knew that ARC values creativity in this resistance work that it does and we wanted to add some of this along with some ‘softness’ to what is often perceived as the nature of men and boys work. Enter Rowan. Rowan is our Racial Trauma and Embodiment Practitioner and he’ll be joining Romain to make sure some of our reclaimed (traditional) ways of doing things are in the mix.  

There are two focus group sessions.

The first is in person at ARC’s offices in Ambleside, Lake District, Cumbria. Once you confirm your attendance, we’ll make sure you have the full address. The second session is online via zoom and again we’ll provide the link on signing up. You must be available to attend both sessions. 

After session one, we’ll be providing a complimentary lunch. We hope you can stick around for this and to enjoy some informal time with others in the group. There will be refreshments available throughout the session. Please let us know of any dietary requirements.

We will pay your travel expenses for travel to the in person session. If you have to stay overnight (this will be the case if you are travelling from the south, so you can be there in time in the morning), we will pay your accommodation costs too. Please reach out to us to help arrange this.

An honorarium of £200 for your attendance, contribution and participation will be paid. 

What happens after the two sessions? 

We will write up a report of our findings and share this with you and GFC. Like we said above, this is very much a learning exercise for us. We welcome any thoughts and ideas from you.

Please note that the sessions will not be recorded but there will be a notetaker. She will be scribing discreetly the whole time to capture the learnings and minutes for us. 

We look forward to seeing you there. Please RSVP to: Janett@antiracistcumbria.org