About The Founder & Executive Director

For the majority of my adult life, I have struggled to balance the life of the mind with a social world of action and responsibility. I began to think seriously about returning to the academy after noticing how much my interests brought me into contact with community organizations and social welfare systems, and pushed me towards a policy focus. The more I thought about how to do research that would matter, the more I was reminded of my own personal experiences and the social contradictions that propelled me back into higher education in the first place.

When I returned to school after several years of working in the social service field, I hoped to seek refuge in books, get re-acquainted with the life of the mind, and gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics influencing my own life. From graduating from Oberlin college to that point, my life had been non-stop social and community activism, focusing mainly on education, organizing men, and counseling and mentoring African American youth. Like many Oberlin graduates, I left college politicized and deeply committed to social justice—particularly for racial minorities—and also molded by a cultural and intellectual environment where dialogue and debate were essential elements of forging community. Unlike many of my classmates, however, I did not directly apply to graduate school, but took a job as a community organizer, working for a community development corporation in a racially and economically diverse neighborhood located in the heart of Toledo's central city. It was one of the most powerful, spiritual, and politically significant experience of my life, affirming every belief I had in the capacity of so-called average people to participate in the reconstruction of their lives, and providing me a grass-roots perspective on African American civil society.

Notwithstanding the many accomplishments we had in addressing the challenges facing the neighborhood, I became aware of a persistent problem plaguing our organizing efforts—we couldn't get men involved. All of our activities were accomplished mainly through the heroic efforts of women, a fact captured rather vividly in the photo records we kept of our campaigns. What was striking to note as a community organizer was not just the consistency with which this gender disparity presented itself over time, but also its consistency across a broad spectrum of issues. Whether we were organizing parent teacher organizations, petitioning the city for more services, closing crack houses, or organizing against the very community development corporation for which I worked, no issue, no campaign seemed to garner significant attention and participation from men. This pattern seemed to contradict a cornerstone principle of community organizing: that people will organize around self-interest, and that the role of the organizer is to assist people in identifying their self-interest and help develop the leadership capacities necessary to achieve their goals. This paradox could have been written off as an isolated case or due to my own organizing deficiencies, but I found that it was a problem shared by the majority of organizers in the city, who also told me it had been that way for years. It was difficult for me to imagine how we could be successful as a community given the stark reality that the male half of the population was systematically not participating in our efforts, and were often more part of the problem than the solution.

This experience prompted me to found Community Outreach Initiatives, Inc., a community outreach organization specializing in organizing and training African American men, specifically to participate in mentorship programs, but in reality part of a more expansive attempt to bring men into community and deal with questions regarding masculinity, male socialization, sexism, family, and patriarchy. Perhaps all my life, but certainly since the birth of my son, I have been deeply interested in what are loosely referred to as "men's issues," and in light of my community organizing experience, I embarked on what I naively hoped would be major effort to address such questions. Traversing the street corners, basketball courts, barber shops, pool halls, clubs, and bars that black men inhabit, I had a good deal of initial success recruiting men to participate in the group, and also gained my first real experience in ethnographic research, although I wouldn't have called it that at the time.

Bringing black men together in communion, providing a cultural space for dialogue, debate, and reflection, and setting up inter-generational bonds between youth and adults provided an incredibly rich experience for all of us, but our efforts contained some implicit contradictions that I was not aware of at the time. Organizing black men around their common racial and gender identity was necessary, but not sufficient. Intense emotional bonding and healing was an inevitable consequence of coming together in that type of format; however, I was much more interested and committed to intellectual clarity and political activism, which could only come from a deeper investigation into the historical antecedents which give rise to the many issues we were grappling with.

In essence, we needed a gender analysis that I was not prepared to offer at that time. I eventually realized that emotion had to give way to agenda through the systematic study of gender, using both class and race to tease out what I/we felt were the unique experiences of black men. I speculated that the contradictions that black (and other) men face of being both victims and victimizers could not be resolved by just bringing them together in ‘Circles of Recovery,' a popular format of that time. I yearned to be part of a program derived from the systematic study of the specialized experiences of men. That I couldn't find such a program that satisfied me was the largest reason I ultimately went back to graduate school.

Upon my return to graduate school at the University of Michigan Joint PhD program(s) in Social Work and Sociology at the time, my initial intellectual project was trying to understand how men organizing around "men's issues" had influenced recent welfare legislation, specifically child support enforcement and public housing policy. However, my overarching interest was always to better understand how men in families, especially fathers, affect the well-being of women and children, around issues of domestic violence.

During that time I became deeply impacted by and involved in the domestic violence movement and efforts aimed at ending and violence against women. I began to grow as a researcher, practitioner and advocate through my work in the field of batterer intervention, specifically through my efforts to integrate a gender analysis with a focus on violence intervention and prevention strategies.

After several years of trying to focus on issues of race, class, and gender I became increasingly concerned with the lack of focus on men's issues within my field of social work and sociology, and in higher education in general. I became even more concerned with the low numbers of males on college campuses and the types of social and intellectual isolation this was contributing to. To address some of this, I organized the Men In Social Work Discussion Group (MSWDG). That was fun! It was a marvelous experience to see a broad cross section of faculty, doctoral students, and Master level students grapple with how a critical focus on men's issue might influence their various social and practice settings. Eventually we say faculty take seriously the idea of integrating more material on men in their curriculum and in their classroom, we say doctoral students begin to formulate and initiate new research questions and agendas with a focus on critical masculinities, and finally we saw MSW students strive to develop more competencies when working with male clients.

Feeling, increasingly marginalized within the academy, I applied and was awarded a New Voices Fellowship in 2005 which allowed me to focus on men's issues, community accountability and primary prevention of domestic violence. Unlike my first community organizing experience, I was determined to combine activism with analysis and so I canvassed the literature on neighborhood effects to determine how neighborhood processes influence social capital and the collective efficacy of men related to domestic violence, as well as male empowerment and accountability, the implementation of feminist practice principles in community organizing and group work with men. Empirically, I sought to utilize a social network analysis to explore how men's relationships were connected to levels of community involvement.

It was during this time that I also became increasingly aware of the growing phenomena of African American men and sex/romance tourism. A phenomena that has been described by Franck Michel as a "mercantile form of extreme leisure with its roots in prostitution" and a "modern version of the old colonial attitudes towards the world.". I became fascinated by the questions of masculinity, morality, and male privilege and how men's experience overseas might affects the well-being of their families and communities, and how that affects communities overseas. Being attentive to class-based masculinities allowed me to more fully understand the intersection of race, class, and gender within communities of color and the international aspects caused by globalization. To me, how all men deal with increasing inequities in their lives and the lives of women will be one of the greatest challenges we face in the 21sth Century.

In a retrospective look at my life, the reason why I went to the academy was to learn about men and boys. The reason why I stepped outside of the academy was to learn from men and boys. The Renaissance Male Project Inc. is the culmination of a dream where men and women join the movement to change their lives and change the world.

Welcome to RMP Inc.