Guys’ Healthy Living Atlantic Canada: Bridges Institute and Public Schools in Atlantic Canada

Bridges Institute is a counselling centre in Nova Scotia with a mission to help people practice healthy, loving and respectful relationships with their partners and families. Bridges seeks to prevent domestic violence. Changing traditional male role norms may not only increase healthy help-seeking behaviours but may play an upstream role in the prevention of domestic violence (Flood, 2019). Bridges Institute, in partnership with Nova Scotia’s Status of Women, and a faculty member from St Francis Xavier University, share a commitment to prevent domestic violence. This work has been supported over the last three years by Nova Scotia’s action plan to prevent domestic violence, with an understanding that engaging men and boys in normalizing help-seeking and building healthy masculinity and relationships can contribute to preventing violence against women and girls. A recent school-based pilot intervention successfully dropped traditional adolescent male norms for more than 100 boys in public schools across Nova Scotia. This partnership continues today with the roll out of a series of interventions for grades 5 to 12 boys’ in Nova Scotia. Our work is a direct opportunity to overcome the challenges described above and increase the positive mental health of boys from grades 5 to 10, increase the capacity and long-term sustainability of Bridges staff and school-based staff to successfully facilitate boys’ intervention programming, and potentially reduce domestic violence long-term. The intern’s key role will be to work with Bridges Institute and their partners to create a best practice model and manual.

Faculty Supervisor:

Chris Gilham

Student:

Partner:

Bridges Institute

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

St. Francis Xavier University

Program: