The Boy I Am, The Man I Choose to Be

The Boy I Am, The Man I Choose To Be is a South African relational-development workbook created to help boys and men develop capacities many of us are expected to have, but were never explicitly taught: emotional literacy, communication, conflict resolution, repair after harm, boundaries, consent, trust, self-regulation, discernment, responsibility and healthy ways of relating to power.

The book asks a simple question: what happens when people are expected to carry adult responsibility with capacities they were never given the opportunity to develop?

Too often, we wait until harm has already happened before we intervene. This project works further upstream. It gives people language for what they are experiencing, helps them understand the function of behaviours they may have learned to survive, and gives them practical tools for developing healthier capacities without using their history as an excuse for harm.

The manuscript is complete. The next challenge is access.

South Africa is multilingual, and a deve...