Supporting Boys and Young Men at Skoll 2026
By Wendy Paris
April 20, 2026
On a Monday afternoon in April, one hundred nonprofit leaders, funders, and advocates gathered at the Randolph Hotel Oxford for a teatime convening about boys and young men called “Connected & Courageous: Investing in the Well-Being of Boys and Young Men.”
Hosted by Futures Without Violence (FUTURES) and featuring some of the most dynamic innovators in the field, the afternoon’s conversations focused on strategies that foster connection, resilience, and civic courage among boys and young men.
Held the day before the official kick-off of the Skoll World Forum, the event drew a lot of people in an afternoon crowded with competing convenings, meetings, teas, and cocktails, pointing to the interest in these issues among many of the world’s most engaged social activists and funders.
Esta Soler, FUTURES’ Founder and President, kicked off the event. She cited some of the struggles young men face today, from depression and economic stress to school shootings, suicides, and rising tides of all forms of hate. “But you know what else we are seeing?” Soler asked, “fast-growing determination to address these problems and to support innovations that hold so much promise to solve them.”
Over the following two hours, speakers and panelists highlighted other struggles faced by boys and men, and the urgency of the work around these issues. A handful of hopeful threads emerged: the importance of empathy, the need for inclusion, and the power of creativity.
Peace Takes Courage and Community
Museum Designer Jake Barton is partnering with the Courage Museum, which will open in 2027, to help create a museum that will be “a platform for a new generation of activists to stand up against hate with courage,” he said.
Pat Mitchell, Co-Founder of Project Dandelion and TEDWomen, and former president of PBS, spoke next.
Mitchell shared her experience as a single mother raising a boy and highlighted FUTURES’s leadership in making the connection between supporting boys and men and preventing violence against women.
“We envision a future without violence, and we know it takes, first of all, courage,” she said.
She was followed by renowned museum designer, Jake Barton, who is partnering with the Courage Museum, which is opening next Spring in San Francisco’s Presidio.
The award-winning founder of Local Projects, Barton, was also the visionary behind other interactive museums designed to increase visitors’ empathy for victims of violence, including the National September 11th Museum & Memorial, The Legacy Museum, and Greenwood Rising, which honors the “Black Wall Street” before and after the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
Barton talked about the process of choosing the Courage Museum’s name.
“How do you get people on a sunny Saturday afternoon to leave a food truck on the lawn out front to go to a museum about violence?” The insight was that the museum is not fundamentally about violence but rather the courage to stand up to it.
“We think about this place as a platform for a new generation of activists to stand up against hate with courage,” he said.
Barton led attendees on a virtual museum tour, including “Empathy Mirrors,” recorded stories told by victims of violence who found courageous, resilient, life-affirming ways to respond and move forward. The audience at Oxford saw clips of three such stories: a young man who took to skateboarding to escape violence at home, a police sergeant raising a trans child in the South, and a young Black man from Detroit whose professional basketball career was cut short when he was shot in the back by a stranger. “I didn’t want that young man who shot me to spend the rest of his life in prison because I knew how that would affect his family,” the third storyteller said.
Even without the dimmed lighting and close-up context of the in-person museum experience, these stories had audience members wiping away tears.
Rachel Smith Fals, FUTURES’ Senior Vice President and Founding Director of the Courage Museum, selected the storytellers for the museum. As Smith Fals said, “Courage happens in community, and in spaces like this one.”
The Power of Storytelling and Prevention
From left to right, Manuelito Biag, Managing Director of Education at the Courage Museum, Sasha Khokha, reporter, and Sarah Haacke Byrd, CEO of Women Moving Millions, sat on a panel called “Cultivating Empathy & Civic Courage Through Stories of Young Men.”
The second half of the event featured three panel discussions, the first two expertly moderated by journalist Sasha Khokha, Host of “The California Report Magazine” on NPR’s Bay Area affiliate KQED.
Her first panel, “Cultivating Empathy & Civic Courage Through Stories of Young Men,” was a deep dive into the power of immersive storytelling to challenge harmful cultural norms and build empathy, inclusion, and engagement. It included Manuelito Biag, the Courage Museum’s Managing Director of Education, and Sarah Haacke Byrd, CEO of Women Moving Millions, a funder affinity group that has collectively given more than $300 million to organizations, including FUTURES.
“We don’t spend enough time investing in prevention work. That’s how I see the Courage Museum,” said Haacke Byrd. “It’s a way to get in early, to build the empathy and courage muscles.”
The second panel, “Boys, Belonging, and the Business of Change,” focused on the FUTURES program “Team: Changing Minds,” which helps athletic coaches lead conversations with their teams about sensitive topics. It has shown the value of early intervention and how effective a simple, low-cost intervention can be for supporting the mental health of boys and young men.
The panel featured the program’s Co-Founder, FUTURES’ Vice President Brian O’Connor, in conversation with Maggie Hureau, Head of Social Impact at Harry’s and Mammoth Brands, the nation’s leading funder of programs for men’s mental health.
From left to right, Maggie Hureau, Head of Social Impact at Harry’s and Mammoth Brands, Sasha Khokha, Reporter, and Brian O’Connor, VP of FUTURES. Their panel discussion focused on the FUTURES program “Team: Changing Minds.”
“We wanted a game-changing idea, one that was going to change the state of men’s mental health today, a big new idea,” said Hureau. “We had hundreds and hundreds of applications, and overwhelmingly we chose Team: Changing Minds.”
For the third panel, journalist Andrew Griffin, Technology Editor at The Independent, spoke with Jared Shurin, an expert on extremism who is with The Greater London Authority.
Griffin said that he spends countless hours online for work, and sees a definite trend toward more extreme and negative content being offered up by the “amoral algorithm.” But, as he pointed out, we also have far more clarity on how these systems work. There is hope in that knowledge.
Shurin said “The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of people are not radicalizing into violence or any sort of grievous behavior.
One of the important framings here is not, ‘Why do people go wrong?’ but rather, ‘Why don’t more?’ What do we have that keeps us from going down that pathway, and how can we replicate those factors?” he asked. “We saw very inspiring examples here today.”
Overall, the afternoon addressed truly worrisome trends while also conveying palpable hope.
As Barton put it at one point, we each have a lever we can pull to reduce violence. “We can diminish violence. We have seen it happen over time. We can improve.”
“As we know, courage is contagious.”
Andrew Griffin, Technology Editor at The Independent, spoke with Jared Shurin, an expert on extremism who is with The Greater London Authority.
