Boys To Men Tucson has worked in Pima County, Arizona since 2009. Its mission, in its own words: “We strengthen our communities by nurturing intentional spaces for boys, men, and masculine-identified folks to practice honest and mindful relationships.”
The core of the work is the restorative mentorship circle. A group meets once a week for an hour, led by at least two trained and screened mentors, run through a trauma-informed lens. The model is called L.E.A.M.: listening, encouragement, acceptance, modelling. Circles began in schools and now run in community sites and inside the Pima County Juvenile Detention Center. Around them sit adventure outings, three wilderness Challenge Adventure Weekends a year, and a job-skills and education programme called Pathways to Engagement and Empowerment.
In 2024 the organisation served 487 youth, trained 28 mentors and made 17,000 mentoring hours available. Across the cohort in its latest analysis, 77% of youth receive free or reduced lunch, 61% are Hispanic, and ages run from 8 to 19 with an average of 14.
The trigger was a new programme. Boys To Men Tucson launched its Healthy Intergenerational Masculinity initiative, a collective-impact partnership with Emerge! Center Against Domestic Abuse and Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona, aimed at school-based prevention and at men’s engagement in gender justice.
A programme like that lives or dies on evidence. The organisation’s executive director at the time put it plainly:
When we launched our Healthy Intergenerational Masculinity (HIM) initiative, we wanted to partner with an organization with technology and knowledge for impact measurement. Among the options, Sopact stood out as the only organization excelling in both areas.
That was Micheal Brasher, executive director from 2019 to 2023. The measurement practice he started outlasted his tenure. It is still running under CEO Erica Smith, and it has become considerably more ambitious since.
The most recent analysis matches 198 youth across 23 sites, from each young person’s first survey to their most recent one, linked by a unique ID so the comparison follows the same individual rather than averaging whoever happened to show up.
The clearest result is about being known.
At intake, 61% of youth agreed that an adult in their life knew a lot about them. By endline it was 73%. More striking: among the youth who did not agree at intake, 58% had moved into agreement by the end.
Belonging rose too, and it rose most where it started lowest. Youth who arrived least connected improved more than their already-connected peers, and youth who returned for a second round improved more than first-timers. For a programme built on relationship over time, those are the two findings you would most want to be true.
Emotional range widened in the direction that matters. Comfort expressing happiness rose, but so did comfort with jealousy, tenderness and shame, the emotions boys are least often given permission to name. The share who said they often hid their emotions to avoid looking weak fell from 33% to 29%.
In a smaller pre-and-post cohort measured across a single spring, the movement was sharper still. Youth feeling accepted by peers went from 23% to 67%. Physical fights fell from 46% to 27%. Among the matched group, carrying a handgun went from 8% to zero.
Here is where this report stops behaving like a nonprofit report.
Substance use went up. Alcohol rose 7.6 percentage points, marijuana 4.5, tobacco 3.5, vaping 3.0. Only prescription pain medication misuse fell.
The bullying composite did not move at all, from 11.61 to 11.60. Some anger indicators went the wrong way: the share who often felt like yelling at somebody rose six points.
In the spring cohort, agreement that all genders should be treated the same dropped from 85% to 73%. Online harassment carried out by youth in the programme ticked up. One young person reported threatening or using a gun after the programme period, and the report flags it explicitly for safety follow-up rather than smoothing it into an average. One zip code showed belonging going backwards.
Boys To Men Tucson’s own summary of all this:
Social connection may be improving faster than externalized behavior.
That sentence is worth more than any success metric on this page. It is a programme stating the limits of its own results, in a report it hands to funders.
The reports carry open responses alongside the numbers. Of the youth who wrote something, 77% described the experience positively.
I improve myself and now I can talk in front of the people without worrying.
9th grade, endline
We told each other some of the problems we had and we didn’t judge each other.
9th grade
And one signal nobody planned for. Across two entirely separate cohorts, an elementary group at one school and a middle-and-high group at another, youth independently asked for the same thing: more time outside, more sport, more soccer.
I was so mad because I couldn’t score goal in soccer but my friends help me calm down.
9th grade
That is a programme outcome hiding inside a complaint about football. A young person naming his own anger, and naming the friends who helped him settle it, in a sentence about a missed goal.
None of this requires a data team. It requires that every survey lands in the same place, attached to the same young person, so a second survey can be compared against a first.
That is the whole mechanism. Unique IDs make matched analysis possible, and matched analysis is what separates “we served 487 youth” from “58% of the youth who arrived feeling unknown left feeling known.” The first is an output. The second is an outcome, and it is the one funders are actually asking for.
It is also what makes the uncomfortable findings visible at all. A programme that counts attendance can never discover that its substance-use numbers are moving the wrong way. Boys To Men Tucson could, did, and published it.
Boys To Men Tucson is a non-profit serving masculine-identified youth across Pima County, Arizona, with a stated priority on BIPOC and economically marginalised young people. It is led by CEO Erica Smith. Its work is supported by the Lovell Foundation, Vitalyst Health, the Kautz Family Foundation, Social Venture Partners Tucson, the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, the Connie Hillman Family Foundation, the Arizona Community Foundation, The Osa Foundation and New Profit, among others.
Learn more at btmtucson.com
