Boys to Men, a community-based mentoring program providing boys with positive male role models, is holding its 25th-anniversary celebration on April 25 at the Catamaran Resort in Pacific Beach.
Titled “Rooted in Resiliency,” the anniversary at the resort’s hotel at 3999 Mission Blvd. will feature a private concert with Grammy Award-winning artist Jason Mraz, joined by Gregory Page, Gregg Gerson, and Carlos Olmeda.
Boys to Men Mentoring Workshop was founded in 1996 by Joe Sigurdson and Craig McClain. The organization encourages boys, many without a father, to become the man they want to be.
“This is going to be an exquisite evening at the Catamaran on the lawn overlooking the bay,” noted Sigurdson. “It’s going to be very elegant: beach formal. We will have a sit-down dinner with carving stations and a hosted bar. Later, we will move upstairs to the Kon Tiki Room where we will present our inaugural Community Hero Award to Shaun Tomson.”
Tomson is a South African professional surfer, environmentalist, actor, author, and businessman. He has been listed among the top 10 surfers of the century and was the 1977 World Surfing Champion. “He’s renowned for writing four books and is one of the most highly sought-after keynote speakers,” said Sigurdson. “He’s an inspiring guy for sure and a founding member of the Surfrider Foundation. He’s been Boys to Men’s spokesperson for our 100 Wave Challenge, our largest annual fundraiser. With his notoriety and his validation, that has put us at another level.”
The Surfrider Foundation USA is a grassroots nonprofit environmental organization that works to protect and preserve the world’s oceans, waves, and beaches.
Sigurdson said some of the core values of Boys to Men come from the model provided by Alcoholics Anonymous, which he noted provides a “super powerful, transformational, and introspective framework, a rite of passage for a boy’s transition into manhood.”
Boys to Men’s founder said the organization employs a “shared experience” between boys and men. Of how the program started, Sigurdson said, “We thought, ‘Let’s do this demographically, inside a school. We started our first in-school mentoring program in 2008. By 2020, we were in 36 schools running 60 groups a week.”
Boys to Men Mentoring’s mission is to build communities of male role models who, through consistent group mentoring, encourage and empower teenage boys to follow their dreams. Middle and high school teenage boys were chosen by Boys to Men because that age is a critical time when a boy’s choices begin to form the foundation of the man he will become. No boy dreams of dropping out of school, going to prison, getting hooked on drugs, or joining a gang – but many do.
“Our mentors go into schools and sit down in circles with young men that are struggling,” noted Sigurdson. “The men share their stories, what’s happened to us, how we feel about the decisions we made, and the price we paid for some of those choices. Then we talk about what we wished we’d done differently.”
Added Sigurdson: “Our job is to challenge them (boys), ask them what they want to be, and then listen. After they tell us, we ask them what they would be willing to do differently to move toward getting that. When the boys make a new choice, our job is then to give them other choices that they can look at. Later, we do accountability where we check in with those guys and see if they’re doing what they said they were going to do to be the men they said they wanted to be. This is a long-term solution, a process of transformation and change.”
