Mengage: A Forum for Young Men to Discuss Youth Issues

This morning, another cohort of high school students, young men from across Belize City, met to discuss issues affecting at-risk youths.  Mengage, as the series of discussions are called, is a training session that teaches teenagers about the risks and consequences of their actions.  It also allows for a safe space to discuss issues affecting them.  Michael Fritz is the Youth and Community Support Officer at the Belize City Council.

Michael Fritz

Michael Fritz, Youth & Community Support Officer

“Mengage is a concept developed through partnerships with the Belize City Council and UNICEF Belize and supported by the National Parenting Taskforce.  Our objective, so young men, particularly those at risk, there aren’t enough opportunities for them to be heard, first and foremost, and what we are doing in commemoration of not only International Men’s Day which is celebrated on November nineteenth, which most people don’t know.  But it’s something that we’re building the foundation for these young men to have a support system, meaning that they have a safe space in which they can learn to be themselves, can iron out what their man box or what they can identify with.  The concept behind it is to not only engage them initially, this portion of the concept is to train one hundred young men from four south side high schools.  We started last week with Sadie Vernon and Gwen Lizarraga and today we’ll have young men from Excelsior High School and this afternoon we’re going to have Maud Williams, they’re coming here I should say.  So we’re training these initial one hundred young men with the objective for them to be the startup of their own Mengage chapters within their respective high schools.  So training them so that they can mold what they want their safe space to look like.”