The Good Men Project

"The Good Men Project aims to bring men together. There are stories about love and death, trauma and recover, and, ulitmaely, understanding."

The Providence Journal

January 1, 2010

Get Lean, Get Green, Get a Great Bike for a Good Cause

Filed under: Good Men Foundation — Tags: , , — tmatlack @ 8:00 am

SevenCyclesBike

If your New Year’s resolution involves getting in shape or getting greener, consider Seven Cycles’ special-edition, $14,000 Diamas SLX. Sales of the bike will benefit the Good Men Project’s Good Men Foundation.

For every bike sold, Seven Cycles, one of the country’s premier makers of custom bicycles,will make a $1,000 donation to the Foundation, which supports organizations that help at-risk boys.

Seven Cycles will build only 25 of the Good Men Project bicycles–one at a time, as the company does with all of its bike models. The bikes will be built to order using Seven Cycles’ Five Elements of Customization process, which involves creating a bike that best suits the individual rider in terms of fit and comfort, handling and performance, tubing and material, features and options, and future riding plans–to ensure that the bike still suits the owner five years down the road.

Seven Cycles, which is based in Watertown, Mass., has dealers throughout the United States and Canada. The purchasing process begins with a visit to your nearest dealer, who helps you complete Seven Cycles’ Custom Kit. This survey and measuring session provides the bicycle maker with nearly 100 points of data about you and your riding style. Once Seven Cycles receives that information from the dealer, a member of the company’s performance design team calls you to review the data and give you the opportunity to work directly with the company on your frame’s design.

The Diamas SLX frame will be made of Seven Cycles’ proprietary A6 high-modulus carbon. The bike’s components will include Seven Cycles’ 5E carbon fork and its custom titanium stem, a Campagnolo Super Record 11-speed groupset, and a Zipp 808 wheelset. The paint job will be an exclusive Good Men six-color custom scheme.

 

November 26, 2009

“Giving Thanks” By Tom Matlack

Filed under: Daily Man, Good Men, Good Men Book, Good Men Foundation — tmatlack @ 4:45 am

The Good Men Project just an idea a year ago, became a reality this month. We’ve released our book and the DVD of our documentary film, and we’ve received tons of publicity, including appearances on local TV in Boston and on national TV. But most important, we have begun taking our message of manhood to the streets–to schools, bookstores, community centers, and a prison.

We’ve been to Sing Sing to talk to lifers, premiered our film in front of a standing-room-only crowd of 500 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and visited a boys’ school in Massachusetts with our NFL Hall of Fame contributor. In New York, we staged an Off Broadway reading with an ex-con who got out of the drug trade and Ivy League grad who left his family’s multinational business. We had another reading in New York on sexuality at a community center for gay and lesbians, and we screened the film at a feminist bookstore.

Co-editors Tom Matlack, Larry Bean, James Houghton. Photo by Aram Boghosian

Co-Editors Tom Matlack, Larry Bean and James Houghton

We’ve presented a wide range of manhood-related topics at an even wider range of venues, but here I want to talk about fatherhood, specifically the effect the absence of a father can have on children. According to the Fathers & Families Coalition of America, more than 28 million children in the United States do not have a dad in their home, and more than a third of those children will not have any contact with their fathers in the next year. The coalition reports that a child with an absent father is 71 percent less likely to complete high school than is a child living in a household where a father is present, and that 85 percent of the youths in juvenile detention centers across the country grew up without fathers. These numbers suggest that boys from fatherless homes can easily fall into the at-risk population.

The Good Men Foundation, the charitable arm of the Good Men Project, was set up to benefit organizations that help boys who are at-risk. The foundation will donate proceeds from the sales of the book and DVDs to such organizations. Sales so far have been brisk enough for us to give thanks to a few groups that do amazing work with at-risk boys. We’re making $5,000 grants to the Boys & Girls Clubs, Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Dorchester Youth Alternative Academy and Trinity Street Potential in Boston, and Exodus Transitional Community in New York.

You can do your part as well: Buy our book and DVD package for the people–men and women–on your holiday gift list. All proceeds will go to the aforementioned organizations, and you’ll be spreading the work about the Good Men Project and helping to foster a nationwide conversation about what it means to be a good father, good son, good husband, good worker, and good man.

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Tom Matlack addressing The Belmont Hill School where students asked questions like, “If I do something bad is it still possible for me to be a good man?”

 

October 29, 2009

The Whole Point of Good Men

Filed under: Good Men Foundation — tmatlack @ 5:38 am
FortuneAdThere is no more important question at this moment in history–with markets collapsing, corruption rampant, two foreign wars, environmental disaster at hand, and the fabric of the American family disintegrating–than what it means to be a “good” man. The conventional wisdom is that men don’t like to talk about their interior lives. But James Houghton and I have come to the conclusion, after running a venture capital firm together for a decade, that conventional wisdom is wrong and that men are desperate to tell their stories and hear how other men have met the challenges of our time.

We have collected a cross-section of men–black, white, brown, gay, straight, rich, poor, liberal, conservative in small towns and big cities–to help us look at this issue by writing about a moment that shaped them as a man. We have a drug lord who spent 15 years in Sing Sing and the US Noble Laureate; a football Hall-of-Famer and a Russian Kick-Boxer; a sniper scout in Iraq and the best known war photo journalist covering that war; drug addicts and stay-at-home dads. We have Pulitzer prize winners (Charlie LeDuff), Golden Globe winners (Matt Weiner) and just regular guys–fathers, sons, husbands–grappling with what the hell to do as a man when the world is falling apart around them and what, in the end, really is important.

At the center of our project are our website, www.goodmenbook.org and the forthcoming book More Than a Few Good Men. The goal of these print and electronic forums is to begin a national discussion amongst men. To that end we are kicking off a national Essay contest March 1 (which runs through May). At a time of darkness, this is a unique opportunity, in our minds, for a reassessment and a new perspective on the part of men in our country.

Our mission is modeled after Newman’s Own. The Good Men Foundation will support men and boys at-risk across America. All proceeds from our book, magazine and merchandise go to the foundation. All copyrights are owned by GMF.

 

July 24, 2009

The Good Men Foundation: Helping Boys At-Risk

Filed under: Good Men Foundation — tmatlack @ 5:52 am

The Good Men Foundation, which owns the rights to the forthcoming book and DVD and will receive all royalties, was formed to help at-risk boys at places like the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.  Our mission is to spark a nationwide conversation about manhood among men, to use our content as a way to talk to boys from all backgrounds about manhood, and to financially assist those for whom circumstance has put them in harm’s way.  Here’s a story about just one such man.  –Tom Matlack

When Basketball is No Longer an Option

When Basketball is No Longer an Option

“At the club, I knew a young Latino man I’ll call Julio who from the time he was just a kid.   He still came to the club to play basketball.  He has face looked exactly like Corey Dillon’s on the Patriots, but he had tattoos and wild hair.  He played on our travel basketball teams.  Another ex-club member got stabbed one night.  He did not die but it was still a very serious incident-a stupid gang fight over turf.  It came to our attention that most people in the club believed that Julio had done it.

We couldn’t have someone who was believed to have committed a violent crime in the club, as much as we liked him.  Julio’s a big guy, not overwhelming, probably 6′1 and thick.  Not fat, but strong.  Good smile when he smiled.  Actually, very personable when you talk to him.  He was a good kid, respectful.  We had a lot of equity years with him so he would listen to us.  The feeling was well, if all the kids know he stabbed this guy, he eventually is going to get picked up.  But if the kids know and we have him in here, it’s a safety issue.  It’s going to scare kids.  So I said, let me talk to him.

When he came in, I grabbed him.  I started asking him about it.  I’m usually pretty good when I know a kid’s BSing and stuff.  Who knows if he even stabbed the kid, but that’s what everybody said.  He didn’t deny it.  Then he broke down and he started crying.  He wasn’t BSing me because it just came out of left field.  He sat in my office for an hour and cried about his life.  He remembered living in the Bronx as a young kid when the police came in one day, this was the main issue, and right in front of him and his mom, they shot and killed his stepfather dead.   He thought they were going to take him away too.  He said he wanted to do right, he wanted to protect people that he cared about, but he didn’t trust anyone because of what he saw.

Two teenagers came in, and they saw him in there and then he didn’t want them to see, so he turned his head.  I told him, if you did that, you can’t come in here because people know. I said, if you had younger siblings, you wouldn’t want them at a place where you knew someone carried a knife.  It’s a safety issue if you’re here.  He understood that.  I let him stay that night and he didn’t come back.”

–Boys and Girls Club of Boston Staff Member