The Men’s Group Renaissance: The Quiet Movement Saving Men’s Lives

In a YMCA basement in suburban Ohio, twelve men meet every other Tuesday at 7 p.m. They are mostly in their forties and fifties, mostly with families and serious careers, and most of them have, at some point in the past three years, found themselves crying in front of the others. They are part of a men’s group — one of an estimated thousands of such groups now meeting in cities and small towns across the English-speaking world. None of them advertise. None of them have an Instagram presence to speak of. Most of the men in them did not know what a men’s group was until a friend invited them.

What is happening in these rooms is one of the most significant under-reported developments in modern men’s mental health. The Mankind Project alone has trained over 80,000 men since its founding in the 1980s. Men’s Sheds, an organization that started in Australia and has now spread to dozens of countries, runs over 3,000 sheds globally and is opening new ones at a rapid pace. Brothers, a nonprofit founded in 2017 by a former hedge fund manager named Kim Evensen, has grown into a multi-country community. Junto circles, Men’s Wisdom Council groups, ManTalks gatherings, Sacred Sons retreats, and dozens of smaller regional networks have, in the past five years, quietly built infrastructure for the kind of male connection that the mainstream culture stopped providing decades ago.

This movement is not a media phenomenon. It is not a podcast brand or a course funnel. It is, in most cases, free or nearly free, run by volunteers, organized around in-person meetings, and oriented toward outcomes that are not visible from the outside. It is also, on the available data, doing something the broader culture is failing to do: giving men access to the relational infrastructure that the Harvard happiness study identified as the variable that decides whether their lives go well.

Most men have never heard of any of these groups. Most men would benefit from joining one. This piece explains what they are, why they work, and how to find the one that fits.

What’s actually happening in these rooms

The specific format varies. Men’s Sheds organize around shared activities — woodworking, gardening, model railroading, repair work — with conversation happening shoulder-to-shoulder while the men’s hands are occupied. ManKind Project runs an intense initiatory weekend (the “New Warrior Training Adventure”) followed by ongoing weekly integration groups. Brothers and similar groups follow a circle format with structured check-ins and active listening. Sacred Sons combines somatic practices, breathwork, and emotional processing in retreat settings. The specifics differ.

What they have in common is more important than what differs. In nearly every format, men encounter three elements that are largely absent from the rest of their lives:

Permission to be unperformed. In most of a man’s life, he is performing a role. Husband. Father. Employee. Boss. Friend. Each role has expectations attached, and most of the time he is meeting those expectations or trying to. Inside a men’s group, the role drops away. The agreement among the men in the room is that everyone arrives with whatever they actually have — exhaustion, confusion, fear, grief, anger, joy, hope — and that the others will receive what arrives without trying to fix it or judge it. This sounds simple. It is, for many men, one of the rarest experiences in their lives.

Witnesses who are not stakeholders. A man’s wife, his children, his colleagues, his clients — these are all stakeholders in his life. They are affected by what he does. He cannot tell any of them about parts of his interior life without producing consequences. The men in a men’s group are not stakeholders. They are not affected by his marriage, his career, or his finances. They can therefore receive his disclosures without the receiving being entangled with their own interests. This neutrality is part of what makes the disclosure possible.

The specific texture of male connection. Men’s groups produce a kind of connection that is structurally different from the connections most men have with women in their lives. The conversations are shoulder-to-shoulder rather than face-to-face. The emotional content is high but not always verbalized. The expectations are framed around capacity rather than vulnerability. The men in the room are mostly trying to become better versions of themselves, and the support is calibrated to that goal rather than to the comfort of the current state. This is the kind of connection most men’s grandfathers had access to through trade unions, fraternal organizations, churches, and military service, and that most modern men have never experienced.

What comes out of these elements, repeatedly, is documented in the research on these programs. Lower depression scores. Lower suicidality. Higher reported life satisfaction. Better marriages. Better parenting. More risk-tolerance in domains the men were avoiding. Less compulsive behavior in domains they were over-engaged with. The effects are not dramatic in any single session. They compound over months and years.

The history this is recovering

To understand why this movement matters, it helps to understand what it is recovering. For most of human history, men lived inside dense male communities — fishing crews, hunting parties, military units, guilds, fraternal orders, religious brotherhoods, working-class neighborhoods. The structures varied by culture and era, but the function was constant: men encountered other men in regular, embodied, sustained ways, with shared work, shared ritual, and shared stakes.

The 20th century, for a complex mix of economic, cultural, and political reasons, dismantled most of this infrastructure. Suburbanization separated men from their workplaces and from each other. The decline of manual labor moved most men into office jobs that were, by design, individuated. The collapse of fraternal organizations — the Masons, Elks, Rotary, Knights of Columbus — removed a layer of male community that previous generations had taken for granted. The decline of religious participation removed another. Even the decline of military service in many Western countries removed a major source of structured male brotherhood.

The result is the demographic situation the male loneliness research now documents. The percentage of American men with six or more close friends dropped from 55% in 1990 to 27% in 2021. The percentage of men with no close friends rose from 3% to 15% in the same period. Roughly 51% of American men report having no confidant for emotional support beyond their wife — and many of them do not actually have that either.

This is not a personal failing in the affected men. It is a structural collapse of the infrastructure men used to inherit by default. The men’s group renaissance is, fundamentally, men rebuilding that infrastructure deliberately because it is no longer inherited.

The major networks worth knowing about

The landscape has matured to the point where a man looking for a group has real options. The major networks each have specific characteristics worth understanding.

Men’s Sheds are activity-based, low-friction, and welcoming. The Australian movement has spread to the UK, US, Canada, Ireland, and many other countries. Sheds typically meet in a workshop or community space, where the men work on projects — repairing donated equipment, building things for the community, running training sessions — while the social work happens informally alongside the manual work. For men who would never voluntarily enter a “circle” or sit in a room talking about feelings, the Shed is often the right entry point. The connection happens through the work, and the depth grows organically over months. Particularly strong for retired men and men in their fifties and sixties.

ManKind Project (MKP) is more intense and more transformational. The on-ramp is the New Warrior Training Adventure, a weekend-long initiation that participants describe as one of the most significant experiences of their lives. After the weekend, men typically join an “I-Group” — a small group that meets weekly or biweekly to do ongoing emotional and personal development work. MKP is for men who want serious psychological work and are willing to do it in a structured community over years. The methodology is unusual and not for everyone, but the men who fit it report dramatic outcomes.

Brothers (the organization founded by Kim Evensen) is more accessible and oriented toward education and skill-building. The focus is on teaching men what most of them were never taught — how to have emotionally honest conversations with other men, how to maintain friendships, how to be vulnerable without losing capacity. Online resources and in-person events combine into a more flexible entry path than the more intensive groups.

Sacred Sons runs retreats and ongoing circle work that integrate somatic practices, breathwork, ceremony, and emotional processing. The container is more spiritual and embodied than the Brothers or MKP approach. Particularly resonant for men with some history in yoga, meditation, or men’s work, and less of a fit for men who would find ritual elements off-putting.

Local men’s circles — independent, often connected to therapists, yoga studios, churches, or community centers — operate in most major cities. The quality varies. The benefit is accessibility. A man can usually find one within a 30-minute drive of where he lives if he looks.

Religious men’s groups — Promise Keepers reunions, parish men’s groups, GodBuddies networks, mosque brotherhood circles, sangha groups — provide the same fundamental function inside a religious framework. For men who already have a faith life, these are often the most natural entry point.

Online groups exist (Facebook groups, Discord servers, Slack workspaces, Circle communities) and can be useful as a complement to in-person groups but rarely produce the depth of effect that face-to-face meetings produce. The body, on the available data, requires the body of other men in the room to register the relational signal that produces the wellbeing effects.

What going to one is actually like

The first meeting is uncomfortable. This is universal. A man who has not done this work before will experience some combination of skepticism, embarrassment, and resistance. The format will feel weird. He will wonder whether the men in the room are people he can actually take seriously. He may feel that some of what they are doing is performative or unmanly. He may feel afraid that he will be asked to disclose something he is not ready to disclose.

This initial discomfort is reported by nearly every man who has joined a group. It is also, on the data, not a reliable signal about whether the group is good for him. The men who push through the first three to five meetings typically report a qualitative shift somewhere between the third and tenth meeting. The format starts to feel less strange. The men start to feel like people he respects. The disclosures, when they happen, feel earned rather than forced. The relief of having said out loud what he had been carrying alone for years is significant.

Most groups have norms designed to make the experience tolerable for new members. Confidentiality is explicit. Participation is invited rather than required. No one is forced to disclose more than they are ready to disclose. The men in the room have, almost without exception, been in his position and remember what it felt like. The hospitality, in functional groups, is real.

The men who report not benefiting from the experience are usually one of three types: men who attended a group that was poorly facilitated and would have benefited from a different group, men who arrived in a state of acute crisis that required clinical care rather than peer support, or men who were not actually ready to do the work and used the discomfort as confirmation that this was not for them. Most men in the first category find a better fit elsewhere. Most men in the second category benefit from the group eventually, after their acute issue has been clinically addressed. Most men in the third category come back, sometimes years later, when something else has cracked them open.

What changes in the men who stick with it

The longitudinal patterns in men who have been in groups for several years are striking. The changes are not always dramatic individually but they compound into different lives.

They become better fathers. Men who do regular emotional work with other men tend to be more emotionally available to their kids, particularly their sons. They are less likely to repeat the absent or distant father patterns that many of them inherited. The next generation receives something the current generation did not.

Their marriages improve. This is one of the most consistent reported outcomes. Wives of men in groups report dramatic changes — the man is less defensive, more present, more available, more able to receive feedback without escalation. The Gottman behaviors that predict marital success become more accessible to men who have practiced them in a group setting. The wife stops being his only outlet for emotional content. The marriage benefits from the load being distributed.

They make decisions differently. The man who has a regular group has access to a sounding board that is neither his wife nor his colleagues nor his parents. The decisions about career, finances, relationships, and direction become better when there is a community to think them through with. Some of the worst decisions modern men make — the impulsive career detonation, the affair, the impulsive purchase, the secret addiction — are decisions that would have been caught and questioned if a regular group existed in the man’s life.

They survive the hard things. The men who go through divorces, job losses, illnesses, deaths of parents, deaths of friends, and other major hardships report dramatically different experiences depending on whether they were in a group when the hardship hit. The group does not prevent the hardship. It changes the experience of moving through it. The man with twelve men checking on him through the worst year of his life moves through it differently than the man alone.

They become useful to younger men. Men who have been in groups for several years often start showing up in the lives of younger men in their orbit — sons, nephews, employees, neighbors — in ways that they would not have without the work. The generational transmission of male wisdom that has been so badly disrupted in the past few decades starts, in these specific men, to be re-established.

How to find one

The honest practical advice for a man who has read this far and is considering joining a group:

Pick a format that matches your style. A man who would never sit in a circle should probably not try ManKind Project as his entry point. A Men’s Shed is likely a better fit. A man who is in psychological pain and needs serious work should probably not start with a casual hobby-based group; the more intensive containers will serve him better. Match the format to what you actually need.

Use the search functions. Each of the major networks has a “find a group near me” function on their website. The matches are usually accurate. Show up to one and try it. If it doesn’t fit, try another.

Give it three meetings. The first meeting will be uncomfortable for nearly anyone. Reserve judgment until you have been three times. Many men’s experience of “I don’t think this is for me” is actually the discomfort of the first encounter rather than a real signal about the fit.

Be honest about your readiness. If you are not yet willing to do any actual disclosure work — to talk, eventually, about what is actually going on in your interior life — most groups will not serve you well. The work is the work. The men in the room are not there to entertain you. They are there to do the work and they expect you to be willing to do it too, when you are ready.

Treat it as a long-term investment. The benefits compound. The men who report the biggest changes have been in groups for three years or more. The investment is small in absolute terms — typically a few hours every two weeks plus occasional larger events — but the time horizon for the return is years, not months.

The deeper claim

The men’s group renaissance is recovering something the broader culture has not yet figured out how to replace. Modern men have unprecedented access to information about emotional health, mental health resources, podcasts about masculinity, books about purpose, and content about every dimension of male life. What they do not have, by default, is the actual experience of being in regular embodied community with other men who are trying to become better versions of themselves.

The content cannot substitute for the experience. This is the part the digital era keeps getting wrong. A man can listen to a thousand hours of Modern Wisdom and remain functionally isolated. He can read every book in the men’s-development canon and not have a single friend who has seen him cry. He can have brilliant insights about his own patterns and have no community in which to actually practice changing them. The content is upstream of the work. The work happens in rooms, with bodies, over time, with other men who are doing the same work.

The men’s groups are where this is being recovered. The recovery is real. The benefits are documented. The barriers to entry are mostly internal — the discomfort, the embarrassment, the assumption that this is not what men like me do. The men who push past those barriers find, in many cases, the most important community of their adult lives.

You probably do not know a man in such a group. Most men in such groups do not advertise the fact. If you ask carefully, you may discover that someone in your existing circle is already doing this work. If not, the groups exist, the search is easy, and the door is open.

The infrastructure your grandfathers inherited has been rebuilt, quietly, by men who decided to rebuild it. You can join what they have made. Many men in your situation have. The lives they are living, two years and five years after they walked into their first meeting, are not the lives they were on track to live before.