Real Men’s Health is showcasing excellence in men’s health programs through our Men’s Health Program Series.
In each article, we will ask 5 questions of a featured program organiser to gain insight into what they do and their thoughts on men’s health today.
In this article, we speak with Tim Hewson, from Mongrels Men.
Q1: Could you please describe your role in the organisation?
I am the Founder and a Director of the Mongrels Men Health and Wellbeing men’s mental health charity.
I also have the pleasure of being one of our volunteer Community Champions and run our weekly Community Meet Up program in Manly as well as our weekly Social Soccer program.
When I am not busy running the charity, fundraising, organising events, or looking for new volunteers and locations you will find me attending one of our regular weekly Community Meet Ups or running Workshops for our communities.
Q2: Could you please describe what your organisation does?
Mongrels Men is a community-based mental health charity focused on development and delivery of non-clinical and prevention-focused mental health programs.
Our programs are designed to help promote, prevent, reduce, and control the occurrence and impact of mental health illnesses, disorders and suicide impacting Australian men.
Our weekly Community Meet Ups are designed to get blokes out of bed and off the couch, outdoors into fresh air, moving, connecting, and communicating with other blokes to help develop support networks with other men in their local communities.
Our monthly Dog House Workshops are education-focused and designed to help blokes build resilience toolkits. The workshops improve mental health knowledge, and provide men with the tools, skills, and knowledge to help support the wellbeing of themselves and others.
Our Mental Health Workshops educate men about mental health, help to reduce negative stigma, and normalise mental health conversations by helping them better identify the signs and symptoms of poor mental health, teach men how to have challenging conversations, tackle conversations about suicide and give them the skills, knowledge, and confidence to support themselves and others experiencing poor mental health.
Q3: What are the biggest changes you have observed within the men’s health space over the past 5-years?
On the positive side, mental health awareness has improved, negative stigma has reduced and we have more money being invested, granted, and donated to mental health than ever before.
Unfortunately, the mental health numbers continue to rise and the number of men who die every day by suicide has not improved.
We are seeing men being more positively encouraged to open-up and share their challenges, but plenty of blokes do not and we have a long way to go before making a dent in the men’s mental illness and suicide numbers.
Q4: If hypothetically, the Government offered you an unrestricted $1M grant tomorrow, what one project would you spend it all on?
I would rollout our programs to 2,000 community locations across Australia so we could positively impact the mental health and wellbeing of 1 million Australian men.
We know that 50% of Australia men will experience a mental health illness in their lifetime, that 75% of men do not seek professional support when needed and when they do only 50% of them complete their therapy.
This means that non-clinical, prevention-focused, and community-based programs like ours are increasingly important for creating a locally based safety-net for men.
Q5: Do you have a favourite sports team, when & why did you start supporting them?
If I had to pick one team, it would be the mighty Seaforth ‘Mongrels’ football (soccer) team.
We started the team just over 10 years ago and it is positively impacted my life in ways I will forever be grateful for. It has kept me fit, motivated and connected to community. I have developed new friendships, created new support networks, it has made me smile on the dark days and its also saved lives.
Thank you for sharing with Real Men’s Health
