Movember Youth Sport

Objective: This purpose of this project will use sport as a setting to improve mental health, promote healthy masculinities, and resilience skills for youth in underserved and underfunded communities. The project will gather knowledge to support the co-design of effective programs in partnership with Movember and key stakeholders, provide expertise to Movember on program development to ensure an effective program that is youth informed, and oversee a robust evaluation of the initial pilot program delivery phase. Period of Performance: The project will begin on 09/01/2024 and conclude on 08/31/2025. This project will be completed in four phases. The first phase will involve partnership building with Movember to learn about organizational history, objectives, and programming. The second phase will focus on partnership building with two programs currently using sport to support underserved youth. The third phase will be dedicated to the co-design and development of scalable programming to facilitate improvements in youth mental health, healthy masculinities, and resilience skills through sport. The fourth phase will focus on evaluation the program and its effectiveness in achieving objectives and supporting program stakeholders. Project Personnel Dr. Tarkington Newman will serve as a consultant on the project and will devote 9.97% of academic year effort, and 2% of summer effort during the project. Dr. Newman has extensive research and programming experience related to supporting mental health literacy and healthy masculinity for youth populations from economically disadvantaged, urban communities. Dr. Newman will serve as a consultant throughout all four phases of the project to provide expertise related to partnership building, program design, and evaluation related to mental health healthy masculinity for youth in underserved communities. Specifically, Dr. Newman will support the design and analysis of focus group interviews, help with the design and development of programming, and supporting the evaluation of programming.