The
GLOBAL
LAB
From The Digital Village to The Global Lab
Everywhere, the world names “masculinity in crisis.” It offers data and theory to explain the crisis. But this isn’t a crisis, it’s a reckoning.
It’s a reckoning about power, powerlessness, emotional illiteracy, and the cost of what men are taught to suppress, inherit, perform, pass on, and how that shapes them, shows up, is professionalized into leadership, labor, and love.
What this reckoning requires is a resource. We’ve built one.
MOVING MASCULINITY GLOBAL LAB
a 10-year initiative
There are 4 parallel arms in theGlobal Lab.
1: THE GLOBAL PUBLIC ROLL-OUT
2: THE NARRATIVE ARM
3: THE PRACTICE ARM
4: THE CULTURAL ARM
The MOVING MASCULINITY GLOBAL LAB is a 10-year initiative of emotional infrastructure for a changing world.
It is a living resource built from the MOVING MASCULINITY DIGITAL VILLAGE and designed to support individuals, organizations, educators, institutions, communities, and cultural leaders to do this emotional work and shape masculinity differently. The Global Lab develops emotional literacy.
We approach emotional literacy as public health, leadership capacity, civic culture, healing practice and collective accountability. We develop it through cultural production, narrative change, capacity training, curricula and healing practices.
This Global Lab is your pathway to engage, explore, learn, practice, convene, teach, question, unlearn, rebuild, and heal.
Below are the different ways to enter the work.
stage 1: THE GLOBAL PUBLIC ROLLOUT
We go from digital village to public encounter.
The Global Public Rollout brings the Moving Masculinity Digital Village into physical space through public screenings and facilitated dialogue. At the center is a narrated film weaving poetry, story, sound, conversation, and ceremony featuring Black men ages 16–60 speaking across vulnerability, loss, grief, loneliness, power, brotherhood, joy, imagination, emotional inheritance, and future-building.
It is the digital village brought to life as a shared public experience.
The Public Encounter travels across communities, cities, countries, and continents. It’s the gateway into the Global Lab and the first entry point into the wider resource ecosystem. Through screenings and facilitated dialogue, individuals, organizations, institutions, educators, and communities encounter the emotional, cultural, societal, historical and relationalrealities shaping Black men’s lives across generations.
This encounter creates space to engage the work as resource, practice, reflection, dialogue, and institutional inquiry. It’s where participants begin navigating the four arms of the Global Lab and identifying how the work can be engaged within their own communities, organizations, leadership cultures, and public life.
All other parts of the Global Lab start here.
Our 2026 rollout sites are:
ACCRA • NEW YORK • LOS ANGELES • CHICAGO • CAPE TOWN
Join the Public Encounter. Enter the Global Lab.
STAGE 2: THE NARRATIVE ARM
UNFOLD is the narrative arm of the Global Lab. It is where the reckoning finds voice.
Part reflection, part interrogation, part living archive, UNFOLD gathers notes, essays, audio, and video exploring masculinity across the personal, political, familial, cultural, institutional, and global realities shaping our lives.
Contributors come from multiple sectors including academia, arts and culture, education, health, human rights, media, organizing, and public life. They are men and women writing from lived experience, professional practice, creative inquiry, and intellectual engagement.
This is not an academic journal. The title “notes” is intentional.
UNFOLD is designed as an accessible, evolving space for multiple voices to question, explore, document, challenge, and contribute to the larger conversation around masculinity, emotional literacy, leadership, race, power, healing, and social change.
Through essays, reflections, conversations, sound, and storytelling, UNFOLD builds a public language for the emotional, relational, and civic realities men are navigating across generations and geographies. It is a growing global archive shaped in real time by the communities engaging the work.
Subscribe to UNFOLD on Substack and enter the narrative arm of the Global Lab.
STAGE 3: THE PRACTICE ARM
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The Practice Arm is where emotional literacy becomes practice. It brings emotional literacy into leadership, institutions, communities, and everyday life through training, curricula, and applied tools.It is built through the four rooms of the Global Lab, translating the MM Digital Village into living frameworks people can actually use. We reject universal models of masculinity. Everything here is shaped by place, history, and lived reality.
It’s built through the four rooms of the Global Lab, translating the MM Digital Village into tools, practices, and frameworks that can be used in real contexts. We reject universal models of masculinity. Everything here is shaped by place, history, and lived reality. This is where emotional literacy becomes practice.
CORE PATHWAYS
MM16: FROM THE CLASSROOM TO THE C-SUITE
Leadership training for men in institutional and executive spaces. It traces how boys first learn power and powerlessness, how that learning is embodied in masculinity, professionalized into leadership, and shapes decision-making and organizational culture. Emotional literacy as leadership practice, for men of all races.
MM16: THE COMMUNITY
Intergenerational work in Black institutions and cultural spaces - churches, fraternities, HBCUs, barbershops - where masculinity is formed and reinforced. Structured gatherings for reflection, dialogue, and truth-telling using MM tools. The boy at 16, the man he became.
EMOTIONAL JUSTICE AMBASSADORS
Practitioners who carry MM methodology into lived spaces. Artists, educators, organizers, facilitators. They hold dialogue, facilitate encounters, and translate emotional literacy into practice on the ground. Becoming an EJ Ambassador is training, immersion, and stewardship.
MM SATELLITES
Place-based interventions for communities where emotional life is reduced to survival, silence, or pathology. They create targeted emotional literacy work, local activations, and pathways for scale.
Two current focuses:
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THE INSIDERS: From Emotional Solitary to Emotional Literacy - formerly incarcerated men navigating identity, isolation, and reintegration
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THE VETERANS: Navigating Emotional Battlefields - veterans moving through their emotional world post-service life
The Practice Arm is a space of on-going design. Our Global Lab continues to develop training, curricula, and resources.
STAGE 4: THE CULTURAL ARM
The Dreaming Ceremony is a global rite of passage for Black boys at age 16.
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It is a structured, intimate gathering where boys and men come into conversation across generations through storytelling, reflection, and guided dialogue.
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It creates space for what is often unspoken: love, loss, grief, regret, joy, fear, responsibility, and wisdom. It is a space honoring reflection, and celebrating imagination.
At its core, it is an exchange between generations.
For the 16-year-old, it’s about the boy he is and the man he’s becoming
For the elder, it’s a reflection on the boy he was and the man he became
Together, they hold a shared practice of listening, remembering, sharing and speaking truth across time.This is formative, and how we pass emotional literacy between generations in real time.
The Dreaming Ceremony is a cultural practice of imagination, reflection, and becoming. It builds a global language of Black boyhood and emerging manhood rooted in emotional literacy, presence, and relational truth.
THE DREAMING CEREMONY MEMORY SET
The Dreaming Ceremony Memory Set is the practical guide for hosting the ceremony in families, communities, schools, faith spaces, and organizations.
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It contains the structure, facilitation guidance, and tools needed to hold the ceremony with care, clarity, and cultural grounding.
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With it, families, communities, organizations can host their own ceremonies - creating moments of reflection, recognition, revelation, sharing and transition. They’re creating pathways of emotional literacy between generations.
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This marks a young person’s entry into emotional literacy with an elder, and a healing for an elder who may give voice to what has been silenced or suppressed.
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This builds a global cultural practice: a living archive of Black boyhood, manhood, memory, and exchange as part of.
MOVING MASCULINITY GLOBAL LAB
is civic infrastructure for emotional literacy. It operates through encounter, narrative, practice, and cultural ritual - four connected entry points into how masculinity is formed, expressed, inherited, and transformed across generations.
It is an ecosystem for engaging emotional life within masculinity as leadership, culture, education, and public practice.
