The Men of Strength (MOST) Club provides boys and young men with a structured and supportive space to learn about healthy masculinity.
The Women Inspiring Strength and Empowerment (WISE) Club offers a space for girls and young women to create a healthy understanding of empowered womanhood.
“My active involvement in this revolutionary program has been the sole catalyst for my maturation into a self-aware and confident young man.”
— Aaron, BAnneker Academic high school (DC)
Community Strength Projects
Community Strength Projects translate the lessons of our curricula guiding of MOST and WISE Clubs into inspired public action, as members organize and become activist leaders in their schools and communities. Through intergenerational and near-peer mentoring, Club members develop, execute, and evaluate their own youth-led initiatives.
By sharing what they learn in their Clubs with the broader community, expanding their capacity as leaders, and earning service-learning credits to fulfill graduation requirements along the way, Club members reap the tangible benefits of active participation and the intrinsic rewards that accompany service to others.
Students at the School Without Walls in Washington, DC, lead a Community Strength Project around civic engagement and voter registration for their peers.
Explore past and ongoing Community Strength Projects across four key areas of our youth development work:
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Solutions Through Film, the annual Black History Month Film Festival founded in 2002 with the American Film Institute (AFI) and originally led by MOST Club. Solutions Through Film highlights the rich innovations, traditions, and contributions of Black Americans in the struggle to realize justice, equity, and opportunity for all. Today, co-led by MOST and WISE Clubs, this project leverages the power of film as a medium to inform, advocate, galvanize, and inspire solutions to challenges facing the Black community and the global community as a whole. At the festival, intergenerational audiences take part in critical discussions through youth-led workshops on the featured films selected by Club members.
Counter Stories, a multimedia series produced by MOST and WISE Club members that presents positive, authentic counter messages through an exploration of lived experience, art, culture, and social justice in their lives. Counter Stories are narratives that resist negative, limiting dominant values and expectations—and are the foundation for developing healthier personal identities open to more diverse expressions and actions. This series provides Club members and their audiences with opportunities to live the counter story.
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30 Day of Strength, when MOST and WISE Club members devote the entire month to “showing their strength” in ways that create and cultivate environments of learning, activism, and positive change to prevent and end violence against women and girls during Sexual Assault Awareness Month every April. Throughout this campaign, the MOST and WISE Clubs collaborate on a series of daily activities geared toward mobilizing their peers on the topic of relationship violence.
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Project Me, an annual empowerment conference created for young women led by the WISE Club. Hosted every spring, dozens of young leaders gather to learn from positive role models, engage in self-expression, develop relationships with their peers, and emerge more empowered, inspired and confident. Through a day’s worth of mainstage and breakout sessions, participants are encouraged to reflect on how they see themselves in their families, communities, and society.
Young Professionals Week, a launchpad to introduce MOST and WISE Club members and their fellow students to young entrepreneurs and new career opportunities. Young Professionals Week grew from the Club members’ desires to connect themselves and their peers to diverse routes of success and to empower each other to think more about their futures. During the week, Club members have various opportunities to build networks with a diverse group of forward-thinking local business leaders and are encouraged to sustain those new relationships into their careers.
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MCSR Gaming, formerly the Eazy Gaming Group, our esports league for MOST and WISE Club members. Launched in response to members’ interest in the gaming industry and more opportunities to connect outside of their Clubs, MCSR Gaming provides safe, supportive space for young people to connect with their peers. The league encourages members to bring the healthier, nonviolent norms established in the MOST and WISE Clubs into their competitive gameplay and supports their interest in the growing opportunities within the gaming industry, allowing them to connect gameplay to specific STEAM programs that they learn as a part of their participation in the MOST and WISE Clubs.
“MOST Club has helped me greatly in life by giving me the ability to look at people and relationships in a different way. Now I am more aware of what it means for men and women to have respectful relationships with each other.”
— Justin, School Without Walls (DC)
Outcomes for MOST and WISE Club Members
100% of MOST and WISE Club members participate in at least one aspect of Community Strength Project planning, facilitation, attendee recruitment, or promotion.
85% view themselves as a critical agent of change in ending men’s violence against women.
85% act as peer leaders and be viewed as leaders by their peers and other observers.
85% improve their attendance and academic performance.
85% reduce their suspensions, expulsions, and critical incidents.
20% of MOST and WISE Club members bring a parent, guardian, or other adult to a Community Strength Project.
At MCSR, we value evaluation and strive to make sure that we are serving our young people and community in a way that is transformative.
MCSR’s youth development work is made possible in part by Learn24 and Out of School Time.
