About the New Zealand Men’s Group Network

Originally from the United States, I found men's work in 2012 in Boulder, Colorado. I later attended a ManKind Project New Warrior Training Adventure and sat in a regular group in Northern California for several years. After moving to New Zealand in 2017, I reconnected with the work in Nelson, where a strong and established community was already thriving. I am an active member of two regular men's groups, have helped create and facilitate new groups, and contribute to organising the annual International Men's Day event in Nelson.

I believe men's circles provide a vitally important space in modern society — a safe container for deep sharing and transformation, and for a brotherhood of men to hold each other accountable.

As a website designer and developer by trade, I am also responsible for most of what you see here. My focus has been on growing the directory to include more groups and events, adding resources for men who are new to this work, and working with my peers and elders in Nelson and beyond to slowly establish the NZ Men's Group Network as one of the leading organisations in the men's work space in Aotearoa.

I came to men's work in 2013 through a mental health crisis. My first experience was a Rotoiti Men's Retreat. It opened my mind and soul in a major way. There I was invited to join a new men's group, which I am still part of.

I believe in accountability, radical self-responsibility, and the brotherhood of men. Our group places a strong emphasis on honest feedback and holding each other to account.

Five years ago, Victor and I embarked on a mission to make men's groups available to any man who wants one. We created the Nelson International Men's Day event, which makes our work visible to the male public, presents relevant issues through experts in the field, and helps us connect men's groups with the wider social work and counselling community.

We have created 7 new groups so far, and I have been involved in facilitating all of them.

I am proud of our achievements, including a leadership workshop, a nationwide men's group website, strong connections with West Coast, Christchurch, and Kaikōura groups, as well as Essentially Men in Auckland and Wellington, and a thriving scene in Nelson of at least 10 connected groups.

I moved from the UK to NZ in 1989. My first circle was a Scott Peck one in Auckland in 1996 — profound, and it led to my first weekly group in Nelson, the Buddhist Bakery: nothing to do with Buddhism or bread, led by a man from Centrepoint. I attended a year's psychodrama course, and then the Tui Men's Gathering in 2000, at a time when nearly all my friends were female. They were doing Men's Anger Work with deep ritual. Blew my head off. This led to the Nelson Men's Circle, which I am still in — a group that has run two Men's Retreats every year since 1995, plus the Tui Men's Gatherings.

I spent three years in an SLAA addiction group as a persistent hetero-relationship starter, and learned a great deal about addiction from a beloved uncle, a 30-year reforming alcoholic and counsellor at Taupo prison. I have counselling training and around 10,000 hours of men's circle work — a hard-won skill with no formal qualification recognised or offered.

In the last five years I have mentored a new men's group each year, growing out of Hardy's Nelson International Men's Day, using a teepee on some disused land I own. All these groups are thriving. I stay in direct contact with many men across the country, motivated by the real and positive changes that happen for committed participants and their families.

I'm a regular member of six groups: two men's groups, a mixed group, a climate group, and two biking groups.

My first men's group experience goes back to 1982 in Christchurch, where I became involved in the Convergence gathering. After a few years my life changed and I became less involved, though it remained an enduring interest. Eventually I shifted to Australia for two years and found an established men's group in Wagga Wagga that I was just old enough to join.

About 13 years ago I returned to Nelson, where I grew up, and started attending Convergence again — which put me in touch with local men's groups. I've become increasingly involved since then, and especially in the last five years, where I've moved from participating in my own men's groups to helping establish new groups and promote men's groups and men's issues.

Around 1994 I attended a men's gathering in Tui Community in Golden Bay. I found a group of men speaking openly about the issues in their lives, within a supportive circle. Wanting more of this, around 1996 I put out an invitation for men to meet twice a year, in autumn and spring. Together we developed a culture of empathic listening, self responsibility, and speaking our truth.

From 2021 we've met at the Rotoiti Outdoor Lodge and Education Centre. The work has grown since then, and it's the deep sharing in our circles, along with the robust humour outside them, that draws us back, a community of fine men working on ourselves and supporting each other.

The work has also expanded to men and women meeting in the Tui Treefield in Golden Bay, twice yearly in winter and spring. This adds a new layer of connection as we explore how we relate to each other, and to the masculine and feminine.

Hosting these events brings deep connection and joy into my life.

I was born in North Wales in 1970. On my way to men's work, I lived a very Zen existence in South Korea, where I studied Buddhist martial arts and meditation for five years. I am a trained and ordained Druid of some 20 years, and I still follow the ‘oak door pathway’.

I'm a qualified drama practitioner and a laughter yoga teacher. I've spent many years working with kids as an educator, having worked in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Oman, and Aotearoa, as well as with street kids in Peru. I also worked as a clown doctor in various hospitals around the world, including the Muscat hospital in the Sultanate of Oman.

I took New Warrior Training in Auckland in 2011 and read the book Iron John by Robert Bly. Game changer! That same year, I embarked on a storytelling odyssey around the planet. I fused ‘the work’ with my experiences in plant medicines, rituals, Sundance, and myth-telling to forge myself a new life path. I started an I-Group in Taranaki, took part in various rites of passage events, and have sat for three years in a local group here in Mohua.

Most recently, I'm being supported and held in a regular sauna practice with a small group of local men. My current focus in the work is through the lens of psychosynthesis. I enjoy reading oracle cards (an ongoing journey), deep nature immersion, and entheogenic healing and counselling services. I focus often, but not exclusively, on addiction support with men and our broken culture.

I also enjoy listening to The Fantastic Mr Fox with my boy.

At fifty, the end of my marriage left me with something I couldn't ignore: the long-held suspicion that my life hadn't started yet, and the question — whose life have I been living?

Meditation and gratitude began the slow work of healing. Then a desire to serve my community led me to Lifeline, where training as a phone counsellor introduced me to the quiet power of holding space without agenda. Robert Bly's Iron John named something that had been nameless. A Mankind Project New Warrior Training Adventure gave me what the solitary work couldn't — belonging as a man amongst men, making sense of the lives we wanted to put behind us and the lives we wanted to see in front of us.

In the years since I have organised and facilitated men's retreats, run fortnightly circles, and played a central role in organising International Men's Day in Ōtautahi.

I've since returned to tertiary study to complete a counselling qualification — not as a career pivot, but as a commitment: to make men's work the final and most deliberate chapter of my life. I bring to MensGroup.nz a belief that the network of men's organisations taking root in Aotearoa is something worth building together.