A Future Men event for International Men’s Day 2026

Fourteen men take their own lives every day in the UK.

Boys are one and a half times more likely to be suspended from school than girls, and more than twice as likely to be permanently excluded. Almost eight in ten say they have no clear idea what it means to be a man today.

For a growing number of boys, the answer is coming from a screen. An algorithm. A stranger in a comment section telling them who to blame and who to become. For others it’s a teacher who has run out of patience, a system that was never built with them in mind, or nobody at all. And for some, it’s still a father, a coach, a mentor. A man who turned up, and kept turning up.

This International Men’s Day, Future Men is coming back to QPR to put that question to a room full of people who can actually answer it: who is raising our boys?

Last year we started a conversation. This year we follow it all the way through, from the classroom to the changing room to the family home, with the people doing the work and the evidence to prove it.

What the day looks like

Ademola Adeyeba, founder of 1000 Black Boys and Chair of Black Men for Change, opens the day with the question at the heart of it all- ‘who is raising our boys?’.

Pablo Blackwood, Race and Ethnicity Lead at QPR, explores what football has taught him about identity and belonging, and what happens to a boy who never finds somewhere he belongs.

Future Men’s Chris Stein and Ann Cayenne lead a hands on workshop built from years of running our Boys Development Programme in London schools, sharing fresh findings from our independently evaluated randomised controlled trial, funded by the Youth Endowment Fund, on what actually changes a boy’s path.

Leon Thompson shares his short film, My Own Worst Enemy, a raw look at fatherhood, healing and family.

Sixteen year old writer and commentator Josh Sargent, who encountered the manosphere himself as a young teenager, asks the question most people avoid. Not whether online role models are good or bad, but what they’re giving boys that the rest of us aren’t.