Vision
OUR VISION: CREATING A MEN’S WELLNESS COMMUNITY
Men, especially queer men, in the Portland area are facing some huge challenges to our individual and collective wellness. To meet those challenges, we are creating a Men’s Wellness Community that is giving us practical, affordable, empowering services and support regardless of our financial or health circumstances. We need a community that won’t abandon us, and that is based on the values of mutual support, wholistic wellness, community ownership & control, and abundance. Here are the factors we believe compel us to act to create such a network now.
Men in the Portland area are creating one of the most comprehensive, creative, and diverse men’s wellness communities in the world. Our community provides highly tailored services to all kinds of men based on our wellness passions and needs for mind/body/spirit wellness and an ethic of mutual support, rather than an ethic of greed and scarcity. We must create a community that learns about and engages each man’s specific wellness visions, challenges, and resources. And most importantly this community must not abandon men when they suffer wellness or financial set backs. It must be there no matter what.
As a record number of us grow older, we cannot afford to wait for the government or health insurance companies to fix the health care system. We now have one of the worst health care systems in the developed world. With costs increasing exponentially while government and the business sector continue to cut budgets, almost everyone is predicting the current system will either continue to get worse — or collapse entirely.
All Manifest programs are open to men regardless of their ability to pay. We expect all men in the wellness community to be of service to other men in the network in ways that match their abilities, skills, and resources. Again, no one will be turned away for lack of funds or because of pre-existing conditions.
We will serve one another from an ethic of abundance and mutual support. While this sounds like pie-in-the-sky, such a wellness network is based on the traditional bartering and mutual support systems used by rural, indigenous, and traditional societies all over the world throughout human history. Bartering and mutual support for health care is a much older, more reliable, and more traditionally successful system than health insurance (which is why the current health insurance system in the U.S. is in a state of collapse). Until universal healthcare somehow miraculously arrives from on high, a Men’s Wellness Network is something concrete and immediately useful we can experiment with in the Portland men’s community. We can learn from one another, and we can help one another.
In the coming years your health will increasingly depend on the quality of the network of people who will support your wellness no matter what. Money will not be enough. Even wealthy people are finding themselves bankrupt overnight by the ways our state and nation fails to deal with health insurance and catastrophic illness. Traditional health insurance and the bloated health care industry it is propping up are increasingly becoming a mirage that gives no one wellness. It is time to invest in a network of men, here and now, who can and will support all of us in very practical, individualized, affordable, and holistic ways.
Let’s start small, make lots of mistakes, learn from them quickly, and build very real and practical systems of mutual support.
We can do this. You can help.
To learn more about volunteering to help create the Men’s Wellness Network,
* check out the available Volunteer Positions or
* create your own volunteer position that is tailored to your passions, skills, & experience, or
* contact us to brainstorm what is possible for you and the Men’s Wellness Network:
Bart at 503-223-8822 or (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)