Haseeb Riaz

Building a safer community requires men to engage with and take active ownership of our behaviours, mental health, and culture - and that conversation starts with our boys.

After leaving high school, pivotal conversations with key women in my life regarding the prevalence of sexual harassment deeply altered my perspective. Paired with observing my mates struggle silently with mental health, we realised that a culture of conformity and a lack of accountability both stem from the same root: rigid, harmful masculine ideals.

There was an urgent, unmet need for relatable, peer-to-peer spaces where boys could speak openly with young men about vulnerability and holding each other accountable. That passion led to co-founding Man Up, Western Australia’s peak provider of positive masculinity workshops for high school boys. Growing alongside my clinical career as a junior doctor at Royal Perth Hospital, Man Up has engaged over 50,000 young men across WA since 2020.

Being recognised as the 2026 WA Young Australian of the Year for this work reinforced that our grassroots approach works. However, Australia still lacks a centralised, evidence-based framework to guide this vital education nationally.

Through my Churchill Fellowship, I am travelling across global hubs to investigate the complete ecosystem of this work: the why by engaging research centres on foundational evidence, the what by analysing diverse educational toolkits, and the how by studying real-world implementation, feedback, and longitudinal evaluation. I aim to translate these insights back to Australia, equipping facilitators with world-class tools and informing national curriculum policy to break the cycle of preventable harm - aiming to re-define what it means to 'man up'.