Donald Jeffries heads an anti-smoking coalition, but at least part of his heart lies with his fledgling nonprofit men’s wellness group.

Donald Jeffries grew up on the move, as most Air Force brats do - in the Azores, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Guam, even for a little while in Belleville. In his late teens, his parents moved to Albuquerque, N.M., and he stayed there for 29 years. But the stillness didn’t reach any further than geography. Once in the job market, he tried everything.

Many New Mexicans remember him from a public-service interview that probably still runs on television; it was made when he headed the state’s efforts to combat shaken-baby syndrome. Other people may recall Jeffries the real estate agent, Jeffries the political campaign organizer or Jeffries the pastry chef. In St. Louis these days, he’s coming to be known as Jeffries the anti-smoking crusader.

Some people wear their lives’ themes on their business card: doctor, truck driver, priest. With other the outward coloration is deceptive, and you have to keep looking for clues.

The book Jeffries was carrying in his office on Hampton Avenue near Forest Park recently was “Mothers, Sons & Lovers” by Michael Gurian. He reads a book a week, and this one, like the majority, is about traditional gender roles and how they cripple both men and women.

He explains: “I think that, like at least some men in the culture, I’m dissatisfied with the ways in which men and women are socialized. I don’t want to be Tarzan and I don’t want anybody to be Jane.”

What separates Jeffries from other people who believe the same thing is what he’s done with the idea. He made it part of his shaken-baby job in New Mexico. He finds connections to it in interviews about entirely different subjects. When he arrived in St. Louis, he set up a nonprofit institute to teach about gender roles. He envisions a center that would offer services to violent offenders, repressed men and troubled fathers. The fact that he’s had to take very different jobs on the way to his goal doesn’t seem to faze him. His focus is personal, even if it extends well beyond the personal. He says, “The thing I’ve realized is that I don’t want to offer equality to women as much as I want it myself.”

A Washington think tank, Ashoka, calls people like Jeffries social entrepreneurs. According to its Web site, “The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck and to provide new ways to get it unstuck. He or she finds what is not working and solves the problem by changing the system.”

The theme of Jeffries’ life found him in 1987 at an Albuquerque church presentation on men’s wellness. He had been sexually abused as a child. The notion that his concept of being a man may be complicating his recovery was startling enough. But beyond this, wellness suggested that traditional notions of manhood, such as being strong and unemotional, and womanhood, such as being flexible and passive, still might be pinching Americans in all sorts of destructive ways, thus contributing both to women’s sense of being trapped and to men’s violence, alcoholism, emotional repression and drug abuse.

When Jeffries took the job as New Mexico’s coordinator on shaken-baby issues, he was struck by one detail that a less focused person might have skipped: Men do most of the damage in shaken-baby cases, and most of the damaged babies are male, too. Why were the abusers more angry with male babies? Jeffries saw a connection to men’s socialization, and so he started giving talks around New Mexico on the destructive things we’re all taught about what to expect from men. The city of Albuquerque was sufficiently impressed to distribute a videotape statewide, after which a cable-TV stations interviewed Jeffries, and that interview played and replayed as a public service until New Mexicans, he confesses with sympathy, have seen it “ad nauseam”.

He came to Washington University for graduate studies in social work. It didn’t take long for him to see work that needed doing. For instance, when he visited a men’s discussion group in Clayton, he found that, in a region that’s 20 percent black, there as not a single black face.

“They literally didn’t notice it,” he marvels, even though black, Hispanic, gay and other minority men have at least as many problems with stereotyping as whites do.

He found, too, that few St. Louis-area therapists were trained to deal with past sexual abuse of men. While about 50 percent of abuse-related issues are the same for men and women, the other 50 percent aren’t, with the biggest one for men being that “in our culture it’s not acceptable for men to be victims.”

He thought some formal institution must be working on these issues, but found that they weren’t. Mark Schwartz of the Masters & Johnson Institute said it would be wonderful if a men’s wellness center opened in the St. Louis area, as did Mike Lew, author of the male child-abuse survivor’s self-help book Victims No Longer.” Both encouraged Jeffries to start such a center; neither offered money - seemingly impractical encouragement for a man without a job, let alone deep pockets.

But in mid-2000, he launched the Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute anyway, with a Web site, some persuasive endorsements, a Missouri nonprofit certificate and one officer, Donald Jeffries. “One of the things I leaned is that the person who has the most vision and energy about a project is the one who’s got to carry it through,” he said. “And it gets pretty lonely.”

Jeffries turned job interviews with area nonprofits into opportunities to meet movers-and-shakers and familiarize them with men’s wellness issues. At one point, a man impressed with Jeffries’ dedication supplemented his income for five months so he could focus on Mariposa full time. But the big, seed money kept its distance, the stipend he received from a family trust didn’t cover his living expenses, and the grind of short-term jobs eventually ground him down.

“I mean, basically I starved if you want to know the truth,”, he said. By last spring, he put Mariposa on hiatus, started living off his credit cards and spent most of his waking hours looking for a permanent job.

In August his ship came in: He became the director of the Missouri Partnership on Smoking or Health, a three-year collaborative project of major health nonprofit organizations. Because it uses all his organizational skills and because he’s so disgusted with smoking, “I tell people I’ve been preparing 25 years to do this job.”

But it’s hard to imagine Donald Jeffries’ ship if it doesn’t have men’s wellness on the pennant. The social entrepreneur smiles. When he interviewed for the job, he told the people who talked to him that “whatever I learn here at the anti-smoking partnership will benefit my nonprofit.”

A coalition of state health organizations working to reduce smoking, partly by ensuring adequate funding of public eduction and raising the excise tax on cigarettes. One of Donald Jeffries’ particular concerns is the disproportionately large impact that tobacco-related illnesses have on members of minority groups.

Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute

A seat-of-the-pants nonprofit group that hopes to grow into a national center, Mariposa hopes to educate men and women about gender roles and men’s wellness and to increase opportunities for men to discuss wellness issues and get therapy for sexual abuse or anger management if they need it.

Address: P.O. Box 190371, St. Louis, MO 63119

Web site: http://www.mmwi-stl.org

Email:

Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute was founded in 2001

to help men become emotionally healthy.