As a teenager coming of age in the New South Wales coastal city of Wollongong, south of Sydney, in the early 2000s, Melissa readily confessed to being ‘a Britney-Spears-obsessed, body-building, loving, cheeseburger addict.’ She was also passionate about men. She found that she just could not stop herself thinking about young men. Whether or not Toxic, Gimme More, or Baby One More Time have endured on Melissa’s 2025 playlists, her passion for men has, if anything become more fervent with the passage of time.
Melissa’s obsession with young men can be traced back to her second year as a communications and media student. It dawned on her at the age of 19 that she was a privileged young woman being given every chance to realise her potential, a woman invested in and investable.
Not so for young men who featured so frequently on the news cycles. Denounced by the media, these were Australia’s undesirables, the cause of so many of society’s ills. Melissa absorbed story after story about the damage done by young men. As far as the media was concerned – the vandalism, the abusive behaviour towards women, the reckless driving, the alcohol-fuelled driving – all of it toxic.
These relentless reports painted young men as drunken violent no-hopers, Melissa said. Aware that the top two causes of death for young Australian men were suicide and road accidents, she realised then that there was something seriously wrong with how young men were not being effectively engaged in the community. Melissa also discovered from research that, in fact, 70 per cent of media coverage about young men was negative. And young men weren’t like that, not in her experience anyway.
Rather than condemn the so-called no-hopers, Melissa thought someone needed to challenge the stereotypes of young men. Someone needed to work out how to address the mental health and well-being of those young men clearly struggling with their identity, with lack of parental and family support, with a feeling of being disconnected from their local community, or worse, with life itself.
That wasn’t the only thing that troubled teenage Melissa. She worried that becoming an ‘adult’ would distract her, or lead her away from a life lived with passion, a life in which holding down a job and paying the bills would matter more than any vision of creating good in the world.
Like all philanthropists disrespectful of the status quo, Melissa resolved not to wait for the other kind of no-hopers, declaring bluntly, ‘Screw it, I’ll start something myself.’ She called her initiative The Top Blokes Foundation with the simple objective at first of generating positive news stories about young men, in the local media. To do that, Melissa came up with the idea of an evening event, the Top Blokes Awards, to recognise and celebrate the achievements of young men who volunteer and help others in their community. The Top Blokes Awards succeeded in catching the public, the media and sponsors’ attention.
Since those early days The Top Blokes Foundation has evolved as a charity. By the end of 2016 it was delivering social education and peer mentoring programmes for over 1,000 teenagers and young men aged between 14 and 24 annually. Innovations like the Building Blokes life and pre-employment mentoring programme were not only having an impact on 16-24-year-old young men in need of skill development, employability and social inclusion, they were succeeding in building a coalition of society partners. Participation in Building Blokes, for example, meant that young men could ‘volunteer off’ any unpaid fines with the Department of State Revenue.
As Top Blokes expanded its programmes and increased the age ranges to help boys and younger teens as well as young men, more Australian decision-makers took note. Awarded the 2016 New South Wales Young Australian Of The Year and the EY Social Entrepreneur Of The Year in 2017, Melissa channelled the recognition into more collaborations, more innovations, and a greater geographical reach. Two years after being named Australian Charity Of The Year in 2020, The Top Blokes Foundation created a Graduate Club for all Top Blokes mentoring alumni, reaching no fewer than 15,000 boys and young men.
Today, any of the 20,000 or so aspiring top blokes on the mentoring programmes of Melissa’s charity will come face-to-face with the spectrum of critical topics about behaviour and responsibility, from addictions to emotional intelligence, from sexual health and consent to pornography, from self-respect to resilience.
Melissa continues to lead The Top Blokes Foundation, more mad about men than ever. Her 19-year-old conviction has only strengthened. As if becoming an ‘adult’ would weaken her passion for investing in young men, for helping them not to give up on life but to recognise the value in themselves, for educating and empowering them to make changes that will create a more equal, cohesive and tolerant society. Moving on from Britney is more likely.