THREE MEN.
ONE CONVICTION.

Our Story

The Catalyst

This mission did not begin with a strategic plan. It began with a tragedy and a mirror.

Baruch's father took his own life facing a mirror — the family's second suicide, twenty years after his grandmother's — as detailed in his book The Guy in the Glass: Six Questions to See the Man You're Meant to Be. For Baruch, this work is not metaphor. It is a response to his father's choice, and to the same choice made by far too many men. Every 13 minutes, another reaches that edge.

For more than two decades Baruch served as a congregational rabbi, officiating over 500 funerals and sitting with thousands in their darkest hours. The work taught him what the institutions miss: the systems built to catch men in crisis arrive too late. After his father's death, he narrowed his life's work to one question — how to reach men before crisis. He earned a doctorate in pastoral counseling, trained as a Diplomate in Logotherapy through the Viktor Frankl Institute, and for the past ten years has guided men in what he calls Meaning Mentoring. Two questions drove his focus on men: who dies at the highest rates, and who is least likely to ask for help. The answer to both is the same. Men do not lack mental health resources. They lack meaning, brotherhood, and an honest mirror.

A Men's Movement

This mission is not built around one man. It was built at an intersection.

Through his coaching practice, Baruch met Dave Mann — a seasoned business leader and master peer-group facilitator from the EO (Entrepreneurs' Organization) world. Baruch brought the meaning framework; Dave brought the proven structure to scale it. Around the same time came Dr. Daniel Franz — a fellow Diplomate in Logotherapy, a practicing psychotherapist, and an authority on addiction and recovery.

Baruch and Daniel found each other in the same place: the work of Dr. Viktor Frankl. Both had built their lives around it — the conviction that meaning is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man, and that a man with a why can bear almost any how. What began as two clinicians comparing notes became a shared calling: to carry Frankl's message and mission to men at a scale he never lived to see. Where Baruch brought decades of pastoral work with men in midlife, Daniel brought the clinical credential and the front-line experience of men whose meaninglessness had already metastasized into addiction.

Together they built the Meaning Mentor model — Frankl's work translated into a curriculum with clinical weight and street-level honesty. And here is where the work breaks new ground. No one has scaled Frankl this way. Meaning Mentoring does not stop at teaching men the insights of a great man and the example he set. It trains them to carry it — a peer-to-peer mentoring process where men who have done the work learn to walk beside the next man, and the next. One man reached becomes one man equipped to reach others. That is how a message becomes a movement.

From 2022 through 2024, the work developed in parallel. In 2025 the formal Men's Peer Group structure launched. By Q1 2026, six permanent groups were active. In April 2026, MPGx entered pilot. On May 7, 2026, the book, the talk, and MPGx unveiled in a coordinated public launch.

The pilots produced the proof. And the proof drew men — not just to participate, but to volunteer, to build, to give their time to something that had given them a way forward. The demand outran the model. We had started for-profit, out of ease. We became a nonprofit out of cause — because what was happening here was bigger than a business, and the men showing up to carry it deserved a mission they could own. Soul Centered Men exists to scale what they built.