Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend 2026: Three Years of FUEL Men Showing Up for Young Men

FUEL Community Project supported both 2026 Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend events, with the full Team FUEL crew volunteering at Berryessa for the third consecutive year and additional support at Santa Cruz.

8/24/20265 min read

For the third year in a row, the men of FUEL Community Project volunteered at the Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend (YMUW). In 2026, we supported both weekends: the full Team FUEL crew showed up at Berryessa, and members of our team also participated in Santa Cruz.

We keep coming back because we believe young men benefit from time spent unplugged, facing healthy challenges, building meaningful connections, and learning alongside positive male role models.

Supporting Both 2026 YMUW Weekends

This year’s YMUW events took place at:

June 18–21: Eco-Camp at Lake Berryessa, Napa
August 21–23: Santa Cruz Mountains, Scotts Valley

At Berryessa, the entire Team FUEL crew came together to volunteer. We also supported the Santa Cruz weekend with some of our team members participating.

Across both events, the focus was on helping young men unplug, have fun, face healthy challenges, and build meaningful connections.

What Is the Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend?

The Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend is a multi-day experience that gives young men space to step away from everyday distractions and engage in challenge, connection, leadership, and personal growth.

The premise is simple: Give young men a place where they can be challenged, supported, encouraged, and seen.

Through shared activities and experiences, participants have opportunities to step outside their comfort zones, work together, and reflect on who they are becoming as they move toward adulthood.

The goal isn’t to create perfect young men. It’s to help them become more confident, self-aware, connected, and prepared for adulthood.

Why FUEL Keeps Coming Back

The relationship between FUEL Community Project and YMUW has become an important part of our work with young men.

For three consecutive years, Team FUEL members have volunteered their time and energy. This year, that commitment extended across both weekends.

Mentorship isn’t built through a single conversation or event. It develops through relationships and repeated opportunities to show young men that adults are willing to show up, listen, challenge them, encourage them, and invest in them.

Our men don’t come to YMUW because they have all the answers. They come because they believe young men benefit from having positive male role models willing to walk alongside them.

Unplugging Creates Space for Connection

One of the defining elements of YMUW is getting young men away from their screens. Without the constant pull of notifications, social media, games, and messages, there’s room for something different:

Conversation
Laughter
Competition
Reflection
Connection

Young men have the opportunity to experience what it feels like to be present with the people around them. That space can open the door to relationships and conversations that might not happen in everyday life.

Healthy Challenges Build Confidence

YMUW isn’t designed to be easy.

Young men are encouraged to participate, try things that may be uncomfortable, work with people they may not know well, and face challenges that require persistence and teamwork.

The point isn’t simply to complete an activity. It’s what happens along the way.

A young man discovers he can do something he wasn’t sure he could do. He learns that asking for help isn’t weakness. He discovers that the team needs him.

He learns that sometimes leadership means stepping forward—and sometimes it means helping someone else succeed.

Those experiences can become building blocks for confidence beyond the weekend.

Leadership Is Something You Practice

At FUEL, we believe leadership isn’t simply a title or position.

Leadership is how you show up. It’s how you treat people. It’s whether you take responsibility and can be counted on.

It’s knowing when to lead—and when to follow.

YMUW gives young men opportunities to practice those ideas in real time. They experience teamwork, challenge, responsibility, failure, success, and relationships firsthand.

And they’re surrounded by men who are modeling what leadership can look like.

The Men of FUEL: Modeling Leadership

One of the meaningful parts of volunteering at YMUW is recognizing that the young men aren’t the only ones learning.

The men are learning, too.

Leading young people requires patience, flexibility, humility, humor, and a willingness to adjust when things don’t go according to plan.

There are moments when a group doesn’t behave as expected, an activity takes an unexpected turn, or a leader has to take a breath and regroup.

Young men are watching those moments.

They see how adults respond to frustration. They see whether we take responsibility, support one another, and make our actions match our words.

We don’t expect ourselves to model perfection. We try to model what it looks like to keep showing up, own our mistakes, support our teammates, and move forward.

Sometimes the lesson we’re teaching isn’t the one we planned.

Planting Seeds for the Future

A weekend like YMUW isn’t expected to transform a young man’s entire life in four days.

Instead, we hope to plant seeds.

A young man may leave with a new understanding of himself. He may recognize a strength he didn’t know he had, form a meaningful relationship with a mentor, or discover that he enjoys leading.

Or he may simply have a weekend where he felt accepted, challenged, and connected.

We don’t always know which seeds will take root. That’s okay.

Our job is to plant them.

Building a Community Around Young Men

Young men don’t grow up in isolation. They’re shaped by families, schools, friends, coaches, mentors, communities, and the examples they see around them.

That’s why FUEL believes in creating opportunities for positive relationships between young men and adults willing to invest their time and energy.

YMUW is one of those opportunities. It brings young men together for a shared experience—one where they can challenge themselves, build relationships, and experience what it means to be part of something larger than themselves.

Looking Ahead

Our third consecutive year volunteering at YMUW—and supporting both 2026 weekends—reinforced something we already believe deeply:

Young men need men who show up.

They need people willing to spend time with them. They need opportunities to unplug, face healthy challenges, laugh, and experience adventure. They need people who will hold them accountable while reminding them they’re capable of more than they sometimes believe.

And they need to see adults practicing the same values we ask them to practice.

FUEL Community Project is proud to continue supporting the Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend and the young men who participate in it.

We’re grateful to the organizers, mentors, volunteers, families, and especially the young men who make these weekends meaningful.

Three years in, we’re still showing up—and we’ll keep planting seeds.