The 23-year-old and his cousin Jahdai Vigona took matters into their own hands by getting a few mates together armed with boxing gloves and pads at a local park in Darwin.
"We'd see a lot of our peers go through things that probably could have been avoided ... like unsafe relationships, drug and alcohol problems, crime, all those things," Mr Rodrigues told AAP.
"We decided to build a program for people just like us, that were starting to go off on a bit of a wrong path and just needed some guidance and assistance."
When their gathering of young men started to attract larger numbers and positive feedback from the attendees, the pair, both Tiwi Island men, knew they had to expand.
"We had young people coming out of their house who don't normally exercise or leave the house on weekends or don't have many friends coming and socialising," Mr Rodrigues said.
"We had middle-aged men coming and speaking about their problems ... we even had an older fella come and tell us he was a bit suicidal, his wife had just left him and he just had a lot going on and he really needed that community and camaraderie to talk about these things."
So the One Per Cent program was born, aiming to improve the mental and physical health of young Indigenous men.
The two cousins now run programs on Groote Eylandt, Tiwi Island and are hoping to take their program to communities further afield.
Suicide rates among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are more than two times higher than among non-Indigenous Australians, 2022 data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows.
Among young people aged 0-24, the suicide rate was more than three times as high, when compared to non-Indigenous people.
On Wednesday a report from the Victorian coroner revealed the suicide rate among First Nations people is three times higher than the rest of the population in the state.
More than half of the Indigenous people who died by suicide in 2020-2024 were under 35, the report said.
For Mr Rodrigues support and programs for First Nations people must be community-led.
"If you send non-culturally aware people to do this kind of education, it doesn't really click, especially in community," he said.
"I think having people from the same background, with lived experience, it's very important when working in this space because it builds rapport with young people a lot better but you can also see where they're coming from."
Mr Rodrigues on Wednesday delivered the youth keynote address at the Indigenous Suicide Prevention Forum in Sydney.
It was an honour, as a young man, running a relatively new program, to speak about the work they're doing and draw attention to the mental health issues young men are facing in the territory, he said.
"We want people to be one per cent better every day," Mr Rodrigues said.
"That's how we approach our sessions, we don't try to make massive changes overnight but we try to be consistent and we get those little one per cent of things done because at the end it adds up to a larger picture."
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