Journey of Hope: Young Men Leading Change
This entry has been selected as a finalist in the
Young Men at Risk: Transforming the Power of a Generation competition.
Roca has innovated programming for very high-risk young people by implementing a stages of change program model in a non-clincial and non-mandating community setting.
About You
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Your idea
Year the initative began (yyyy)
1988
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Plot your innovation within the mosaic of solutions
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Low self-value and stability leads to risky choices
Which of the principles is the primary focus of your work?
Create credible choices and opportunities
If you believe some other barrier or principle should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic:
Roca perceives that two critical barriers affect these hard to serve young people: 1) lack of positive relationships and 2) the failure of society to meet them where they are and to work with them at their own level of emotional, spiritual, and mental development. Roca believes that given the right circumstances, every young man can thrive, contribute and be hopeful.
The young men served by Roca are best described as youth in crisis or very high-risk youth. Many of these young people have dropped-out or are truant, are abusing substances, involved with gangs, have extensive criminal records, are newly arrived immigrants, are young parents and/or come from broken homes without the income to support basic living requirements. More often then not, these youth are the ones who fall between the cracks of the very systems that were designed to help and protect them. Few programs attempt to serve them and even fewer have demonstrated success altering their life outcomes. This is Roca’s work.
Roca’s own model creates an additional Innovation Principle inside the Mosaic of Solutions, creating individualized partnerships that can hold the tension of growth and change as high risk young people increase positive knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors.
We fundamentally understand that in order to bring very high risk young men into opportunities that will move them toward self-sufficiency and living out of harm’s way, it is essential to first spend the time to reconnect and maintain them in positive relationships. As such, Roca’s transformational relationship model helps engage and move high-risk young men through five stages of change: 1) Pre-contemplation - not thinking about change; 2) Contemplation - thinking about change; 3) Planning - talking about what it would take to make change happen; 4) Action - taking positive steps, including participation in competency-building programs, toward improving life through trial and error; 5) Sustaining - having continuing support during difficult times until they are able to move demonstrably toward achieving a self-sustaining lifestyle and living out of harm's way.
Name Your Project
Journey of Hope: Young Men Leading Change
Describe Your Idea
Roca has innovated programming for very high-risk young people by implementing a stages of change program model in a non-clincial and non-mandating community setting.
Innovation
Describe your program or new idea in one sentence.
Roca has innovated programming for very high-risk young people by implementing a stages of change program model in a non-clincial and non-mandating community setting.
What makes your initiative uniquely positioned to create change in your community?
Roca is one of the only organizations of its kind to define the phases of relationship development with very high-risk young people and to identify how to move these youth through stages of change. Roca is relentlessly dedicated to young people, re-engaging them after multiple failures, teaching them to learn from mistakes, and to experientially create success. By working through the stages of change, Roca has transitioned a proven clinical model into our most disenfranchised communities.
Roca has created a staff coaching model, enabling others to utilize our learning in engagement, intensive relationship-building, and development with high-risk youth. This is supported by a unique transitional employment model, helping young people with virtually no job skills learn and practice the skills they need to get and keep a job. Concurrently, Roca works with all the major institutions that affect poor, urban youth’s lives – criminal justice, child welfare, education, health, government, public health, etc. – resulting in a range of informal and formal procedure, practice, policy, and systemic change.
Describe how you organize and carry out your work?
Demonstrating that ALL young people can achieve positive change, Roca combines relentless street outreach and relationship building with activities/programs, including transitional employment, designed to meet youth where they are.
Roca Youth Workers, often drawn from the communities Roca serves, are trained to recognize and work with the stages of change. High-risk young people will fail, relapse, and be avoidant of change. Understanding this, Youth Workers consistently engage young people, maintaining relationships, building trust, and continuing to re-engage them, until they maintain success.
What is your plan to scale and expand your innovation into your community and beyond?
Over the next five years, Roca’s model will be proven as strategy for engaging very high-risk and disengaged young people, ages 14 – 24, and moving them towards positive outcomes. Nationally, Roca will be the only community-based, non-mandating organization with a demonstrated evidence-based model for working with this population.
Results will include a 41% increase in young people served in transformational relationships, and 120% increase of youth in transitional employment slots.
Roca is working with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety to develop a pilot project to implement a transitional employment program based on the stages of change – designed to serve 800 very high-risk young people across the state over three years.
Roca is currently designing methodology to bring our stages of changes model for high-risk young people, outcome system, and engaged institutions strategy to scale both locally and nationally. To do this, Roca is planning a feasibility study, which will be used to determine Roca’s most appropriate implementation methodology and partners.
What other resources, institutional, or policy needs would be necessary to help sustain and scale up your idea?
Roca is ideally positioned to achieve its scale and growth goals, through staff capacity building and the formalization and documentation of its programming and staffing processes. Roca has also developed a significant amount of interest in its programming and data tracking processes, from both local organizations, like the Department of Youth Services, and agencies across the country.
Now, Roca must develop appropriate organizational structures and partnerships to share these lessons on a larger level. In addition, Roca must expand its internal evaluation capacity to ensure continuous quality improvement and is partnering with the Crime and Justice Institute to conduct and independent evaluation of Roca’s processes and outcomes.
There are several policy changes, which, while not necessary, would also make this expansion easier, including changes in the areas of the creation of a framework of intervention, transitional employment and restorative justice.
Impact
Describe your impact in one sentence, commenting on both the individual and community levels.
Every high-risk young person can lead positive change in their own lives when offered relentless support and opportunity, creating safer communities and hope.
What impact has your work achieved to date?
Failing to meet the needs of high-risk youth results in a growing burden on public safety, our communities and the economy. Whether looking at Boston, Los Angeles, El Salvador or Iraq, the outcome is the same: unattended and unemployed youth are becoming increasingly dangerous.
Emerging as a national model, Roca’s impact can be seen throughout its programming. For example, in FY’07, Roca worked with 658 very high-risk disengaged youth, effectively engaging 77% of them through transformational relationships. Similarly, of a targeted cohort of disengaged street, court and gang involved young people, who previously were not participating in any organized activities: 100% enrolled in alternative education or engagement programming; 85% received court assistance; and 80% were engaged in transitional employment.
Roca’s work is also extremely cost-effective, investing an average of $4,880 per young person as compared with the alternative costs to the community, estimated by the Journal of Criminology to be between $250,000 and $2,000,000 in social and incarceration support over his/her lifetime.
Number of individuals served
The most pressing problems facing civil society today are the consequences of unattended youth: their anger, hopelessness, lack of positive options lead to gang participation, unwanted pregnancies, and criminal behavior. These young people exist on the fringes of society without the skills necessary to lead to self-sufficient and productive lives.
Since its inception, Roca has helped more than 15,000 young people change their lives.
Annually, Roca intensively reaches 600 young people through life skills, education, employment opportunities, and transformational relationships. Of all our participating youth, in this past year:
54% were male;
49% were street, court, gang or system involved;
65% were expelled, dropped out of school or were suspended;
43% were young parents;
45% had a history of substance abuse issues; and,
55% of young people were born in another country.
Roca also provides less intensive educational programming for an additional 450 parents and young people and provides one-time outreach to 20,000 community members.
Community impact
Roca has helped more than 15,000 of our communities’ most high-risk young youth make positive, profound changes in their lives, demonstrating a model of success in moving disengaged and disconnected youth beyond effects of violence and poverty. Comparative to the area’s high prevalence of poverty, Chelsea, MA has some of the lowest DYS commitment rates, in part because of Roca’s work. Our intensive outreach and peacemaking circle processes have aided in flipping the culture of gang violence, leading to less shootings and incarcerations of our young people.
Roca has also experienced a 75% job placement rate for a cohort of 119 young people, in our pilot years of a transitional employment strategy. This same group has demonstrated significant reductions in recidivism and probation/parole violations (16% for program participants as compared with 60% of the national re-entry population), prompting a six month “think tank” with the Lieutenant Governor to develop a draft plan on transitional employment for the state and a proposed pilot project for young people.
Society at large
The issues of angry, isolated and unattended young men are the most critical issues facing our society. Failing to address these issues results in a growing burden on our communities. Roca’s nationally-acclaimed programming and relationship-building model serves as a critical vehicle for catalyzing youth development. This model can be replicated to decrease numbers of disconnected youth, while at the same time, reducing recidivism, increasing public safety, reducing young men’s reliance on public benefits systems, and providing skilled entry-level employees for our nation’s workforce.
What measure do you use to gauge your impact and why?
Roca is committed to rigor in outcomes, continuous learning from best practices, and excellence in our programming, staff development, management, and leadership. Roca's evaluation/data collection system is uniquely customized to systematically track an individual's progress and inform the effectiveness of Roca’s model in moving young people toward the outcomes of self sufficiency and being out of harm’s way. The system examines not only Roca’s internal processes but also outcomes for participating youth, transitional employment/job placement/retention, and related benchmarks for organizational capacity and growth.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
How is your initiative currently being financed and how would you finance further expansion and/or replication?
In 2008-9, Roca’s 20th Anniversary Campaign will raise $20M from foundations, individuals and corporations, increasing programming, capacity, capital, and endowment funding. Roca will meet new business plan goals, show an evidence-based model, and establish itself as a sustainable organization. Over the next 5 years, Roca’s budget will go from $6.9M to $8.8M, with a $5M endowment generating a percentage of funds through interest. Earned revenues from our two social enterprises will grow annually for each program, reducing Roca’s need for private funding resources. Roca is also working with the Commonwealth to expand transitional employment services into the greater Boston area, allowing additional work crew revenues to be generated, and also working with legislators and administrators to create a statewide plan/fund for our transitional employment model.
Provide information on your current finances and organization:
Roca’s budget for FY 08 is $6,400,000. Of that, an estimated 54% provides services to high-risk young men.
Roca receives $6,300,000 in annual revenues each year. Of that: 58% is support from private foundations; 32% is from governmental contracts and grants; 8% is from earned income; 0.6% is from corporate donations; and, 1.4% is from individual donations.
Roca has a staff of 52 full time and 20 part time employees. Their work is supported by an estimated 82 volunteers.
Who are your potential partners and allies?
Roca has countless partners and allies in its program expansion, including: the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts; the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety; the Massachusetts Departments of Youth Services, Social Services, Public Health, Labor and Workforce; the Vice-Chair of House Ways and Means St. Fleur; the Cities of Boston and Cambridge; the District Courts in Boston/Cambridge/Somerville, Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office; MassInc.; MGH Hospital; the Chelsea School District; the Crime and Justice Institute; the National Transitional Jobs Network; local unions; and, area businesses.
Who are your potential investors?
Potential investors in Roca’s expansion process for its transformational relationships and transitional employment include: the W.K. Kellogg Foundation; the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation; the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation; the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, Inc.; and, the Smith Family Foundation. Roca regularly seeks individual and corporate donations and government grants. In addition, Roca’s 20th Anniversary Fundraising Campaign will dedicate a portion of its revenues to the expansion of the Roca programming models contained in this proposal and develop new potential investors.
The Story
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story.
Since 1988, Roca has been deliberately serving the most disenfranchised and disengaged young people, ages 14-24, in the communities of Chelsea, Revere, East Boston, Charlestown, and Winthrop, Massachusetts. Even today, there are an estimated 8,000 young people who are not in school and unemployed in Boston and 70,000 statewide and these numbers continue to increase.
From our earliest days to the present, street, gang, and court involved young people, immigrant youth, and young parents have shown us the way to create practical solutions to community violence. Peer leaders have emerged, guiding programming, creating support, and raising funds for our building. Youth migrating from different countries continue to teach us about the larger world and their local challenges.
Young people engaged with Roca have launched one of the country’s first Cambodian American HIV/AIDS Project, the Azi AIDS Project; hosted area peace summits with gang involved youth; started social enterprises, Circle Catering and the KEY project, through which young people with no work skills become job-ready and employed; run an award-winning dance group, Essencia Latina; and, have informed local and public policy through peacemaking circles.
Today, we have adapted cognitive-behavioral stages of change into all aspects of our organization; boldly continuing to help very high-risk young people grow, learn and become agents of change in their own lives and in the community. Through intensive, transformational relationship building, Roca helps young men re-engage in society by moving them through the stages of change becoming self-sufficient and living out of harm’s way.
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material.
Mary (Molly) Baldwin is Roca’s Founder/Executive Director. Molly has over 33 years of experience working with young people and communities in the arenas of youth development, criminal justice and community organizing. A tireless advocate and pioneer, Molly believes all can “be the change.” Her practical and collaborative approach enriches her stature as a visionary leader. She is highly regarded in the community, bringing together the major institutions that affect urban youth’s lives, to build trust, accountability and communication across diverse individuals and groups.
 | 221 weeks agoJourney of Hope: Young Men Leading Change has been chosen as a finalist in Young Men at Risk: Transforming the Power of a Generation. |
