Roca: Roca is an outcomes driven organization that helps very high risk young people ages 14 - 24 get out of violence and poverty. Roca's innovative intervention model uses long-term relationships, education and employment programming, and organizational partnerships to achieve sustainable individual and community change.
Need: America's young people are dying. They are dying quickly from guns and gangs and slowly from poverty and isolation. There are no services for young people who don't show up for programs, schools or jobs. These are the young people and young parents in gangs, in and out of state systems, using drugs and alcohol, poor, hungry, often homeless and/or suffering from the trauma of war. Reports show that nationally 10-15% of all young people ages 14-24 are disconnected from work and/or education.
What Makes Roca Different: Roca is unique in the work that it does: 1) Roca seeks out the most difficult, challenging young people - the young people who are unwilling or unable to attend traditional programming, work or school; 2) Roca is an outcomes driven organization and has created a successful Intervention Model to change the lives of our young people and our communities; and 3) Roca works with systems to change how they work with those young people.
WHAT WE DO: We connect very high risk young people to each other and adults by building positive and intensive relationships. Using these relationships and targeted programming (life skills, education and employment) Roca helps young people develop the necessary skills to move them towards economic independence and living out of harm's way. Roca teaches young people to get and keep jobs, creating businesses and other opportunities to allow for economic advancement. Roca's transitional employment model has been successful at working alongside union employees.
Roca's model is showing results and generating national attention. Most recently, Roca received a $2.3M grant from the U.S. Department of Labor's Pathways Out of Poverty Program - the only grant of its kind in the entire state of Massachusetts.
Goals for the Future: For the most part, people think that these young people can't change their lives. Roca knows better. Roca is demonstrating success. Young people are changing their lives. Roca is at an early stage in demonstrating its intervention model as a solution to reducing violence and poverty. To do this, Roca has five strategies:
1. Demonstrate the Intervention Model for Very High-Risk Youth as evidence-based;
2. Build an infrastructure to create and expand transitional employment opportunities;
3. Replicate the Intervention Model for Very High-Risk Youth;
4. Implement a Knowledge Sharing, Advocacy, and Public Policy Agenda to share the model, develop a comprehensive system for supporting these young people and leverage funds; and,
5. Increase organizational capacity for scale, impact, and sustainability.
Benefit: Roca's work makes significant changes in the lives of young people and communities. It is extremely cost-effective, investing an average of $5,000 for a transformational relationship per young person per year over 3-4 years (average of $7,000 - $12,600 per person for transitional employment per slot per year from which young people pay taxes), 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. read more