Who We Are

Strategic Methods

In order to help youth and young adults achieve outcomes, we use five strategic methods: (1) relentless street work and outreach; (2) transformational relationships; (3) opportunities for life skills, education, and employment; (4) peacemaking circles; and (5) engaging the institutions that are a part of young people’s lives.

These methods are used to engage young people and others in a process of change that enables them to increase their positive knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors over time and in stages, which allow youth and young adults to be self-sufficient and live out of harm’s way.

Relentless Street Work and Outreach

Roca works with young people who are without the relationships, resources, or support to keep them alive and helps them imagine and embrace possibility, learning, and change. Through relentless outreach and support, Roca builds life-altering, transformational relationships between disconnected young people and caring adults. Relentless not only means engaging with these young people when they are most resistant, it means meeting them where they are – in the streets, in their homes, at school. For many of these young people, voluntarily coming into Roca is not a realistic expectation. Youth workers continue to meet them in the places where they are until they are ready to come to Roca and engage with the youth worker in programming.

Transformational Relationships

At the core of Roca’s work with young people lies the Transformational Relationship Model. We fundamentally understand that in order to engage very disconnected and disengaged young people in opportunities to move toward self-sufficiency and living out of harm’s way, it is essential to first spend the time to reconnect and re-engage them in positive relationships. This intensive case management model, transformational relationships, engages young people in a process of change that enables them to increase positive knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors over time and through the stages of change. As change can be extremely difficult, young people often fail, and return to negative and destructive behavior. Unlike other programs, Roca takes advantage of these failures and turns them into opportunities, through relentlessly following-up with young people so as not to lose them.

Life Skills, Education and Employment Programming

Assisting young people in moving toward living out of harm’s way and economic independence requires clear and definitive benchmarks of competency attainment in life skills, education, and employment readiness. Over the past few years, Roca has been implementing programming based on the stages of change in order to engage young people literally “where they are at” cognitively and behaviorally. This work has been successful in some areas, and not in others. Over the next few months, Roca is going to further develop the concept of competency-based programming, meeting a young person where they are in the stages of change, i.e. their readiness, willingness and ability to participate. As demonstrated through the Roca flow chart (found on the next page of this document), young people will move along a continuum of increasing structured and formal educational and vocational programming.

For young people who are ambivalent about their change process or engagement in competency-building programming, Roca will provide: basic transitional employment; informal certifications that may be one-time or short-term multi-session trainings; pre-GED, literacy, basic ESL classes, and homework help; community service opportunities to increase leadership and organizing competencies; and finally, life skills groups, circles, and topic specific workshops. For young people who are ready to participate in advanced competency building opportunities, Roca will provide: advanced transitional employment; formal certification trainings (i.e. CNA, culinary arts, custodial arts, or building maintenance); GED classes, ESL I, II, and III classes, MCAS Prep, and advanced computer classes; organizing projects with targeted outcomes; and on-going life skills groups, circles, emotional literacy workshops, and topic-specific one-time or multi-session trainings.

Peacemaking Circles

Roca uses this alternative communication technique to enable discussions around challenging issues and facilitate personal learning, healing, accountability, and community building. We learned peacemaking circles (a restorative justice methodology) from the Tagish Tlingit people of the Yukon Territory and share them to the best of our ability as we learned them.

The circle process is “simple but not easy,” and there is an intangible quality to the circles that must be experienced to be fully grasped and replicated. However, there are some key structures that help to define the circle.

• The meeting space is the most visible structure. Participants are seated in a circle focusing on the center where symbolic objects may be placed to remind participants of values shared among those in the circle.
• A talking piece is used as a way to ensure respect between speakers and listeners. The talking piece is passed from person to person within the circle and only the person holding the piece may speak.
• Two “keepers” of the circle have been identified. The keepers guide the participants and keep the circle as a safe space. While it is possible to have only one keeper, generally a team of two is preferable.
• Ceremony and ritual are used to create safety and form.
• Consensus decision making honors the values and principles of peacemaking circles and helps participants to stay grounded in them.

The circles provide group spaces to promote Roca’s principles of truth, trust, and transformation to address conflict resolution, family communication, leadership development, accountability, and community development through shared discussions and decision making. The circles are used by young people, youth/adult teams, community partners, families and staff teams.

Engaged Institutions Strategy

The institutions that are in a young person’s life – schools, local government, agencies, and organizations – are just as influential to the needs and growth of a young person as Roca. In recognizing this, Roca sought to create partnerships with these institutions, open the lines of communication, and benefit from each other’s expertise. Roca’s engaged institutions strategy is designed to promote and/or develop informal and formal practice, procedure and policy change to positively impact very high-risk young people and their families.

At the core of Roca’s Engaged Institutions Strategy lies our Transformational Relationships Model, a building process that has proven as effective for use with institutional partners as with our young people. As is true with young people, in order to engage organizations and institutions in a process of development and change, it is essential to first spend the time to connect with them in positive relationships. With the Engaged Institutions Strategy, participating organizations acknowledge over time that the current system is fragmented, deficient in appropriately addressing high-risk youth. They commit to actively working, in dialogue and action, towards accountability, progressive collaboration, and, over time, enacting alternative restorative policies and procedures to our communities’ system-based strategies. To begin this work of engaging other institutions, Roca first underwent its own, similar process: evolving from defensive youth advocacy of “fight the system to protect the young people,” to a deeper understanding of the need to be collaborative and respectful partners.