Strategy

Transitional Employment

Today, Roca’s transitional employment enterprises enable young people to continue working on their education and growing at the same time that they earn a wage and learn about how to work. In 2006, Roca started two combined enterprise/program models for transitional employment, the KEY Project and Circle Catering (originally Tacos Unidos). Currently, these enterprises provide 28 transitional employment slots for approximately 120+ young people each year.

The KEY Project (Keep Empowering Yourself) provides cleaning, painting and maintenance with 21 work slots in outside work crews and 4 work slots in an in-house crew. The KEY Project includes four workdays, one development day, and job placement with retention support when young people are ready for full-time employment and/or sectoral training. A retained revenue account through the Massachusetts Department of Social Services gives Roca access to contracts with state institutions, port authorities, and municipalities. Circle Catering is a retail food business providing sales and catering at different business locations, and keeps 4-5 transitional workers at any given time throughout the year. Revenue for this project is through sales.

Over the past few years, Roca has operated these two businesses, undergone planning processes for both businesses as well as the organization as a whole, hosted a Business Advisory Board with a diverse team of business leaders, and participated in technical assistance planning processes for different types of businesses. The KEY Project continues to be extremely successful in helping these particular groups of young people. Given the multitude of challenges of the young people, the model costs more, but will be at 70% self-sufficient funding for youth wages and adult supervisors within three years. While Circle Catering has yielded great lessons and wonderful PR for the organization, it has offered limited transitional employment opportunities, and needs an enormous amount of staff support to help the young people, Roca has determined that it would be most appropriate to close Circle Catering, and expand other work crews and contract work models. After careful review, Roca will close this project in June 2008.

Given Roca’s goal to have 45- 50 transitional employment slots, including advanced slots, Roca will build off its success with the Key Project, powerful partnerships with Suffolk Building Services (SBS) and Employment Resources Inc. (ERI), and dramatically increased business development skills to launch a new enterprise for Advanced Transitional Employment that in year three (3) will create 21 positions, break even financially and generate a moderate surplus that can be used for expanded job development. With SBS, Roca will implement a model of advanced work crews for painting, cleaning and maintenance for young people to increasingly perform at market level. With ERI through their highly successful Health Professionals Institute, Roca will develop a pre-CNA training programming and a series of individual job placements in elder care facilities.

The young people will work in the Advanced Transitional Employment Project for 6 – 12 months and then be placed in full-time employment; at the same time they will participate in specialized trainings for the respective fields. This model will function as a temp-to-perm project that specializes in high-risk young people. The two partner organizations will bring their respective expertise in their fields to job creation, sales, and training, while Roca will bring its expertise in youth development.