Roca, Inc.

Our mission is to be a relentless force in disrupting incarceration and poverty by engaging the young adults, police, and systems at the center of urban violence in relationships to address trauma, find hope, and drive change.

Our primary goal at Roca is to help young people meet basic needs, get them out of the “fight, flight, or freeze” state of living, and instead slow down, pause, and think before they act. We help them turn off the fear and relieve the hypervigilance. Only then are they able to deal with their trauma. Without this step, they cannot drop their guns; they cannot finish their education; they cannot keep a job; they cannot become the parents they want to be. Just as a doctor would do with a gunshot victim lying on a gurney, we don’t start by offering GED prep – we address the bleeding first.

Roca has developed an internationally recognized, long-term (4 year) behavioral health model that intervenes with young people at critical risk to teach them life-saving skills – the behavioral skills they need to stay alive long enough so that they can learn to choose to live.

Our intervention is made up of 4 critical components: (1) Creating Safety and Stability; (2) Teaching Life-Saving Skills; (3) Practicing Skills; and (4) Engaging Institutions and Systems.

We structure the model this way because we understand that we must help young people to feel safe before they can address behavior change. And because the young people we serve have experienced significant amounts of trauma, we must address that trauma, using Cognitive Behavioral Theory (CBT), and help young people develop critical educational, employment, and life skills. We must then give young people multiple opportunities to put these new skills into practice and work through relapse to create long-term, sustained behavior change. Finally, we work directly with police, systems, and community partners to wrap services around these young people and help them support this long-term behavior change.

We disrupt urban violence by driving individual-level change (working with young people), systems-level change (working with police and other systems partners), and high levels of data sharing and reporting.

Each year, Roca works directly with more than 1,300 young people ages 16-24, some of whom are parents, across Massachusetts and in Baltimore, Maryland. The impact of this work speaks for itself: 97 percent of graduates stay out of jail and more than 64 percent hold down jobs for one year or more.

To expand the impact of our model and help save and enhance more lives beyond those communities where Roca is providing direct service, Roca is proud to announce the 2020 launch of the Roca Impact Institute, an additional training arm for our organization. We must spark new thinking about how to work with young people at the center of urban violence, and our Roca Impact Institute will do just that in coaching and working with police and other systems partners.

Roca is internationally known for its robust performance management and data collection system, using ETO. We are committed to being a high-performing and adaptive organization that uses real-time data for continuous improvement and evaluating impact. The way in which Roca uses this data, collected on a daily, weekly, quarterly or annual basis, is both tactical (using the data as a tool to inform weekly operations) and strategic (using the data to inform programmatic/model adjustments when necessary). This adherence to performance based management and continual use of data has given way to an extensive staff coaching system, which provides structure to a complex and nuanced intervention process. Additionally, Roca works with several external evaluators and researchers, such as Abt Associates and Urban Institute, to assess the effectiveness of our work with very high-risk young people.

Recent research has shown that:

 Roca reduces criminal justice system involvement and increases employment for high-risk young people. Each year from 2014-2019, 84-97% of Roca’s young men had no new incarcerations for new charges after their 24th month of enrollment, and 76-92% retained 90 or more days of employment.

 Roca improves parenting, educational, and employment skills. In 2019, 83% of graduating young mothers demonstrated improved parent-child interaction, while 82% made educational gains and/or increased employment retention.

 Roca’s recidivism rates are significantly lower than the state average. External evaluation of Roca’s work with 1,246 high‐risk young people between 2012 and 2019 shows that less than 33% of them were convicted of any crime within three years. This represents a 30% reduction when compared to the Massachusetts Department of Correction’s reported recidivism rate of 47% for 18-24 year olds released in 2014 and a 41% reduction compared to the Council of State Governments Justice Center’s reported rate of 56% for 18-24 year olds. The fact that these state recidivism rates encompass young people of all risk levels, while Roca only serves young people with the highest risk of recidivating, further highlights Roca’s effectiveness.

 Roca reduces violent crime. While 85-90% of Roca participants served between 2012 and 2019 committed violent offenses before coming to Roca, only 16% were convicted of a violent crime after joining Roca.

 Practicing CBT skills appears to serve as a protective factor against the risk of recidivism. Even though the participants who practiced at least half the CBT skills were considered to be more at-risk for recidivism, they did not differ in their likelihood of facing new criminal charges compared to a lower risk group that did not practice any CBT skills.

 Practicing CBT skills at least once impacts Roca participants’ likelihood of obtaining employment. Compared to those that that did not practice any CBT skills, those that practiced all CBT skills had an almost 280% increased chance of obtaining a job.

 Practicing CBT skills at least once has been shown to increase program retention. Participants who practiced all CBT skills have almost 70% more total days at Roca compared to those who did not practice any CBT skills.

In a strategic step to further expand our impact, Roca will answer a national call to launch the Roca Impact Institute in 2020, a new training arm of Roca in which we will coach other organizations and public officials across the country to work with high-risk young people. This next phase of Roca’s work and impact is driven by a dual strategy of providing direct services to young people while working to drive systemic change.