Programs

Harbor Area Healthy Families Program

Healthy Families, based on the national model of Healthy Families America, is a statewide program that is funded and administered by the Children's Trust Fund (CTF), a Boston-based child advocacy group. This free program serves approximately 150 teen and first-time parents each year. The goals of the program are to:

• Reduce child abuse and neglect by supporting nurturing parenting
• Achieve optimal health, growth, and development in infancy and early childhood
• Promote educational attainment, job readiness, and life skills
• Reduce repeat teen pregnancies
• Promote optimal parental health and wellness

This unique program approaches its work with families from a strengths-based perspective. The parent-driven program provides intensive home visiting, beginning once a week and moving toward once a month as the participant becomes more self-sufficient. Using various assessment tools, the program identifies risks, strengths and needs of pregnant and parenting teens. Healthy Family workers provide home visits, child development screenings, parent education and support groups, parent infant/child interaction groups, family-focused social events, resources and referrals. Healthy Families is family-centered, community-conscious, and culturally sensitive. Roca continues to have the Healthy Families Program because we feel it is in the best interest of our young people and their children to maintain current, supportive relationships with them. Roca has made a commitment to work with young parents and the Healthy Families Program allows us an effective platform to positively affect the lives of many young people. The mission and goals of Healthy Families Massachusetts and Roca are very well aligned.

Young parents practice supportive and effective parenting skills once they are able to take care of themselves. Central to this work is second pregnancy prevention, as we understand the critical nature of preventing additional pregnancies for young parents.

 

Transitional Employment Programming at Roca

Roca believes that one of the most important things we have gotten onto is transitional employment, where young people learn to work while working. The work is simple and designed to teach people to show up, follow instruction, and work cleaning, painting and maintenance. This program is built especially for our high-risk young people who have challenges getting and keeping jobs. It takes into account the stages of change, relapse phases, and multiple opportunities to succeed.

Often it is not the inability to actually do the work, but the inability to recognize how their harmful behaviors and attitudes create barriers for successful employment and retention. Roca’s employment programming creates a context for our young people to actually experience and process how these behaviors create barriers. Our programming allows them to begin changing those behaviors and practicing new positive behaviors. It takes young people with these particular challenges around work about 1 1/2 - 2 years to be able to put in sixty days in a row. While these young people have often been written off as unable to succeed, the truth and the very good news is that they can learn to work. It just takes time.

By twenty-two, Juan had already served 4 years in federal prison for drug-trafficking. His mother died in Puerto Rico when he was a child and his father and brother were both in jail for selling drugs as well. At twenty three, his probation officer posed him a seemingly simple question: do you want to spend the rest of your life in jail, or do you want to do something more? Juan didn’t know what to think. Since his childhood, he had known nothing but a life of gangs, drugs, violence and fast money. One day, a Roca Youth Worker saw Juan on the street and asked him if he wanted a job. Considering his options, Juan decided to come into to Roca and give the transitional employment program a try. “I had nothing to lose”, Juan recalls, “if I didn’t like it, I would just go back to selling drugs.” But the Roca Youth Worker wouldn’t let Juan do that. “Everyday, my Youth Worker would check in on me. I remember one time, my boy called to see if I wanted to get in on some action- all I could think about was making some quick money. But, all of a sudden, like it was planned, my phone rang and it was my Youth Worker asking me if I wanted to grab some food with him. I knew right then that I couldn’t go back to selling coke. I called my boy back and told him I had to handle some other stuff. A half hour later, I was sitting in a restaurant with my Youth Worker eating dinner. I didn’t want to disappoint him. Everyday he was there for me- like nobody had ever been.” Today, Juan is in charge of Roca’s building maintenance crew.

— Juan, Roca Transitional Employment Program Participant

Project Sol

Roca’s Project SOL is an innovative dropout prevention and intervention program conducted in partnership with Chelsea Public Schools (CPS). Project SOL annually engages 200 of the most high-risk students attending Chelsea High School (CHS) and the Phoenix Charter Academy (PCA – a charter school focused on serving the most at-risk students). The project’s primary goal is to keep these students in school and moving towards successful graduation and connection to post-secondary education and/or employment.

PSOL is offered to students in grades 9-12, but will focus on those entering and/or in the 9th grade. Ninety-three (93) of the 200 students targeted by Project SOL are 9th grade students that are repeating freshmen, some of whom are repeating for their third time. Project SOL targets students that are identified by CPS as being at-risk of repeating the 9th grade and/or dropping out of school. These are students that CPS has determined require at least supplemental activities or, for the most at-risk, intensive activities and services to succeed in getting their high-school diploma.

Roca has worked with CPS to outline four critical program objectives for Project SOL: 1) improve the overall school culture; 2) improve the schools’ response to our most high-risk youth; 3) increase the number of students that transition successfully out of the 9th grade; and 4) increase the number of students that successfully complete high school.

 

Via

Roca’s VIA Programming targets young people (ages 16-24) who are street, court, or gang involved, disengaged, unable to participate in other programs, or who have dropped out of school. Via starts with intensive outreach and follow-up to a targeted group of very high-risk youth, offer programming, offer employment opportunities through our existing Transitional Employment Programming, and work with the City, several criminal justice partners, and other organizations. The intention of Via is to 1) help very high-risk young people move toward economic independence and living out of harm’s way, 2) demonstrate impact through rigorous evaluation, and 3) increase transitional employment over the next few years.

Youth Star

Roca’s Youth STAR high-risk youth leadership corps provides a rare opportunity for 25 young leaders, (nine (9) of which are young mothers) from the low-income, urban communities of Chelsea, Revere, and East Boston, MA to engage in civic participation by developing and implementing a range of community service projects focused on anti-violence and health initiatives.

Youth STAR members are first intensively trained by Roca staff on the health and anti-violence topics their initiatives will address. Members continue their personal development by engaging in Roca life, education, and employment skills programming while implementing their community service projects. Community service initiatives provide a wide-spectrum of services, including: health care access education and resource referral, pregnancy prevention education, HIV/AIDS prevention programming, domestic violence prevention, and career counseling. Youth STAR members are valued peer mentors in their communities of Chelsea, Revere and East Boston, MA as they conduct regular classes at local high schools on health & wellness and violence prevention. They provide an edge that typical leaders cannot provide in that they started with the same high-risk behaviors that Roca participants are working to change. Who best to help a teenage mother learn about well baby care, how to access healthcare resources, and career counseling than another young mother in the same situation?

Youth STAR was recognized in 2010 as one of the “Most Innovative AmeriCorps Programs in the United States” by America’s Service Commissions and Innovations in Civic Participation.

“I love youth star, I became a better person, even a better mom because of the work I do in my community, servicing others, and working on my self development…”

— Keishla, Youth Star member

 

Peacemaking Circles

Roca’s method of Peacemaking Circles teaches young people and families an alternative communication method that allows them to deal with extremely painful and difficult issues, how to manage their own healing process, and how to make agreements that promote safety so they can live in a healthy way. Circles are effective for identifying real issues and seeking appropriate solutions when there are conflict situations, when there is a need for healing or understanding, or a desire to reach consensus.

Roca was mentored by the Tagish Tlingit people in the Yukon Territories, and has adopted this practice of peacemaking circles. Derived from aboriginal and native traditions, circles bring people together in a way that creates trust, respect, intimacy, good will, belonging, generosity, mutuality and reciprocity. The process is never about —changing others—, but rather is an invitation to change oneself and one’s relationship with the community.

This approach involves participants sitting in a circle, preparing themselves to speak honestly and listen to each other respectfully, and taking turns speaking. Each person speaks only when holding an object (specifically an object that has meaning for the group; e.g., Roca often uses rocks (which is what Roca means in Spanish, a young mothers' group might use a baby’s toy, etc.) that is passed clockwise (in the direction of the sun's movement) from one participant to the next. We use circles in a variety of ways with and without young people, internally and externally, often partnering with other agencies, groups, and community members.

Values and Principles - Though each circle develops its own values and principles, all peacemaking circles generally:

• are designed by those who use them
• are guided by a shared vision
• call participants to act on their personal values
• include all interests, and are accessible to all
• offer everyone an equal, and voluntary, opportunity to participate
• take a holistic approach, including the emotional, mental, physical and spiritual
• maintain respect for all
• encourage exploring instead of conquering differences
• invite accountability to others and to the process