Strategy

Employment Programming for Young People

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.

Basic Transitional Employment
Central the Model is transitional employment. Transitional employment provides time-limited, subsidized jobs that combine real work, skill development, and support services. Designed for multiple relapses, young people are able to continually re-enter transitional employment as they learn from their relapse and increase their own accountability. Participants who choose to enter transitional employment will move through this process until they are able to successfully “graduate” to job placement assistance and retention services.

Roca’s young people face many real challenges in their perilous transitions to adulthood. Very few of our young people come to Roca ready to hold down a job or even to complete a skills training program. Skills, attitude, motivation, and ability to get along with others often need to be developed. Transitional employment allows a young person to learn to work by working. The goals of the program are simple. Participants must learn and consistently demonstrate the ability to show up on time, be prepared to work, complete assigned tasks, and work effectively and respectfully in a team. The jobs themselves require little to no skill since the focus is on the simple etiquette of job completion.

Roca borrowed best practices from leading transitional employment programs and combined them with business creation, earned income strategies, workforce and youth development, and Roca’s powerful culture that actively engages young people in a transformational process for personal growth and work readiness. The core of Roca’s transitional employment model is to allow young people to become successful over time and re-engage in spite of many failed attempts. It is expected a young person may spend from nine months up to two years until they are ready to succeed in unsubsidized employment. It offers participants an opportunity to learn the customs and routines of work, acquire work-task skills, establish a work record, and generate employer references to enhance their competitiveness for the private sector employment.

Participants are assigned to a 7-person work crew, with one crew supervisor, that works on state maintenance and cleaning contracts in the region, including, outdoor cleanups, construction site cleanup and other custodial tasks that can be completed in large groups. All participants holding basic assignment work slots are paid for four (4) work days per week. Each work day has an actual work time of 6.5 hours not including lunch and transportation to and from the work site. The rate of pay for work slots is $8.00/hr. Participants also engage in an unpaid, mandatory “development day” one (1) day per week, focusing on educational and pre-vocational skill development. Participants who are more prepared for employment can skip the basic transitional employment component and move immediately on to more advanced program elements.

Advanced Transitional Employment
In order to support young people’s transition from the crew based model, which is a more supported environment, into unsubsidized employment, Roca created Advanced Transitional Jobs, a single placement model with companies which function similarly to temp to perm opportunities. Young people may be employed through advanced transitional employment for 6 – 12 months with a business, during which time they remain employees of Roca. Young people engaged in advanced transitional employment are paid either $8.50 or $9.00 per hour for 40 hours per week (depending on the position selected.) After successful completion of the advanced transitional employment position they are placed in full-time employment either at the business where they completed the transitional employment or in another business.

Roca’s goal is to have a minimum of 50 transitional employment slots for young people with a range of skills development opportunities. To do this, Roca will build off its success with the Key Project, powerful partnerships with Suffolk Building Services (SBS), a building maintenance and cleaning company, Employment Resources Inc. (ERI) , that operates a health professions training institute and one-stop centers, and area employers to launch a new enterprise for advanced transitional employment, a temp-to-perm business. In five years, the advanced transitional employment business will create 25 positions, break even financially, and demonstrate a national model for temp to perm for very high-risk young people.

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, Roca will develop a pre-CNA training program and a series of individual job placements in the elder care field. ERI has identified four (4) potential employers and is in the process of setting up meetings. Roca currently works with over seventy-five (75) area employers in a diverse range of industries for job placement. Two excellent area employers, Kettle Cuisine and Kayem Foods, have already committed to purchasing temp-to-perm slots for advanced transitional employment. The Chelsea City Manager is also working to connect employers and new businesses to this project.

Placement, Retention and Advancement
As participants successfully begin to meet mid-point program benchmarks, he/she begins to work with the job developer. The job developer supports the active participation of each young person in the pursuit of unsubsidized employment by further developing employment readiness skills including: resume building, interviewing skills, appropriate follow-up with employers, and job searches. The goal for Roca’s job placement services is to match each participant with an appropriate position through which they can experience success and have advancement opportunities.

The job developer maintains relationships with the employers and provides support services that maximize successful retention. Youth workers continue to meet with their participants who are placed in unsubsidized employment as long term support is critical for young people to retain their employment. As our young people often initially feel uncomfortable, placed in unknown environments, working with different and more diverse people, they rely on their youth workers to help them deal with challenge that may arise. Additionally, youth workers ensure that participants continue to access the supports necessary to successfully retain employment: receiving assistance with child care issues, issues with the corrections system, problems on the job site, etc.

Not only will each employer will acquire a young person who has a proven history of being ready-to-work and who has the full support services of Roca and their youth worker, the employer will be actively engaged in keeping our communities safer by providing the opportunity necessary for a young person to move out of violence and poverty.

A Special Thanks to Employers We Work With:

McDonalds

Reggie’s Auto Service Station

Suffolk Building Services

Whole Foods Market

Read more about our partnership with Whole Foods here!