“I think I’m really a youth worker at heart,” says Molly Baldwin ’12, CEO of Roca, Inc.
In 1988, she launched Roca, a Chelsea, Massachusetts-based nonprofit that employs “relentless outreach” to engage with young men who are felons, “likely to shoot or be shot,” and young mothers — all living in poverty and violence.
“They’re not going to go to another program, they’re not going to go to job training, they’re not going to go to college, you can’t pay them to do those things,” says Baldwin. “The issues of structural racism have left this group of young people way out there … but people can heal and they can get the skills they need to heal and live.”
The young youth worker
Baldwin, now 61, first began working with young people when she was only 16.
“I feel like I got called to it, although I certainly didn’t understand that when I was younger,” she says.
Doing youth work and doing outreach for hours on end, “I was able to learn a lot and listen,” she says.
When she founded Roca, the Spanish word for rock, she says, “The idea was to build a foundation as strong as a rock.”
The focus was always on young men and young mothers, including immigrants and refugees. Over time the organization grew — including more young people, establishing job training, incorporating behavioral health, and replicating its intervention and behavior change model in five locations across Massachusetts and one in Baltimore.
The Reluctant Student
Baldwin, who received an honorary doctorate from Lesley in 2016, enrolled in a self-designed master’s in education program in 2010. She wanted to figure out how to scale up Roca’s operations.
Three Roca staff joined Baldwin, a self-professed “reluctant student.” But she found that the opportunity to take an academic look at her work and immediately put it into practice was invaluable.
“Everything about the way we do our work tells you, you should not replicate it,” she says of Roca’s hands-on, door-to-door approach. “I used my studies at Lesley to put in place the framework. Now we’re launching the Roca Impact Institute doing those things.”
Molly Baldwin speaks to Lesley graduates at our 2016 Commencement.
Scaling up
The institute is still in the “soft launch” phase and has been slowed by the pandemic, but Baldwin and her colleagues want the institute to replicate Roca’s approach to youth development, with a focus on addressing trauma and working with police, criminal justice partners, and other community organizations. So far, four houses of correction, two police departments and one district attorney’s office have signed on with the institute. Roca will work with them for one to two years.
“I think the Impact Institute is an important vehicle to work on social justice,” says Baldwin. “I feel incredibly lucky to work with the young people on the team and partners to, in some way, try to move toward justice.”
In the midst of the coronavirus, Baldwin and her team have also adjusted their programs and outreach to make it safe and more tech savvy for youth.
Baldwin stays busy, but she doesn’t tire of Roca's work. If anything, current events have spurred her to work harder, to keep fighting for social justice and to challenge more people to do the same.
Baldwin never asks herself if she’s done enough. Instead, her question is “How can I be most of service?” And whatever the answer is, that’s where she’ll be.
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