5 in 5: Molly Baldwin, Roca’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Results for America Fellowship Alumni give five answers in five minutes. This month, we caught up with Molly Baldwin, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Roca.

1. Summarize what you do and how you do it.
   Since 1988, I’ve been the founder of Roca, an organization that works 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.
2. Share something exciting that you’re working on.
   To expand the impact of our model and help save and enhance more lives beyond those communities where Roca is providing direct service, we are proud to announce the 2020 launch of the Roca Impact Institute. 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 community based organizations, police, and other systems partners across the country.
3. Tell us one thing you learned from someone else during your RFA Fellowship.
   I was privileged to get to know Lauren Sanchez Gilbert, CEO of BellXcel, through RFA’s What Works Nonprofit Fellowship, and was fascinated to get to know more about BellXcel’s work to expand impact by helping direct service organizations grow outward by developing intensive training and coaching. BellXcel understands that both what you do and how you do it is important when sharing your work through training, which is particularly key for Roca’s work with very high-risk young people. Because of their expertise, BellXcel has since become a key partner in Roca’s Impact Institute.
4. If you could wave a magic wand and have any data or evidence, what would it be?
   At Roca we are grateful that our data may be compared to widely available government data in order to clearly illustrate the long-term impact of our Intervention Model on the highest-risk, justice-system involved young people, through two simple data points: reduced recidivism and increased employment. While we also know that Roca positively impacts the most traumatized and isolated young mothers and their children — potentially preventing a lifetime of negative outcomes for two generations in the realms of economics, education, child welfare, health, the justice system, and more — we are challenged, as are our government systems, to illustrate this long-term impact in terms of public cost savings. These young people and their children are often involved in and receiving resources from multiple government systems, over a long period of time, who do not intermingle data with each other, and we have been searching for a magic wand to produce this evidence for years.
5. What’s the [pick-your-adjective] job you’ve ever had?
   This job is the most humbling opportunity that I’ve ever had. Since we created Roca in 1988, I have learned to see that there is a group of young people who are so left out, so forgotten, that they truly have no one. They don’t show up for programs, won’t go to job training or work, and they are constantly in harm’s way, and they often cause a great deal of harm themselves — but they can change too. They need a place to belong. They need a place to start something different, and we created Roca to be that place for them.

Extra Question: How is Roca adapting its work in response to COVID-19?
Like you, we are saddened by the impacts of the pandemic, particularly on our young people and often their children, who are now more vulnerable to trauma, poverty, and isolation than ever before. But because we cannot and will not stop our work, the need to continue providing outreach, case management, and basic needs like food and baby care supplies to young people brings about a special opportunity for Roca to refine its technological capabilities and methods for keeping in remote contact with young people, like delivering online programming through services like Zoom, Meetup, and FaceTime. While consistent, face-to-face contact will always be our gold standard for nurturing intensive, long-term relationships with young people, we know it will only strengthen our model to have more, effective ways of keeping in touch with our very high-risk, hard-to-reach participants.

Molly Baldwin participated in Results for America’s What Works Nonprofit Fellowship.