Page 48 - BusinessWest February 21, 2022

Roca Holyoke and Springfield
This Unique Program Proves That Meaningful, Lasting Change is Possible
WBy George O’Brien
hen BusinessWest first caught up with Trevor Gayle in the winter of 2015, he was a relatively new employee of Chase Management in Springfield.
A recent ‘graduate’ of the Roca program, which helps high-risk individuals — those who have been
incarcerated, are in gangs, have substance-abuse issues, or have dropped out of school — Gayle was handling a wide range of duties for Chase, a property-management firm, from painting to snow removal to apartment- turnover work.
He was also learning what it took to be a good employee and putting to work lessons learned while in Roca that would help him keep his past — he spent six months in jail for sitting in the seat next to a friend who shot and wounded an individual as he approached their vehicle — from becoming his future.
Today, he is superintendent of a huge — as in 447-unit — apartment complex in Groton, Conn., and has several people working under his supervision.
As he reflects on his Roca experience and how it helped him get from where he was — behind bars — to where he is today, he said simply, “I learned how to be my own leader.”
Leah Martin Photography
Not all Roca stories have such positive trend lines, but many of them do. And it is transformations like this that Molly Baldwin had in mind when she started Roca in Chelsea in 1988 to help transform the lives of young, at-risk men. The concept, as summed up in the marketing slogan “less
help them get jobs — and perhaps a career. In recent years, the program has been expanded to include young mothers facing
challenges ranging from a lack of education
and work experience to gang involvement, drug
and alcohol use, violence, abuse, trauma, and more. And the goals for this constituency are the same — to help participants heal from their hurt and anger and gain the tools needed to achieve success later on.
“Our mothers’ program is really about parenting,” said Christine Judd,
the indefatigable director of Roca’s programs in Springfield and Holyoke. “It’s helping them be better parents. It’s helping them overcome substance abuse. Many of them are victims of domestic violence, and some are victims of sexual violence. These are trauma-based services aimed at making them better parents.”
Roca’s official mission is to “disrupt the cycle of incarceration and poverty by helping people transform their lives,” Judd said. And it does this through an intense, three- or four-year intervention model (more on it later) that,
at its core, recognizes that meaningful, lasting change does not happen overnight
And it also does it through partnerships — with constituencies ranging from law-enforcement officials to private business owners and managers who employ participants — that essentially involve the entire community in the work to keep young people on a path to success.
Hampden County District Attorney Anthony Gulluni is one of those partners. Over the years, and especially through a new program he created, the Emerging Adult Court of Hope (EACH), he has helped many at-risk young people find the Roca program.
And what they find, he said, is a support system like none other in this
jail time, more future,” is simple — use street outreach, data-driven case management, stage-based education, and
employment training to reduce individuals’
involvement in crime, keep them out of jail, and
“I learned how to be my own leader.”
48 FEBRUARY 21, 2022
BusinessWest