At Roca, founder and CEO Molly Baldwin is redefining how communities respond to urban violence. The organization works with 16- to 24-year-olds who are disconnected from school, probation programs, and traditional services. Many have experienced or committed violence and rarely seek help on their own. Roca’s mission is to disrupt cycles of harm by helping youth heal from trauma, build emotional regulation, and learn new ways of responding under stress.

Its approach combines two central methods: Relentless Outreach, a long-term commitment to finding and engaging young people wherever they are, and Rewire CBT, a nonclinical adaptation of cognitive behavioral therapy. Through Rewire CBT, staff teach seven emotional regulation skills that help participants recognize the difference between what they think, feel, and do, and practice taking an eight- to twelve-second pause before reacting.

Roca’s work focuses on:

• Bringing behavioral health to youth outside formal systems or classrooms.
• Integrating Rewire CBT into all activities, from street conversations to work crews.
• Partnering with probation officers, employers, and city agencies to strengthen support networks.
• Training practitioners nationwide through the Roca Impact Institute, active in 22 states.

In Massachusetts, recidivism among high-risk young men has fallen by 30 percent, with early pilots in Maryland showing similar gains. Participants describe using “the pause” to prevent violence, repair relationships, and stay employed.

In an environment with widespread housing instability, exposure to guns, and chronic trauma, Baldwin’s model continues to demonstrate that persistence, trust, and practical skill building can help even the most disconnected young people regain control over their choices and futures.

In Baltimore, Kurtis Palermo, executive vice president of Roca Maryland, works with young men living at the center of urban violence. Many have grown up amid poverty, incarceration, and constant exposure to trauma, leaving them in a state of survival where fear and impulse often dictate their choices. Roca’s mission is to disrupt these cycles by helping youth build emotional regulation and safer, more deliberate ways of responding to stress.

Palermo finds that true behavior change requires time, consistency, and structure. Through a three-year engagement, Roca staff guide participants in developing awareness of their thoughts, emotions, and actions. The organization’s model centers on Rewire CBT, a nonclinical form of cognitive behavioral theory developed with Massachusetts General Hospital, which teaches young people how to pause before reacting and make choices aligned with their long-term goals.

Roca’s approach combines:

• Daily contact and persistent follow-up to build trust and accountability.
• Paid transitional employment that reinforces emotional control and responsibility.
• Integration of Rewire CBT into every interaction, from work crews to outreach visits.
• Partnerships with police, hospitals, and probation officers to coordinate care.
• An after-shooting protocol that deploys staff within 48 hours to prevent retaliation.

The outcomes are tangible. Participants show fewer arrests, improved job stability, and measurable gains in emotional regulation. Some graduates have returned as youth workers, mentoring others through the same process of change.

Challenges persist as funding shifts and the work remains emotionally demanding. Yet Palermo remains committed to steady leadership amid uncertainty: “It’s just chaotic, crises on any given day. You have to keep everything on the rails.”

Olga Romero came to Roca first as a community member, then as a participant in her final two years of high school, and eventually as a staff member — returning nearly a decade later to serve as a youth worker and, later, the organization's first reentry coordinator for women. Now working specifically with the Young Women's Program, Romero brings lived experience of the same Chelsea streets and systems her participants navigate. That experience shapes everything about how she approaches the work: "You can't teach what you don't know."

The Young Women's Program grew out of Romero's recognition that the young women on her caseload — many of them mothers — were carrying risks and vulnerabilities that weren't being named. Partners who were shooters, domestic violence, substance use, trafficking, gang involvement: these were not peripheral issues but defining realities. Her work with this population includes:

• Building trust through persistent, relentless outreach over months — showing up consistently even when young people test boundaries, lie, or push workers away.
• Walking young women through consent forms and safety contracts at the start of engagement, including an honest, example-based explanation of mandated reporting so that the boundaries of confidentiality are clear from the beginning.
• Using Rewire CBT and peacemaking circles with young women in the same way Roca uses them with young men, while also addressing the specific compounding pressures young mothers face around custody, housing, employment, and reentry.
• Coordinating with the young men's team to share referrals and information, allowing Roca to support young people as a family unit rather than as isolated individuals.
• Working directly inside the jail system during COVID and after, helping young women understand and assert their legal rights around child custody and reunification at a time when those rights were frequently being overlooked.

Romero is direct about what she sees as a systemic failure: young women involved in the justice system face harsher judgment, fewer rehabilitation resources, and faster timelines for losing parental rights than their male counterparts — all while navigating more complex survival risks on the street. "Knowing better and actually doing better are two very different things," she notes, describing the impossible tangle of probation requirements, DCF appointments, employment conditions, childcare, and housing that a young mother leaving incarceration must manage simultaneously.

She acknowledges that clinical care has real value but argues that skill-based, community-rooted approaches are what reach young women when and where systems cannot. The biggest barrier to change, she believes, is simply awareness. Until the distinct vulnerabilities of young women in street-involved situations are recognized and measured, the systems designed to help them will continue to be built around someone else.

Anisha Chablani-Medley, managing director of the Roca Impact Institute, works with young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are both victims and perpetrators of violence — intentionally serving those who aren't ready, willing, or able to show up for programs. The organization stays with someone for about three years, pursuing the relationship and building a consistent presence that can support behavior change.

At the center of Roca's model is Rewire CBT, a skills-based approach developed with Massachusetts General Hospital and designed to be delivered by non-clinicians. Built around an understanding of brain science, neuroplasticity, and the stages of change, it targets pre-contemplators through seven core skills practiced in real time, often on a street corner or in a car. The model responds to the needs of young people by:

• Teaching seven core skills — being present, labeling feelings, behavior activation, acting on values, sticking with it, cognitive flexibility, and solving it — to help people recognize when they're stuck, slow down, and make a choice.
• Equipping youth workers, not clinicians, to deliver skills in real time wherever young people are, making each contact as intentional as possible.
• Building relationships through persistent outreach, with contact standards of at least two visits per week and up to eight or nine attempts to reach a single young person.
• Running a transitional employment program where young people can practice skills in a supported work environment until they get it right.
• Training other community violence interruption programs and juvenile justice systems in Rewire CBT through the Roca Impact Institute.

The impact of the model is visible across Roca's sites. When Rewire was rolled out, staff noticed a significant drop in physical altercations, shifting the culture from reacting to de-escalating. In the transitional employment program, young people on work crews began using the skills with each other. Chablani-Medley also points to longer-term examples: a young person who returned after a period of incarceration and told his former youth worker, "I was thinking a lot about those cycles that you were talking to me about when I was in there."

Chablani-Medley acknowledges that the changing dynamics of street violence — including increased access to firearms and drugs — are ongoing challenges the model must plan for. Balancing crisis-driven operations with the capacity building needed to sustain staff is another persistent tension. She notes that while people recognize the need for youth mental health support, "it's hard for people to separate how to support mental health from behaviors that young people have done, particularly when they're harmful behaviors." Within Roca, staff wellbeing is supported through the same tools used with young people, including Rewire CBT in supervision, and peacemaking circles — a practice learned from the Tagish Tlingit in the Yukon territory.