Transformative Relationships

TRANSFORMATIVE RELATIONSHIPS

Roca calls its networks of consistent support “transformative relationships.”

Roca (Spanish for “rock”) is an organization whose purpose is to build a safe and healthy community for young people. Chelsea, Massachusetts, where Roca is based, is less than two miles from Boston’s financial center, but it is a world away culturally. It is inhabited mostly by Latino, Southeast Asian, and Central African immigrants. “As an immigrant, you have lost your friends, your job, your standards, and your standing in your community,” says Seroem Phong, former director of the Roca street workers. “Families become dysfunctional. Typically, the father cannot speak the language, so he cannot hold a job. Because he no longer can be a provider, he becomes an abuser. Usually the second generation has even more difficulty, because they grow up without any family stability. They have no drive to advance because they have no hope that advancing is possible. So they, as I did, join gangs.”

Recruiting former teenage gang members, young parents, and community members to work on the streets to help others and to rebuild community, Roca has become an interface between police, courts, schools, and a host of social service agencies. In the eighteen years since Roca’s founding, Chelsea has seen dramatic decreases in crime rates and violence, and increases in graduation rates. Many young people who probably would not have survived their teens have ended up in community and four-year colleges and are holding jobs and living productive lives. “What Roca has accomplished is nothing short of amazing,” says Harry Spence, director of the Department of Social Services (DSS) for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. “If we had a half-dozen Rocas, it would make a huge impact on our work across the state.”

I’ve spent a fair amount of time with the youth leaders of Roca, and I continue to learn from their deep understanding of how to help people grow. “Creating transformative relationships is the basis of our work,” Tun Krouch told me during one of my visits with a group of street workers. “The young people we’re dealing with need a relationship that can help them to live,” says founder Molly Baldwin. “Our first job is simply to show up for them. Many have never had someone they could count on to be consistent, to be with them in a relationship of complete support for who they really are as human beings. Over time, they then start to do that for one another.”

Roca’s core method and continual training ground for this “showing up for one another” is what the group calls “peacekeeping circles,” a type of collective reflective practice based on Native American traditions of learning and healing. “We learn to truly listen to each other in circles,” says Omar Ortez.

Marina Rodriguez tells a typical circle story: “Recently, we had a young woman who had gotten pregnant, and she didn’t know how to tell her mom. She was afraid. In a more typical situation, the girl might have run away, or some family friend might have intervened, but instead we decided that the best way to support her was to create a circle. The street worker had a good relationship with her, and formed a small circle with a few people the girl and the mother trusted. We dealt with the situation together, which is wholly different than the girl and the mom just yelling at each other. The key was to create a conversation that would let the mother listen to her daughter, and let them accept one another. The whole idea is to enlarge your circle to build the support that you need.”

“It becomes about cooperative learning,” Susan Ulrich adds. “A circle conversation is where you can all sit together and figure out what is going on and how we’re going to deal with it. You see that a problem is not just one person’s problem, it is [everyone’s] problem. In circle, we are equals, we all have problems and we learn by helping one another.”

“We have a saying we learned from a chief justice of a Navajo tribal court,” adds Baldwin. “He says, ‘You can’t get to a good place in a bad way.’ Circles keep us grounded in our connectedness and create community day by day as we confront whatever we have to confront together.”