A beacon of hope
CHELSEA - Angie Rodriguez remembers when she couldn’t shake Molly Baldwin.
Angie was a gifted teenager throwing her talent away on the streets of Chelsea in an adolescent fog defined by girl gangs and silly behavior. Baldwin was the tenacious woman from Roca, the neighborhood social service agency, who kept offering help Angie didn’t think she needed.
“I kept thinking I should tell her off, and maybe she’d leave me alone,’’ Rodriguez said recently. “It was easy for me to do the street thing, because I knew the outcome.’’
Roca is part community center - part jobs program, part daycare center, part beacon of hope. It serves over 600 teens and young adults in Chelsea, offering a wide variety of services.
To see just how wide, all you have to do is take a walk around the place. On a recent afternoon, a group of young mothers was making jewelry in one room.
In the gym, kids were shooting hoops. Upstairs, in a dance studio, a group of children twirled around.
Certainly, it is not the only program that successfully addresses the needs of young adults. But few can match the sheer tenacity of Roca, a program whose motto could be, “We Never Quit.’’
Baldwin has run the agency since its inception 21 years ago. She was drawn to Chelsea, almost by accident, asked to help craft a youth program in a city she barely knew.
“We started with young people who other people didn’t want to deal with,’’ Baldwin said. “They have a right to have a sense of belonging.’’
Simply put, successfully working with troubled kids takes a lot more than simply giving them a place to go for a few hours after school. It may involve day care, or job training, or help with finishing high school.
One thing it definitely takes its patience. Roca’s job training program, which in theory takes 18 months to complete, usually takes much longer. That’s because students will falter, and drop out, and return - often multiple times. There is no limit to the number of false starts one is allowed. Learning the skills to function in the world is not necessarily a seamless process.
“We have positive and unconditional love for them,’’ Baldwin said. “It’s a belief that as long as you’re alive, you can do this.’’
Baldwin said the agency went through a crisis a few years in, convinced that they were running good programs, but not producing enough results. That resulted in a more tough-minded approach to programming, with an emphasis on measurable outcomes and results.
A breakfast this week honoring the program illustrated just how broad its fan base has become. Larry Lucchino and Tom Werner were there from the Red Sox, as well as Mike Ashe, the longtime sheriff of Hampden County.
Margarita Barrios Ponce, a board member, said she was drawn to Roca partly because it addresses a population that is often overlooked. “A lot of programs deal with school-age children and a lot of organizations deal with young people who have been incarcerated, but Roca really focuses on young people who are in the middle, in that void.’’
Angie Rodriguez freely credits Roca with turning her life around. She became an honors graduate of Chelsea High, before going on to study journalism at Northwestern University.
She didn’t go into journalism, though. She is working at Roca, chasing kids in Chelsea down the street and drawing them into the program. She is trying to share what she found: a place to belong.
“A lot of these kids are so isolated,’’ she said. “This is a place where you find forgiveness.’’
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 