Living Together Well in Diverse Urban Communities: An Interview with Molly Baldwin
by Kali Saposnick

from Leverage Points Issue 38

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Molly Baldwin is founder and executive director of Roca, Inc., a grassroots, multicultural human development and community-building organization in Massachusetts based on a vision of helping young people and families to thrive and lead change. Molly will be a keynote speaker at this year's 2003 Pegasus Conference in October in Boston, where she will share how Roca has succeeded in bringing multiple stakeholders—be they rival gangs, gang members and police, parents and children, youth and politicians, teachers and students—to the table to address tough questions and help them create action plans for change. The following is a preview of some of the values and tools Roca brings to its initiatives.

The issues facing teenagers today—drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and gang wars, to name a few—seem daunting to most adults. Especially in diverse urban settings, many young people do not have the support they need to thrive in the world, let alone cope with their stressful problems. Consequently, they often succumb to poverty, isolation, and despair.

In 1988, a group of community activists concerned with these issues decided to take on the challenge of supporting the youth in the Chelsea, Revere, and Lynn communities. Forming Roca, Inc.—originally an acronym for "Reaching Out to Chelsea Adolescents," but now a reference to the Spanish word for "rock" or "foundation"—they initiated numerous projects that have brought hope to scores of previously marginalized children. "We've helped kids who had no parents, or whose parents weren't there for them because they were struggling with their own issues," says Molly Baldwin, founder and executive director of Roca. "Some teenagers were living on the streets; others were experiencing trauma, having immigrated to the United States from war-torn countries. Whatever their situation, our staff has consistently taken action based on Roca's vision that every young person belongs and that all children are our children."

Over the years, guided by its inclusive vision, Roca has initiated many activities for young people, including building a youth center to increase leadership, vocational, and learning opportunities. With little planning, the staff recruited adolescents to clean up the streets and answer phones at the center "just to get them involved and give them a sense of purpose," Molly explains. "Our theory of change is that, if young people feel that they matter in the world, they'll take care of the important things; they'll make healthier and safer decisions and be more considerate of others."

Eventually, many teenagers began to experience inner transformations and reach out to their community. Some kids who were homeless and involved in illegal activities stopped their antisocial behavior, finished their education, and went to work in the business world. Others became staff members at Roca and ran programs or served on the board of directors. Still others have started their own businesses or gone to college.

Community Resistance to Change
Despite Roca's successes, the organization's efforts were unpopular with many adults in the community. Especially early on, when the staff initiated conversations around the hard questions—dealing with gang violence and drugs, healing the post-traumatic stress disorder that plagued the Cambodian community, supporting youth development programs, and celebrating diversity—many residents refused to engage with them, calling them communists or cult leaders and attacking their core values of justice and peacemaking.

Resistance was particularly strong to Roca's extensive work in Chelsea around teen pregnancy prevention, even though the city has the third-highest teen pregnancy rate in the state. As part of Roca's advocacy for making condoms available in school-based clinics, its staff had to participate in a public hearing. Many parents expressed horror upon hearing young mothers talk about sex during their testimony. Baldwin says ruefully, "They somehow did not get the connection that in order to have babies, teen mothers were engaging in sexual activity."

The kids, on the other hand, were eager to talk about the challenges facing them. They wanted to deal with the violence and pain in their lives, but they didn't know how. Roca activists spent long hours trying to convince the community that young people could lead, organize, and do things in ways that substantially affected their neighborhoods and improved their own lives.

Peace-Making Circles
When Roca turned 12, the staff had a breakthrough in their struggle to overcome community resistance to change. While revisiting the organization's vision, they decided to expand Roca's focus on teen development to include building a broader network of support for the entire community. In the process of making this transition, the group learned about a values-led process for communicating, making decisions, discussing difficult issues, and healing called "peace-making circles." Peace-making circles are based on aboriginal practices that bring the four components of human beings—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual—into the conversation. Using ritual, such as passing a talking stick, the circle creates a sacred space in which people agree to honor certain values, such as respecting and inquiring into each other's thinking, while they talk.

First, Roca staff and certain community members went through a four-day basic training in conducting peace-making circles. Soon, big shifts began to happen. "The staff began to 'show up' differently in conversations," Molly explains. "For the most part, we had previously acted like zealous, self-righteous advocates, demanding that community members talk about the undiscussables, yelling at them for not understanding that, for example, the school dropout problem could not be 'fixed' just by giving kids a little tutoring." During the first training circle, she and other staff members developed profound insight into their own behavior.

Baldwin describes, "We were prepping for leading a circle with kids and cops, and in just two minutes, the process blew up. People began shouting at each other that the circle was never going to work. Suddenly, I got a very clear view of myself: How many times do I decide that I'm right and they're wrong because I feel I'm on the side of social justice? Yet, if I'm committed to the value of belonging, then everybody has to belong. We can't have an 'us' and a 'them.' If we want our community to change, and we can only change ourselves, how do we show up and invite change collectively? If we want people to demonstrate belonging and justice, how do we act accordingly? Asking those questions became the shift for many of us."

Creating Hope
As a result of participating in the peace circles, community members have become more involved in working to address critical issues facing their children and neighborhoods. To date, Roca has trained 350 youth, parents, and social service, health, and nonprofit professionals in four-day circle processes. The staff uses circles for discussing personnel issues; for meetings between parents and elected officials; for conversations with senior leaders in institutions; and around gang issues, conflicts, healing processes, and hard conversations. In one instance, the area director of the Department of Social Services attended one of the trainings and loved it; she has since sent 58 of her 78-person staff to the four-day process, and they have begun to use circles in their interactions with kids and families.

Molly believes that Roca's greatest accomplishment is creating a space where youth and families grow, learn, and work together every day. The active ingredient for helping the community live together well is the organization's consistently clear vision, mission, and values. "When we lose our way," she explains, "we continually return to the core values of belonging and generosity. They're so much bigger than we are and call us to keep learning, not get stuck in our assumptions about how things work. We've been brought to our knees by the stunning experiences that young people and parents have shared. Our belief that we can start again no matter how many mistakes we make or how difficult life can be, that harm can be addressed, accountability clarified, and reparations made, has created tremendous hope in our community."

Kali Saposnick is publications editor at Pegasus Communications.