Bankruptcy Pays as Expanding Youth Services Draw Together Kids from Somalia, Bosnia, and even Massachusetts
Stepping into the new $2.93 million ROCA youth center downtown here is like stepping into America’s multicultural future. Teens from nearly every continent mix and mingle, dance the salsa and play basketball.
“I came here for the Cambodian dance,” says Kyle Say, 18, as he leads a tour of ROCA, which is Spanish for “rock” or “foundation.” Now an AmeriCorps youth worker for ROCA and a clerk at Staples, Say is saving for college to study computer science.
At a family leadership meeting here two years ago, “Cambodian and Somali women ended up in the same room speaking French to each other,” says Molly Baldwin, ROCA’s executive director. “We created a place where people feel like they belong — and we just realized it!”
She sounds shocked by ROCA’s accomplishments. But Baldwin tirelessly slogs through the mud of racial politics and bureaucracy surrounding youth work with immigrant teens, all the while smiling, hugging and listening, giving direction to youth, building alliances with youth-serving organizations and changing the system from within.
A 1960s-style activist, Baldwin’s goal — to “empower youth to be leaders in their own lives and in the life of the community” — sends her to every nook and cranny for funding and allies. ROCA’s new youth center was built because local and national foundations and funds — with names like Kresge, Hyams, Needmor, Gardiner Howland Shaw, Charles Hayden and Reebok — were convinced by Baldwin and her staff to put up the money.
Baldwin and ROCA rub some people the wrong way, but the sheer scope of the youth work and the entrepreneurial energy driving it has pushed ROCA to the top among Chelsea’s youth-serving organizations. With an annual budget of $2.13 million in 1998, ROCA is now working on developing strategic long-term goals and a three-year intensive development plan to increase and diversify funding sources.
Like California, Texas, and an increasing number of cities across the country, Chelsea is an immigrant landing point. As of the 1990 census, the city was about 50 percent Hispanic, 35 percent white and 12 percent Asian. A surge of immigrants from Somalia and Bosnia are changing this small city yet again with their cultures, languages and children. According to Chelsea public schools, up to two-thirds of the students speak English as a second language (or not at all.)
Yet last year Chelsea was awarded the prestigious All-America City Award from the National Civic League, which “honors 10 communities who best exemplify grassroots problem-solving,” according to the League. So how did this just-off-the-boat city — population 31,434, almost in the shadow of Boston’s downtown — become an All-American?
It went bankrupt, that’s how.
Falling Down to Get Up
“Receivership was the best thing that has ever happened to us,” says Chelsea Police Department Capt. Don Robitaille. “Before receivership, it [local government] was the old school- boy network.”
Chelsea was run by Boss Tweed-style machine politicians elected largely by elderly, white registered voters in an overwhelmingly young, immigrant (and nonvoting) community. By the 1991 state takeover, three former Chelsea mayors had been convicted of corruption or lying to a grand jury. Youth services were fragmented, underfunded and often English-only.
Local politics had gone the way of the local economy, signs of which remain to this day. Looking down from Tobin Bridge over the Chelsea River, it’s hard to miss the skeletal remains of heavy industry: huge oil tanks, twisted and broken steel, and foundered rusting boats line the shores.
By the late 1980s, Chelsea’s schools were decrepit and failing. The city was the lone hold-out among Massachusetts’ 351 cities that had never asked for state school-building funds that had been available since World War II. In 1988-89, only a quarter of high school students took the SATs, one-fifth planned to attend four-year college, and over half of those entering high school didn’t graduate. By 1989, schools that had once sent graduates to Harvard and MIT were deemed such abject failures that Boston University, led by unorthodox President John Silber, was asked to take them over.
Two years later, Chelsea, the poorest city in Massachusetts, went bankrupt and was taken over by the state. State overseers replaced the mayor with a strong city council, led by a city manager. They gave the local economy a much-needed shot in the arm with large-scale building projects. Finally tapping into $150 million of those school-building funds, every school was renovated. The city remodeled its police station, renovated Bunker Hill Community College and built a new courthouse.
Rebuilding Youth Services
But new buildings don’t remake a city; people do. When asked why she came to Chelsea to start ROCA, Baldwin says she was “called here” as if on a mission. And ROCA’s mission statement — “to promote justice through creating opportunities with young people and families to lead happy and healthy lives” — has drawn to the center a loyal group of volunteers, youth workers and teens who also talk with missionary zeal about transforming lives.
“You’re always thinking about the future of the community,” says Shirley Tang, ROCA special projects coordinator. “This is a think and action tank where work is no longer work. It’s like breathing.”
Cited as one of the three grassroots programs that made Chelsea an All-America City, ROCA has grown and changed significantly from its narrow beginnings in 1988 as a teen pregnancy prevention and community coalition program funded by Massachusetts’ Teen Challenge Fund. Inspired by El Puente in Brooklyn, Baldwin says, ROCA changed its focus from “adult and social-servicey” to being “youth-led.”
ROCA’s programming has grown and added depth to youth services in the city by launching initiatives including: the ROCA Chelsea Leadership Center to provide activities, counseling and street outreach for youth aged 12 to 21; Young Mothers United, to provide home-based counseling for young mothers and parents; YouthSTAR Corps, a full-time youth service and conservation corps funded by AmeriCorps, state, local and private funds; health education, gang prevention and outreach and other workshops; and a variety of similar programs in the nearby city of Revere.
Annually serving more than 750 youth at the center and more than 5,000 youth in outreach programs throughout Chelsea and nearby Revere, ROCA becomes a stable, surrogate family for many. With 30 full-time staff (70 full-time in the summer) and 15 part-timers (including seven former “members” who are now paid youth workers), shared memories and intense devotion permeates the organization.
“My husband jokes about this — he was a founding member,” says Danille Calvo, ROCA’s coalition coordinator for Chelsea-Revere Youth and Family Services. “When he was 14, Molly [Baldwin] started playing basketball with him and asked him — on the court — “Do you need condoms?’”
Baldwin laughs when reminded of her impertinence. She says she wasn’t quite that abrupt, but adds, “I want the kids to stay healthy, so I talked with them anywhere.”
Other youth programs, like the YMCA and Chelsea Boys & Girls Clubs, offer more traditional after-school programs than ROCA’s intensive programming. “We offer life skills training, field trips to snowboarding and college visits,” says Josh Kraft, director of the Boys & Girls Club. “But we mainly have sports here: a basketball and flag football league.” Centered in the old high school, the Club works with children and youth from age 6-to-18 during after-school hours.
Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom
After the corrupt garbage lid was taken off the city, grassroots political organizations and youth services addressing the needs of a rapidly changing immigrant community began to flower.
“When I first arrived it was the old-fashioned school health program with no [foreign] language capability and three nurses, “ says Debbi Kerr, director of school and public health nursing for Chelsea. With seven nurses and five bilingual health aides now, “it’s more pro-active. We don’t just react to crises, we can manage health crises.”
With the shake-up of Chelsea’s political system and state oversight came more avenues to state, federal and private aid than local social service agencies had had. Tobacco tax money poured in for public health programs, and Massachusetts General Hospital’s (MGH) “Community Benefits” program brought much-needed money to Chelsea’s youth and family health programs.
For students at Chelsea High School, the school nurse and health clinic are funded by the Community Benefits program. The nonprofit MGH gives back the money it would have paid in taxes to help low-income areas around Boston, like Chelsea. According to Sarah Oo, director of Community Benefits, MGH also funds Chelsea Community Health Center; HAVEN (Hospitals helping Abuse and Violence End Now); a tuberculosis clinic for refugees; interpreters for Somali-, Serbo-Croatian-, Spanish-, Vietnamese- and Khmer-speaking residents; and PACT (Police Action Counseling Team.)
Oo chairs the “coordinating committee.” It sounds bureaucratic but is somewhat revolutionary in its commonsense approach to agency collaboration which replaced the turf wars that used to be the norm. Each month youth and family service workers from MGH, the Chelsea Police Department, the city Department of Social Services, Chelsea public schools, ROCA, juvenile court and North Suffolk Mental Health Services gather to discuss teens that one of the providers has identified as having (or as on the way to having) serious problems and hammer out specific services each agency will provide.
“We try to do case coordination,” says Oo. “It’s like a small town getting together to decide what is needed and who should do what to help.”
Though Chelsea is in many ways a small city coping with big city problems, many local youth workers use its size to their advantage, according to Sue Clark, executive director of Choice Through Education. “We model our teen pregnancy program after the one-room schoolhouse, from sixth through 12th grade together,” she says.
An Upward Bound program with high school youth, Choice has been quietly building skills and tutoring local youth and helping prepare them for college for 18 years. Clark’s program helped educate many locals, like city council president, Juan Vega, who are now leading the city. Choice also partners with Chelsea High School to provide classes for teen mothers so they can graduate with a Chelsea diploma rather than a GED.
Partnering between service providers is the buzzword of the decade, but in Chelsea it has real meaning. In the PACT program, three social workers from MGH’s mental health unit “respond with the police at the scene to do crisis intervention,” says Oo. These social workers then follow up with youth who have been victims of, or witnesses to, domestic violence or street violence. The youth workers refer teens to whatever other services they might need to deal with the trauma and, hopefully, break the cycle of violence.
Partnering might be hip among let’s-have-a-meeting youth workers, but getting Chelsea police on board PACT was a tough sell, according to Capt. Robitaille. “Cops are notoriously reluctant to change,” he says. “You can usually get one or two to pioneer it, they’re very skeptical and will wait several months to see if it works.”
But these days, the Chelsea Police Department is trying to be hip in its own way . Besides the PACT program, officers teach martial arts and basketball to teens through their Police Activity League nights and are getting to know teens on the street. The relationship wasn’t always so warm.
“Pre-receivership,” says Robitaille, “the mentality was us against them. Our job was to get ‘em, book ‘em and get back out as fast as possible.” The idea of collaborating with other agencies or having bilingual police officers was nearly unheard of until the department received a $1.1 million U.S.
Justice Department’s Weed and Seed grant in 1992. After “weeding out the central criminal element,” Robitaille says, the department started seeding by changing to community policing. Then it began “partnering with anyone,” including the schools, Boys & Girls Clubs and ROCA. According to Chelsea Police, crime has fallen steadily since community policing began and was down another 12.8 percent in 1998.
“We hired eight bilingual officers. That eased tensions with the Hispanic community,” Robitaille says.
Nice Neighborhood, but How Are the Schools?
“If you want to hear Boston University folks bristle, say that it’s been 10 years and not much has changed,” says Superintendent Douglas Sears.
BU took up the reins of Chelsea’s schools two years before the city declared bankruptcy, assured the district’s funding would remain level for the length of the 10-year contract. Instead, “just when we were getting ramped up to do the curriculum changes and after-school programs, we were literally cut to the bone and had huge, awful layoffs,” says Sears. “We held it together with spit and baling wire — and we raised $10 million ourselves.”
In addition to $2 million in Annenberg Challenge grants for urban schools, Chelsea received $286,924 in U.S. Department of Education funding to reduce class size and $142,000 in 21st Community Learning Center after-school funding.
City Council President Vega is not complimentary of the job Boston University is doing. Though he agrees the new facilities are a big improvement, “they have been here for 10 years and the schools haven’t turned around.”
Vega, founder of Centro Latino, is a born-and-raised Chelsea son. BU might be seen by Vega and some others as an occupying force, but the high caliber academic minds and priceless fundraising skills and contacts brought to bear on tiny Chelsea took many folks’ breath away.
“They’ve raised $10 million in the 10 years they’ve spent in Chelsea. We couldn’t do that in 90 years!” says Chelsea City Manager (and native) Guy Santagate. “They’ve brought in professionalism, they can do long-term planning and they’re high-powered people.”
BU says drop-out rates have decreased to 15.6 per cent in 1998 (from 52 per cent in 1989), and that 40 percent of high schoolers planned to attend four-year college (from 20 per cent in 1989). “There’s improvement, but there hasn’t been an appropriate evaluation or outside review,” says Vega.
In 1989 Vega was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit to stop BU from taking over the schools. Though he agrees the schools were in bad shape, “we, the elected representatives gave over all the power to Boston University, a private university.”
Yes, agrees Santagate — and more for the better. “BU comes on strong. If they had a PR school, they should shut it down because they’re no good at it.” But, he adds “they’re effective, they’re good at what they’re doing, they believe in their goals and in discipline and in good work habits.”
It’s Raining Money
The two receivers appointed by the state in 1991 are still looked upon by many as angels from on high. James Carlin, the first receiver, had been Massachusetts commerce commissioner and secretary of transportation. Now chairman of the state board of higher education, he’s also a millionaire businessman. The second receiver was Harry Spence, Boston’s former Housing Authority receiver who was credited for turning around the public housing agency. Their financial expertise and silver-clad connections turned on the spigot that brought a stream of state and federal money. Or perhaps it was a fire hose.
Remember that Weed and Seed grant? Chelsea was one of the 21 pilot sites chosen by the U.S. Department of Justice, sharing the spotlight with such crime-ridden cities as Chicago and Los Angeles. That’s odd, because “Chelsea never had war zones, it didn’t have drug dealers on every corner,” according to Choice Through Education’s Clark. “If you read the grant application, Chelsea was portrayed like East L.A. or something.”
Uncle Sam and Massachusetts had taken a personal interest in Chelsea, and it showed. Sitting around the local Weed and Seed steering committee were local youth work luminaries from the Chelsea Police Department, ROCA, MGH and the likes of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
But the rain of funding won’t last forever, and Santagate knows it. Working to bring new business and jobs into Chelsea is at the top of his list. For youth like Kyle Say and ROCA AmeriCorps youth worker and teen mother Kerry Lyons, a movie theater and more “things to do” are key issues for the city.
Despite lacking a movie theater of its own, confidence in the city is palpable walking through Chelsea’s 1.3 square miles of trim brick and wood homes and tree-lined streets. Plans are set for a new hotel, and a local theater group recently opened its doors.
“Chelsea’s exciting: it’s bilingual, there’s tons of potential here,” says Danielle Fateux Jacques, artistic director of Theatre Zone and its youth component, the Chelsea Youth Theatre. Partnering with the Chelsea public schools and Shakespeare and Co., Jacques is “looking to do programs with continuity so kids can be involved over the long-term.”
In early May, 40 teen actors and 40 teen stage hands at Chelsea High School performed Macbeth for their classmates. A week later, they took the show on the road to a statewide festival — and to present the new Chelsea on the world’s stage.
Resources
Molly Baldwin
Executive Director
ROCA Inc.
101 Park St.
Chelsea, MA 02150
(617) 889-5210
Douglas Sears
Chelsea Public Schools
Superintendent
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway
Chelsea, MA 02150
(617) 889-8666
Chelsea Police Department
PACT program
Capt. Don Robitaille
Patrol/Operations Division Commander
180 Crescent Ave.
Chelsea, MA 02150
(617) 889-8600
Debbi Kerr
Director
Chelsea School and Public Health Nursing
500 Broadway St., Room 100
Chelsea, MA 02150
(617) 889-8260
Juan Vega
President, Chelsea City Council
Executive Director, Centro Latino
267 Broadway St.
Chelsea, MA 02150
(617) 884-3238
Susan Clark
Executive Director
Choice Through Education
P.O. Box 505599
Chelsea, MA 02150
(617) 884-4706
Sarah Oo
Director
Community Benefits
Massachusetts General Hospital
151 Everett Ave.
Chelsea, MA 02150
(617) 887-4305
David Rein
Public Information
National Civic League
All-America City Award
1445 Market St., Ste. 300
Denver, CO 80202-1717
(800) 223-6004
Sidebar:
Rook, Ayesha. "Bankruptcy Pays as Expanding Youth Services Draw Together Kids from Somalia, Bosnia, and even Massachusetts." Youth Today, June 1999, p. 48.
©2000 Youth Today. Reprinted with permission from Youth Today. All rights reserved.
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