IMPACT BOND: A decades-long commitment to keeping troubled young Bostonians out of jail has put Molly Baldwin and her nonprofit, Roca, at the center of a pioneering pay-for-success program.
This article is one of a series The Chronicle is featuring this month about leaders who are pushing unorthodox ideas to give philanthropy more power to do good.
When she founded the youth nonprofit Roca outside Boston in 1988, Molly Baldwin was a hell-raiser. “We were a big pain in the butt — a social-justice, change-the-world group fighting with everyone,” she says. “It was all very dramatic and very fun.”
Today, Roca is working closely with “the system.” In 2014, the group became the linchpin of the nation’s largest pay-for-success program, a social-impact bond through which private entities — among them, establishment players Goldman Sachs and the Kresge Foundation — are investing in the expansion of Roca, hoping for both social and financial returns.
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Kelvin Ma for the Chronicle
IMPACT BOND: A decades-long commitment to keeping troubled young Bostonians out of jail has put Molly Baldwin and her nonprofit, Roca, at the center of a pioneering pay-for-success program.
This article is one of a series The Chronicle is featuring this month about leaders who are pushing unorthodox ideas to give philanthropy more power to do good.
When she founded the youth nonprofit Roca outside Boston in 1988, Molly Baldwin was a hell-raiser. “We were a big pain in the butt — a social-justice, change-the-world group fighting with everyone,” she says. “It was all very dramatic and very fun.”
Today, Roca is working closely with “the system.” In 2014, the group became the linchpin of the nation’s largest pay-for-success program, a social-impact bond through which private entities — among them, establishment players Goldman Sachs and the Kresge Foundation — are investing in the expansion of Roca, hoping for both social and financial returns.
The makings of this deal date back years to what Ms. Baldwin describes as a “profound and painful awakening” for Roca. Working with the most troubled young men and women in financially forlorn Chelsea, the organization had developed a panoply of programs and built a multimillion-dollar budget. It was the embodiment of nonprofit success. Yet doubt crept in. Gang members would come to the Roca offices for its programs, then return to the streets and resume drug-dealing and fighting. “It was quite humbling,” she says.
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About 10 years ago, the organization halted virtually all of its work to develop a theory of how to bring about change — and a way to measure whether that change was happening. “It’s such a privilege to be in the lives of these kids that you better have some way to tell if you’re doing any good on any given day,” Ms. Baldwin says.
When Roca emerged from this deliberation, it shed much of its programming and focused more narrowly on helping young men recently released from jail or the juvenile-justice system stay out prison. It also created a data-analytics system to study what worked.
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After a few years of development, Roca had a model with an intensive human touch: A cadre of trained youth workers fan out in the streets and develop close relationships with the young men most at risk of returning to prison. These workers mentor the men through Roca’s life-skills training, career work, and job placement.
Rigorous studies showed this strategy worked extremely well. One reported that recidivism rates for participants dropped by 55 percent.
When considering how to expand, Ms. Baldwin decided that a pay-for-success program offered the most opportunity. Roca started the fourth in the country, and it’s the largest of 10 underway today (all begun since 2012). Kresge and the Goldman Sachs Social Impact Fund are among those providing $18 million in loans or grants for the expansion. Massachusetts will repay these investors based on Roca’s success in a randomized, controlled trial. At best, investors will get $27 million, and the state will spend $45 million less on incarceration. At worst, the state will pay out nothing.
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With a seven-year timeline, the outcome won’t be clear for a while. The nation’s first pay-for-success program — which aimed to reduce recidivism rates among adolescent inmates released from New York City’s Rikers Island — ended after a few years when it didn’t hit targets. But Ms. Baldwin, the former rabble-rouser, believes a Roca success will have her crafting more deals with the establishment. “If we do well, we can negotiate outcomes-based contracting with the Commonwealth. But if we can prove this, it’ll be easier to contract with anybody.”
