2025

This year, America feels on edge.

The world our young people are inheriting is more divided and uncertain than it’s been in decades. Social safety nets are fraying, and too many families are left to shoulder the weight of trauma without enough support. Violence prevention programs are losing funding, and mental health systems are stretched thin.

Amid the noise and the loss and the politics dividing us, one truth remains: if the kids aren’t okay, none of us are.

Yet even in this moment, hope persists.

At Roca, we see this hope every day in the faces of the young people who are choosing to fight for their futures. They are navigating street violence, poverty, and systems that were never built for them—and still, they take chance on Roca. They show up. They try again. They remind us that even as investment in community safety and behavioral health is rolled back, our shared resolve can deepen. People can step up.

And people do: in the midst of federal cuts, extraordinary commitments from partners including ICONIQ Impact, Whiting-Turner, and Bank of America have helped ensure that Roca could sustain life-saving work—demonstrating the profound power of private leadership when public support falters.

For nearly four decades, Roca has reached the young people most disconnected from opportunity—the ones who slam the door, who don’t answer when you call, who test you again and again until they trust you won’t leave. With relentless outreach, patience, and care, we help them learn to stop, think, and choose differently.

And at the heart of that transformation is Rewire CBT—our breakthrough behavioral health intervention that transforms who can deliver care, how it’s delivered, and who gets to benefit. Born from the streets and grounded in science, Rewire CBT gives youth workers, violence interrupters, and police officers the tools to meet young people where they are. Through intensive relationships and intentional dialogue, Rewire CBT helps young people manage emotions, regulate their thoughts, and take back control of their choices.

As we look ahead, Roca’s Path to 2030 is about leaning in, not pulling back. Through digital innovation and the expansion of the Roca Impact Institute, we are on track to bring Rewire CBT to more than 200,000 young people across the country in the next four years—each one given a new chance to imagine a life beyond violence.

This work has never been easy, and never more necessary. It is a reminder that change doesn’t come from policy alone—it comes from people. From the conversations that begin in moments of pain or anger or fear, and turn into something else entirely: connection, insight, possibility.

As Roca youth worker Sted from Lynn, Massachusetts reminds us, “We’re creatures of trauma. But everything starts and ends with a conversation. Emotions are energy. You get to choose how you use them.”

Every day, we watch young people make that choice—to channel pain into power, to reach for something better, to believe again. That is the miracle of this work. That is the story of Roca.

Thank you for believing in this work—and in the conversations that make it possible.