2024 Annual Report

2024 has been a hopeful year with regard to gun violence in major cities across America. While violent crime has declined nationally, Baltimore’s homicide rate has reached its lowest point in a decade, and Boston is swiftly becoming the safest major city in the country. Roca’s work in these cities has been cited as a key reason why—revealing a simple but powerful truth, one that we try every day to instill in our young people: What we do matters.

One shooting, one life lost, is too many. But what we are seeing is real progress. And as Roca Baltimore’s own Kurt Palermo told CNN this year, “This is not a fluke; this is not luck. This is a systemic approach to a public health crisis.”

At Roca, we always say that justice is a verb. But justice can happen only when we mute the deafening headlines meant to divide, anger, and scare; when we reframe unhelpful thoughts and feelings and believe that our decisions are significant and our actions add up. Justice happens when we come together despite differences, arms linked, and get to work.

For 36 years, Roca has helped young people reach a life beyond violence, using a set of time-tested strategies including relentless outreach, Rewire CBT, and dynamic partnerships with communities and systems. Roca’s success with these strategies has influenced other organizations, inspiring a growing national revolution in violence intervention and community policing.

Last year, Roca directly served nearly 2,000 young people at the center of urban violence in three states. So many young lives, yet not nearly enough to meet the vast need across the country. But in just the last four years, Roca’s Impact Institute has coached 75 community violence intervention programs, criminal justice agencies, and police departments in 54 cities across the United States. Through the organizations we train and coach, we touch the lives of tens of thousands of young people, more than we could ever reach on our own.

The outcomes you will find in this annual report provide hard evidence that Roca’s intervention model is saving and transforming lives. And the personal stories you will watch illustrate a thousand small victories behind those numbers: one more gun dropped, one more day sober, one more trip to work on time and back home safe.

What we do matters. The ancient Celts believed that heaven and earth were only three feet apart, and that, in “thin places,” the distance was even shorter. In these thin places, the spiritual and physical worlds come to meet, and the world we grapple with and the world we reach for become one.

We hope you find in this annual report a thin place of your own—a quiet space, or a spectacular moment, where hope comes alive and a life beyond violence is within reach for all of us.