Goals of Project
NYC Resilience, Opportunity, Safety, Education, Strength (ROSES) is a community-based program pairing youth and LGB/TGNC+ youth experiencing school push out or who have had police, probation, or court contact with a highly trained advocate.
ROSES advocates work with young people in their communities free of charge to support them in their own self determined goals. Advocates work with and on behalf of their clients for 8-10 hours per week, for 10-15 weeks, working with clients by:
- Providing access to resources and education
- Helping girls define individual goals
- Supporting the development of self-efficacy skills
- Encouraging girls’ and LGB/TGNC+ youths’ engagement with multiple social contexts (school, family, peer, etc.)
- Promoting contextual competence to reduce justice system involvement
Interested in Referring Someone to Work with a ROSES Advocate?
ROSES may be ideal for girls and LGB/TGNC+ youth who are in secure facilities for shorter periods of time, who are in non-secure facilities, who are on probation, or as an alternative to incarceration. All you need to be eligible is to:
- live in or near NYC
- be 11 to 18 years old
- have current or past school push out (suspensions, expulsions, not going to school, wanting to transfer school), or police, probation or court contact.
You can learn more or refer a young person, a family member, friend, or yourself by emailing ROSES@nyu.edu.
ROSES Research Study
ROSES was created as an advocacy program for adolescent girls based on empirically supported models in the literature (Sullivan & Bybee, 1999; Davidson & Rapp, 1976). Through the program, paraprofessional advocates are trained and paired with adolescent girls involved in the justice system. Using a strengths-focused and community-based model, advocates provide intensive outreach and intervention while focusing on girls’ strengths and providing services in girls’ natural community contexts (e.g., schools, neighborhoods, homes). The main element of advocacy is to assess girls’ multitude of needs and intensively engage local resources in order to shift girls’ contexts so that they are responsive to those needs, such as by helping girls’ obtain educational support, financial resources, legal advocacy, and cultivate their creative potential (e.g., through writing). To date, this program has proven to be sustainable in our local community and is in its fourth year of operation. Since the program’s inception, we have collected process and outcome evaluation data from youth participants and have found evidence for the program’s effectiveness. This research suggests that ROSES participants report increased self-efficacy and decreased aggression over time (Javdani & Allen, 2014). Based on these promising findings, a National Institute of Justice funded Randomized Controlled Trial of ROSES is underway in New York City in collaboration with multiple citywide and community based organizations:
Girls Justice Initiative (GJI) – ROSEbuds (Westchester, NY)
Rutgers’ University (Camden, NJ)
Gwen’s Girls’ (Pittsburgh, PA)