Program Goals/Target Population
Resilience, Opportunity, Safety, Education, Strength (ROSES) is a community-based, trauma-informed, gender-responsive advocacy intervention for girls 11 to 17 years old who are at risk for or already involved in the juvenile justice system. The program (formerly called the Girls Advocacy Project [GAP]) uses an advocacy framework that focuses on girls’ strengths (rather than their deficits) and aims to increase girls’ access to community resources and make the community (which includes the systems in which girls are involved in) more responsive to their needs. The goal of the program is to strengthen girls’ contexts (e.g., school, family, peers) in a way to promote their positive development and decrease their engagement with risk-enhancing contexts. Contexts can include informal (e.g., peer, family) and formal (e.g., school, juvenile justice system, child welfare).
Key Personnel
The ROSES intervention involves a university–community partnership. The intervention is implemented by advocates, who are advanced undergraduate students from a local university. Advocates complete an intensive, 40-hour manualized ROSES advocacy training and attend weekly in-person advocacy supervision meetings. They work alongside girls, in the girls’ home communities.
Program Components
ROSES uses an individualized, strengths-based, and multilevel approach. The program is 10 to 12 weeks long. Advocates meet with their assigned clients in the community twice a week and engage in advocacy work for about 10 hours each week.
The advocacy work involves four phases. During the first phase, the assessment phase, advocates get to know their clients and gather information about the girls’ lives, goals, and contexts (e.g., peer dynamics). This information helps advocates determine and understand what goals the clients want to accomplish during the program (such as improving grades in school, successfully completing probation, or joining a sports team). The second phase begins with advocates collaboratively identifying areas of clients’ unmet needs and assembling a variety of resources tailored to meet these needs. During this process, the clients select which resources to contact, and advocates help the clients make phone calls, arrange in-person meetings, and identify important individuals who could improve their chances of accessing the resources they need. In the third phase, advocates and clients work together to identify and assemble new formal and informal resources that could also meet the clients’ needs. In the final phase, advocates work on efforts to transfer “self-advocacy” skills. They transfer skills and knowledge about advocacy to their clients and encourage the girls to take a more active role in their own advocacy. This phase includes a psychoeducational component, in which advocates instruct the girls on the phases and philosophy of advocacy. There is also an active component in which the girls become more involved in aspects of the program (planning and leading meetings with probation officers or writing their own letters to the juvenile court).
The advocacy phases could be engaged in simultaneously. For example, assessment of unmet needs could continue for the duration of the program, and transfer of self-advocacy skills could begin during the first contact between advocates and their clients.
The program also incorporates trauma-informed principles, such as a promotion of safety (by attending to victimization risk and safety planning); trustworthiness (by holding advocates accountable to high standards set by the program); choice (by supporting multiple solutions to meeting girls’ goals and needs); collaboration (by involving girls in the directing and planning of the intervention), and empowerment (by following a rights-based model that asserts each girl has a right to positive youth development) [Javdani and Allen, 2016].
Program Theory
Two theoretical frameworks guide the elements of the ROSES program. The first theoretical framework is ecological theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1992), which asserts that multiple levels of analyses shape human behavior (such as individual biology and social environments like school or family). ROSES was designed to intervene with girls’ proximal social environments, to change conditions of their lives with the aim of decreasing certain risk factors and increasing protective factors (Javdani and Allen, 2016).
The second theoretical framework is empowerment theory, which asserts that individuals, groups, and communities experience greater well-being when they have more control over their lives (Rappaport, 1981). Disenfranchised groups (specifically youth and girls) often do not have decisionmaking control over certain parts of their lives that directly affect them. In ROSES, girls have decisionmaking authority regarding the focus of the intervention and the specific direction the intervention will take (Javdani and Allen, 2016).
