About RALLY
The RALLY Program provides children with integrated mental health services and educational supports while helping them build strong relationships with adults and peers that strengthen their resiliency. RALLY is both an in-school and after-school prevention program and currently operates in six public middle schools across the country, with four sites in Boston, one in San Francisco, and one in Lorain, Ohio. RALLY staff work as "Prevention Practitioners," a new professional role our program is evolving to support young adolescents identified as at-risk for psychological problems and school failure. We believe that prevention practitioners who actively bridge children's experiences at school, at home, and in the community, will greatly reduce the onset or continuation of problems. With children's developmental needs in mind, practitioners focus on three primary objectives: relationship building and counseling, linking the different worlds of the child (school, afterschool, home, peer, community), and providing academic support in classrooms. RALLY is committed to pulling supports into the classroom rather than pulling children out for specialized services. The classroom thus becomes the hub of collaborative activities between teachers, students, and prevention practitioners; at-risk students do not feel stigmatized by the attention they receive and ALL students are able to benefit from RALLY's services.

Under the direction of Dr. Gil Noam, RALLY's Boston sites operate as partnerships between the host schools (the Taft Middle School in Brighton and the Cleveland Middle School in Dorchester), the Harvard Graduate School of Education (which provides practitioners-in-training as part of the Masters Program in Risk and Prevention), and McLean Hospital/Massachusetts General Hospital/ Harvard Medical School (which provide consulting and assessment services and practitioner supervision). RALLY's Boston sites have also developed an extensive network of local partner organizations that are able to provide RALLY students with additional services. Current partners include mental health providers, afterschool programs, mentoring programs, and other community organizations.