Arizona State University Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research - Curriculum credibility built with university partners

The Organization

Michele partnered directly with Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz at ASU School of Social Work. Dr. Roe-Sepowitz is helping Michele and her team assess and analyze data so that, in the future, the Brave Series can stand as a research-based curriculum.

Dr. Roe-Sepowitz served as lead researcher on a comprehensive Hawaiʻi State study of sex trafficking across the islands from 2018 to 2024, in partnership with the State Government. It has been a great honor and privilege for Michele to partner with Dominique, who from the very beginning shared how deeply she believes in the Brave Series, so much so that she volunteered her expertise and time to this work.

The Engagement

A full-circle story

When Dr. Roe-Sepowitz's Hawaiʻi research findings were first published in 2018, Michele was so moved by what Dominique and her team had uncovered that she felt called to respond. In 2019, Michele hosted the Listen Conference, a citywide gathering focused on anti-sex trafficking awareness and prevention. A month after that conference, she began writing what would become the very first volume of the Brave Series curriculum: Brave and Beautiful, for teen girls.

Years later, the research and the curriculum have come back to meet each other. Michele had the chance to thank Dominique in person for the impact her work had on the trajectory of Releasing Generations, and to share that the Brave Series was, in a real sense, born out of Dominique's own research. Dominique was deeply moved to hear it. She had once shared that she does the work, but rarely gets to learn whether it lands.

For Michele, this has been a beautiful full-circle moment, a dream come true, and an honor to now work alongside Dominique on the very curriculum her research helped inspire.

The work the partnership produced

Through the spring and summer of 2026, Michele, her team, and Dr. Roe-Sepowitz built and refined the Brave Together pre- and post-curriculum evaluation surveys across all four volumes of the Brave Together curriculum.

Michele's team working alongside Dr. Roe-Sepowitz included retired Deputy Superintendent Phyllis Unebasami and Lisa Nagamine, who helps oversee middle school principals across the state of Hawaiʻi.

The Outcome

For Michele, the partnership delivered three things at once. A real evaluation instrument the Hawaiʻi partners can run in classroom settings. An academic affiliation that grounds the curriculum's outcome claims in research-credible measurement. And a peer relationship with one of the field's leading prevention-education researchers.

For the curriculum, the partnership did the harder work. It separated what Brave Together teaches from what it can be shown to change, and built the measurement bridge that lets the field tell those two stories cleanly.