1. 1. Briefdescription ofyour organization and overall focus.
The Relationship Foundation is an educational initiative that combines the tools of Social and Emotional
Learning and Nonviolent Communication to address real issues students encounter, in order to help
students navigate the complex pressures and decisions they face on a day-to-day basis. In our program,
Healthy Relationships 101, we discuss and discover new ways of addressing bullying prevention, self-
esteem and body image, the effect of the media, excessive use of technology, and of course, learning how
to build healthier relationships with family, friends, peers,and partners. Our mission is to build safer,
more harmonious communities by establishing relationship education as a core component of the learning
process.
We have been teaching Healthy Relationships 101 in New York City high schools, community colleges,
and four-year colleges for the past seven years. The program has been successfulacross a wide variety of
school cultures – private, public, charter,single sex, faith based, and multilingual institutions. Thus, we
have taught students from a range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Remarkably, our program,
Healthy Relationships 101, has received an abundance of positive feedback in every school with which
we have worked. Our program’s ability to reach a large and diverse audience has proven to us not only
the absolute need for relationship education in schools, but specifically that our program can do it right.
2. The critical question(s) your proposed work/project is designed to address.
Our focus has been to provide students, as well as teachers,with the tools they need to communicate in a
more effective way that encourages relentless empathy for others; we believe empathy is the blueprint for
healthier relationships. We have already found that teaching empathy is extremely useful in detecting
abusive relationships, but we want to take our program a step further: we hypothesize that an early
intervention program of empathic understanding and communication may be a key to preventing sexually
abusive relationships.
In order to incorporate sexual abuse prevention more fully into our program, it is imperative we answer
essential questions in safe relationship education: how do we teach children to see that sexual abuse 1)
impedes others’ needs and 2) is an ineffective was to have their own needs met? Our own experience with
students and a copious amount of qualitative and observational data has shown this correlation to be
probable, but we want to provide ourselves and other safe relationship educators with hard data. The goal
of our project is to gather quantitative research in a longitudinal evidence based study over a three-year
period, exploring the links between safe relationship education and sexual abuse prevention. We will
work in collaboration with teachers,students, parents,and staff at John Adams High School in Ozone
Park,Queens, NY,where our Healthy Relationships 101 program has previously been implemented, as a
research site for our work. We hope to test and develop safe relationship practices,drawing from the
successes of our current curriculum, with the end goal of establishing a new and crucial addition to our
Healthy Relationships 101 program, entitled Safe Relationships 101.
Our preliminary research,as carried out through our current program over an eight year period, suggests
that TRF can offer a multifaceted approach to sexual abuse prevention: examining students’ own needs
and feelings allows them to reflect on their actions and decisions (self-empathy); encouraging students to
recognize others’ needs and feelings promotes a respectfulenvironment (empathy); using the language of
needs and feelings allows teachers,social workers, and responsible adults to better help the victims of
sexual abuse, as well as better understand perpetrators and prevent them from using abuse to fulfill their
social and emotional needs in the future. Thus, Safe Relationships 101 will heavily rely on teachings in
empathic understanding to help students gain social and emotional literacy. As our founder Michael Jascz
tells administrators employing Healthy Relationships 101 at their schools, “Abuse is no longer a concept
in the mind of a child who finishes our program. Learning empathy changes their neural pathways so that

2. it is absolutely unthinkable to hurt another human being, physically or verbally.” We would like the
opportunity to build on our existing program in relationship education and to fully develop a safe
relationship program, bringing it to the same level of success as our Healthy Relationships 101 has
experienced.
We believe the fundamental aspects of our Healthy Relationships 101 program can be incredibly useful
for promoting safe relationships. The far-reaching impact of our work was explored in Atlanta, Georgia
last year, during a workshop Michael led at the Empowered Living Academy,a safe haven for young
women who have been sexually exploited and/or at a risk of exploitation. A personal development and
independent living coach at the academy, Kayla Merritt, who participated in Michael’s workshop, firmly
believes in the usefulness of our program in building safer and more meaningful relationships: “The
Empowered Living Academy has been using The Relationship Foundation’s Needs and Feelings and
Empathy material for some time now in their work with survivors of sexual exploitation and trafficking.
We have seen great growth and movement in the maturity of their relationships and communication
among the women we serve. Severalwomen reported that they are thinking about their needs and how
they feel before reacting in their closest relationships. We are happy to incorporate this material into our
curriculum at the Academy and are invested in the fruit that it produces.”
In line with our Safe Relationships 101 rationale, the federalgovernment believes sexual abuse
prevention to be an expected result from relationship education: The Teach Safe Relationships Act of
2015 passed this week in Congress as an amendment to the Every Child Achieves Act (ECAA). The
amendment permits public schools to spend funding on teaching safe and healthy relationship education
for the express purpose of “preventing sexual assault, domestic violence, and dating violence.”
Safe Relationships 101 will make use of activities and exercises that have been successfulin our Healthy
Relationships 101 programs and workshops: dynamic classroom activities, such as role-plays, active
discussions, and student journals; and contemporary media analyses, such as videos, and articles. We
have seen students’ excitement over learning about our relationship techniques and reflecting on their
own relationships through these methods. However,we would also like to research the effectiveness of a
complimentary digital application to Safe Relationships 101 to aid students in safe relationship education
even after the in-person classroom sessions have been completed. More and more, high school and
college students interact with each other through technology and we hope to better relate to them by using
a digital application of relationship education.
3. What you hope to learn as a result ofthis work and what impact you hope to achieve.
We hope to learn how to best develop and include Safe Relationships 101 into the already flourishing
Healthy Relationships 101 curriculum. We want to move from qualitative analysis to a quantitative
assessment of our work through a long-standing study of safe relationship education. The impact we hope
to achieve is a national distribution of safe and healthy relationship education, beginning in urban areas,
then expanding nationwide. Through an educational collaborative we have just established with
Scholastic Inc., we can implement our best practices in Safe Relationships 101 on a national scale.
Scholastic has agreed to make available to schools our program, Healthy Relationships 101. Therefore,
updating our curriculum to include well-researched and developed Safe Relationships 101 will actualize
abuse-free relationship education on a large scale – Scholastic has 100% penetration in schools in the
United States and is a trusted name with students, teachers and parents.
Safe Relationships 101 will build on our success of Healthy Relationships 101, a success that we have
seen in a multitude of school environments, helping to meet the growing need for relationship education
from a student’s point of view. Furthermore, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) provides another way

3. to explain our program’s accomplishments. Healthy Relationships 101 meets the standards of an effective
prevention program that the CDC outlines in their Principles of Prevention:
1) Our program offers comprehensive services, addressing social, emotional, and academic
learning, including a variety of activities, such as discussions, lecture, journals, and role-play.
2) We use practiced and varied teaching methods, such as incorporating hands-on experience to
develop skills in empathic understanding and communication of needs.
3) We ensure the proper follow up is administered to assess the effect of our classroom programs
through student and teacher evaluations.
4) We heavily draw from the theories of Social and Emotional Learning and Nonviolent
Communication, both of which close the gap between unfulfilled needs and how to fulfill them
through clearer communication and more meaningful relationships.
5) We advocate for positive relationships, but not only between peers; relationship education
helps teachers better relate to students, fostering closer relationships between students and the
responsible adults in their lives.
6) Psychologically, we have found high school students are emotionally capable of the
concentrated self-reflection we encourage, and intellectually mature enough to address sensitive
subjects, such as abuse.
7) Relationships are relevant to humans’ lives, so we have found that relationship education is
more than socioculturally relevant, it is necessary. The United States Congress has also
concluded this, as seen by their passing of The Teach Safe Relationships Act of 2015.
8) Our process of evaluations has allowed student-input to be at the forefront of program
development, shaping the curriculum to best fit students’ needs.
9) Moreover, our staff is under the guidance of Michael Jascz, a relationship coach practicing for
the last fourteen years,who has studied with important figures of the social and emotional
learning world, like Marshall Rosenberg, and Harville Hendrix.
We know how to build a preventative program, and we hope to take what we’ve learned in Healthy
Relationships 101 to create Safe Relationships 101. We can use the qualitative analysis the Principles of
Prevention outline to design a safe relationships program, but with this grant we hope to gather
quantitative data to concretely prove our effectiveness over an extended period of time, something we
have heretofore been unable to carry out.
4. Description ofthe team ofpeople that will lead this work.
-Michael Jascz.
Founder and Executive Director, The Relationship Foundation (TRF); BA Honors Program, Ohio State.
-Michael Anthony Hopkins.
Director, TRF; Writing Corps Curricular Director, Harlem Children’s Zone; BA, UC Berkeley; MA,
NYU Steinhardt.
-Amy Killingsworth, Kayla Merritt,Monique Overstreet.
PersonalDevelopment and Independent Living Coaches,Wellspring Living -Empowered Living
Academy, Atlanta, GA; experts in working with survivors of sexual exploitation and trafficking who
incorporate Healthy Relationships 101 materials in their work.
-Rebecca Kuhn.
NYCDOE,High School Spanish teacher,faculty team leader, PBIS, Positive Behavioral Interventions
and Support, John Adams High School, Ozone Park, Queens; BA.,PACE,MA. Institute of Education,
University College, London, in progress. Rebecca has previously worked in curriculum development with
TRF and was instrumental in bringing Healthy Relationships101 to John Adams High School where our
team is planning to work on site with students, staff, faculty and parents.
-Risa Nagel.

4. Research Assistant,and Writer TRF; BA, Hamilton College, in progress.
-Mike Carlino.
Manager,and Grant Administrator TRF; BA,Baruch College.
-Susan Stratton.
Project Manager; deep executive, content and business development experience with a special interest in
educational innovation; BA, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
5. Howthis work and approach is aligned with JBC’s priorities.
TRF engages communities beyond education and awareness to address specific changes in practice.
Our Safe Relationships 101 program will not only educate students,but also provide them with concrete
tools to help them discover and build healthy, abuse-free relationships with the development of a new
curriculum and vocabulary. We have found that the curriculum and vocabulary we teach fundamentally
changes the way students communicate with each other, and therefore,shapes their consciousness: we
believe that learning empathy, in addition to understanding needs and feelings, will make the idea of
hurting peers an unthinkable deed for students now and, because of the lasting impression of this work, in
the future.
We mobilize communities around this issue to shift cultural norms.
It is a tenet of the Healthy Relationships 101 program that expressing needs and feelings changes the
normal patterns of conversation. Getting students to change the way they relate to each other now will
prevent this emotional blindness later on in life. If we are able to examine the correlation between
addressing needs and feelings over a long period of time, empathic abilities, and the likelihood of students
to be complicit in sexual abuse, we can truly change the normalization of abusive relationships.
We could offer newapproaches and solutions to ending child sexual abuse.
The immense benefits of social and emotional learning through our existing and future programs can only
occur when students are interested in the material and find meaning in its practice. In this way,we think
our program is unique by getting students excited about learning, discussing, and applying healthy
relationship techniques. We have a relaxed approach to teaching that separates relationship education
from typical health classes,and more formal studies. Further, our program appeals to students by
discussing topics they find important (their lives, family, and friends), harnesses their enthusiasm and
focus, and from there, builds on their engagement to achieve real breakthroughs. We are also pushing for
innovation with dissemination of early intervention Safe Relationships 101 educational materials digitally
and through existing major distributor Scholastic Inc. to students, teachers and parents.