• Royce Fellowship
Francesca
Raoelison

Concentration 

Sociology and Entrepreneurship

Award Year 

2020

Francesca Raoelison originally from Madagascar, concentrating in Sociology - Organizational Studies track and Entrepreneurship. Francesca worked as a Sexual Assault peer educator and currently working as a Community Dialogue Facilitator on campus. She is the Founder of Omena, a project that she started at Brown last Summer through the Breakthrough Lab. Omena is providing SEL tools to students to prevent and break the cycle of emotional abuse in Madagascar. Her Royce Project research aims at investigating the beneficial use of healthy relationship workshops for Malagasy high school students through the Omena Project, to prevent emotional abuse in Madagascar. Francesca’s work will focus on examining Malagasy youth’s perception of healthy relationships in Madagascar. She will collect data based on the Omena pilot project Francesca led in 6 schools in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, in December 2019. This research is important because it is critical to understand the experiences and perceptions of youths who participated in the Omena workshop. Without understanding their perceptions and experiences, it is difficult to understand the effects Omena had on them and also understand how youth, in general, understood emotional abuse and healthy relationships before attending the workshop.