As Founder and Principal of Let’s B.E. Collective, LLC, Rochell works at the intersection of history, memory, descendant engagement, community engagement, institutional accountability, and reconciliation. Through speaking, consulting, facilitated dialogue, historical research, strategic planning, storytelling, and public history, she helps universities, museums, faith communities, philanthropic organizations, corporations, nonprofits, and civic institutions move from learning about difficult histories to engaging the people and communities most directly connected to them.

 

At the heart of Rochell’s work is a guiding principle:

 

Descendants are not merely subjects of history. They are knowledge holders, storytellers, researchers, community leaders, and essential partners in determining how history is remembered, interpreted, taught, and transformed into action.

 

Her professional work is deeply informed by her own ancestral journey. Rochell descends from multiple families enslaved by the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits. Her ancestors include Jackson “Jack” Hawkins; Patrick and Letty Blacklock Hawkins; Isaac Hawkins; Adelphia “Delphy” West and Betsy West; and Gabriel “Gabe” Butler and his parents, Nace and Bibianna Mahoney Butler.

 

Her great-grandfather Jackson “Jack” Hawkins was three years old when he was among the men, women, and children sold by the Maryland Jesuits in 1838 and forcibly transported to Louisiana. Through years of genealogical and historical research, Rochell has worked to understand this history not simply through transactions and institutional records, but through the lives, relationships, resilience, faith, kinship, and communities her ancestors and their descendants built.

 

Rochell’s commitment to truth and reconciliation began years before discovering this ancestral connection. Following Cincinnati’s 2001 civil unrest, she studied the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and began exploring the role truth-telling and dialogue could play in addressing racial division. Her work has included developing One Blood: A Path to Cultural Oneness, a church small-group curriculum; participating in the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Undoing Racism® workshop; and serving on the steering committee of the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center’s Rethinking Racism initiative.

 

These experiences shaped the philosophy that continues to guide her work today: reconciliation requires truth, and meaningful truth-telling requires the participation of the people whose histories and communities are most directly affected.

 

Rochell holds a Master of Science in Business Management from Indiana Wesleyan University and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Southern University and A&M College.

 

Through Let’s B.E. Collective, Rochell creates spaces where people and institutions can listen deeply, engage courageously, confront difficult truths, honor ancestral memory, strengthen descendant voices, and turn understanding into action.

 

Her work ultimately asks institutions and communities to consider not only:

 

“What happened?”

 

but also:

 

“Whose voices have been missing—and what will we do with the truth once we know it?”