Rochelle Keyhan is the Chief Executive Officer of Collective Liberty and the 2018 Thomson Reuters Foundation Stop Slavery Hero. She develops and executes the organization’s strategic direction and collaborations focused on disrupting specific types of human trafficking, including recruiting and maintaining robust collaborative networks of law enforcement, agency stakeholders, and service providers. Her team analyzes national trends and best practices, creating comprehensive trainings and resources to help facilitate the effective and systemic eradication of trafficking in the United States.

She was formerly the Director of Disruption Strategies, at Polaris, a department she designed to shift systems to disrupt trafficking in the United States. In that capacity she created national strategies to disrupt human trafficking including supporting the passage of over two dozen state and local laws, training thousands of law enforcement and financial crimes investigators across the country, and guiding the creation of the largest, most comprehensive dataset on a specific type of trafficking in the nation. It was this work, as well as her unique capacity for connecting historically siloed stakeholders to one another to build a more cohesive anti-trafficking field that led to her nomination and ultimate winning of the Thomson Reuters Stop Slavery Hero award.

Before joining Polaris, Rochelle spent six years as a prosecutor of gender-based violence crimes in Philadelphia, where she is bar certified to practice law. She also previously served as director of the non-profits Feminist Public Works and HollabackPHILLY (while a founding board member of Hollaback!). As an Assistant District Attorney, Rochelle championed the need for increased investigation and prosecution of human trafficking in Philadelphia, successfully prosecuting the first two trials herself. Her approach to prosecution involves a perpetrator-focused process that centers the victims, limiting added trauma while maximizing survivor empowerment. Her non-profit work on gender-based violence emphasized systemic approaches toward sustainable culture shifts to end gender-based violence and insecurity. As a first generation Iranian-American, she also speaks conversational Farsi.