Ruling Our eXperiences (ROX) began in 2006 as a research study at The Ohio State University where Founder and CEO Dr. Lisa Hinkelman spent her career training graduate students in counselor education. As a licensed counselor working with adults and students in school settings, Dr. Hinkelman recognized that the issues facing female students mirrored the experiences of the adult women she was working with in counseling. This connection sparked a research agenda that sought to understand the challenges facing girls and what interventions existed to help them navigate these challenges.

Highly motivated to improve outcomes for future women, Dr. Hinkelman put research into practice and developed a comprehensive curriculum that could be delivered during the school day and that was available for any girl that expressed interested. Dr. Hinkelman founded Ruling Our eXperiences, Inc. (ROX) in 2011 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with a mission to create generations of confident girls who are in control of their own relationships, experiences, decisions and futures.

Since then, ROX has scaled nationally to grow programming across 30 states with more than 6,500 girls annually and launched The ROX Institute for Research & Training to provide innovative, data-driven resources for the adults who support girls. Serving nearly 6,000 adult influencers each year, the ROX Institute conducts large-scale national studies of girls’ lived experiences and uses that data to provide engaging, evidence-based resources for parents, educators, counselors, mentors, and coaches.