Expertise
Social change efforts require thoughtful inquiry at every stage. How do we define a field and what are its best practices? What knowledge gaps need to be filled? In what ways can public policy support change and how can it get in the way?
We engage all these kinds of questions through our field-building work in three areas of expertise: Education, Social Innovation, and Males of Color.
Education
Frontline approaches education from a systems perspective, helping organizations and systems to think smarter, collaborate, engage and lead.
We help organizations and institutions better understand and connect to their key constituents, from helping funders understand the landscape of potential education grantees in Philadelphia, coaching charter schools to work smarter with their faculty and Board members, or advising the School District of Philadelphia as it explores how to make the voices of parents and communities count in its school reform efforts.
Frontline’s education practice specializes in:
- Using whole-system engagement strategies as means of bringing about organizational, community and systems change
- Parent and constituent engagement
- Education advocacy, organizing and strategy
- Philanthropic advising
- Strategic planning and organizational development
Within the past two years, Frontline has undertaken two projects that serve as telling examples of Frontline’s education practice.
- Since spring 2010, Frontline has assisted the School District of Philadelphia to provide strategic guidance on the community engagement portion of the Renaissance School Initiative. Over the past two years, Frontline has had the honor of supporting over one hundred parents from across the District to serve on School Advisory Councils. Nearly 200 parents and community members have worked have day and night to review proposals, conduct site visits, host community forums and ultimately recommend to the District which provider they wanted to turnaround their neighborhood public school.
- Ryan Bowers, a Frontline Partner and the Director of Community Engagement, has learned a lot about the city’s school system through various positions, including working as a teacher and a Community Engagement Coordinator for Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter. The specific needs of families with school-aged kids have become tangible and real. A parent himself, he has been able to identify with parents and guardians who needed current and reliable data on the district’s many private and charter schools.
Bowers was particularly struck by the lack of resources providing school admissions guidelines and other key details. He imagined a product that could fill the information gap. In coordination with Frontline’s education team, Bowers oversaw the development of Philly School Match, a web-based school admissions guide covering Philadelphia metro area elementary, middle, and secondary schools.
Social Innovation
A growing set of institutions actively engage in defining social innovation. For instance, Echoing Green focuses on supporting social entrepreneurs who are “resource magnets,” those able to garner widespread support for their ideas. But what if leaders live in a place where, no matter how charismatic they are, there just aren’t a lot of resources to “stick” to their idea?
Our work has made clear to us that often the best investments are not sure bets on connected entrepreneurs with a wealth of opportunity. Rather, we focus our efforts on under-resourced leaders, social entrepreneurs and dynamic innovators who may not have a chance to attend a TED Talk or an Ashoka conference. In fact, most of our favorite innovators don’t even self-identify as social entrepreneurs.
At Frontline, social innovation’s potential extends beyond the social enterprises or revenue-generation models that are now the field’s calling card. Social innovation can also pave the way for nonprofits to forge new strategic partnerships with public and private agencies. Organizations and individuals who see an opportunity to implement change need not be intimidated if they aren’t an investor or don’t have an MBA degree. “We see social innovation as an opportunity to expand and shift the way those of us working for social justice think,” says Micah Gilmer of the Frontline approach. “We want to learn from our partners, finding new ways to move beyond the oppositional understanding of social justice work, encouraging our partners to look in unexpected places for resources and partners.”
Gilmer is the University of North Carolina’s Clinical Assistant Professor of Social Innovation and the sole entrepreneurship faculty member hailing from the nonprofit world. In his course “Implementing Change,” instead of reviewing case studies about widely recognized social innovation organizations and models, Gilmer exposes students to dynamic and under-resourced social change leaders who are changing their communities and the world.
As a community of learners, the Frontline team’s analysis around social innovation continues to grow. “I really think that most of the effective community change agents probably didn’t win a ‘social innovator’ or ‘genius’ award. They are not being talked about in university classrooms or professional development webinars,” says Marcus Littles, Frontline’s Senior Partner.
A good illustration of this approach can be seen in the Faith, Farming and the Future Initiative, a project that employs youth in a community gardening program through which they learn nutrition, financial management and entrepreneurial skills. The project was co-conceived by UNC’s Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, Frontline, and a coalition of local churches led by Coley Springs Baptist Church in Warrenton, North Carolina. This is an example of non-traditional partners utilizing limited financial resources to conceive and execute an idea that teaches, supports and empowers an isolated and under-resourced community. Littles contends, “Often, social innovation is not heavily capitalized; rather, innovation itself is the capital that leads to real change.”
Currently, Frontline is seeking to replicate and enhance the strategies it has developed for supporting social innovation in under-resourced communities by leading North Carolina Central University’s Social Entrepreneurship Collaborative through a process of planning and curriculum design. Together with the energy and ideas of Frontline’s diverse community of social change leaders, Frontline’s Social Innovation work is helping change happen.
Males of Color
Once largely unnoticed, theories about gender and race are gaining more traction in the marketplace of ideas. Experts say gender and race are not discrete traits, and as they relate to human identity and experience, they are virtually impossible to separate. People live out their racial, gender, and sexual identities at the same time and cannot experientially separate these identities from each other. Since Frontline’s seminal 2008 report, Why We Can’t Wait: A Case for Philanthropic Action, the organization has proactively investigated the intersections of race, gender and identity, particularly as pertaining to the life outcomes of Black males.
“One thing I find really exciting and new about our work is that we constantly keep in mind that gender and race are interconnected,” says Dr. Bianca Williams, Frontline’s Associate Director of Research. “We are not at any time focusing on Black men and boys and just focusing on race, but we are constantly thinking, ‘Okay, well, they experience the world this way because they’re Black men, because they’re Black gay men, because they’re young Black men.’”
Frontline is committed to contributing to the emerging field and growing body of promising strategies to influence and learn from how Black males interface with a myriad of influential systems: the family, education systems, health care systems, government. Both in Frontline’s consulting work, independent research and projects, it is building knowledge, advancing policy, and amplifying best practices in the males of color field, based largely on the notion of intersectionality of race and gender, as theorized by several prominent scholars.
Efforts that bear Frontline’s stamp in this field include the Healthy Men, Healthy Communities (formerly Marginalized Males Funders Group), a venue for foundation staff to increase philanthropic investments serving marginalized males, and The Scholars’ Network on Masculinity and the Well-Being of African American Men, an assembly of scholars committed to reshaping scholarly and public understandings of the lives of African American men.
Frontline staff have increasingly become highly sought after presenters at conferences and academic institutions about the life outcomes of males of color, Frontline Partner Ryan Bowers led the research and publication of The State of Black Males Commissions. And Frontline Partner Dr. Micah Gilmer is currently authoring a book on how traditional youth development programs like athletics can impact the lives of young men.
