A new Frontline in Focus issue for a new year! For those of you new to our community, Frontline Solutions is a social change organization that provides consulting services to institutions in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors; invests in the pipeline of emerging social change leaders; and develops knowledge, informs policy, and improves practice within three core issue areas: Education, Social Innovation, and Males of Color.
Frontline in Focus is one way we update our community about our ongoing work and that of our close affiliates. In this issue, we talk about a new school admissions resource that emerged from our community engagement work, an initiative to increase the enumeration of Black males in the Census, and two Frontline affiliates, Marcus Thompson and Jamaica Gilmer, doing impactful work in their communities.
We hope you enjoy this issue. As always, we want to hear from you, so write us back with your thoughts. And feel free to forward this newsletter on to others. Thanks for reading!
The Frontline Solutions Team
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What We’re Learning: School Admissions and Philly School Match
by Ryan Bowers
Back-to-school time can be a stressful season for parents in Philadelphia, especially for those who feel that their kids are stuck in a sub-par school. We’ve heard from parents across the city about their difficulties advocating for their children and finding a place where they can get a quality education.
Questions have included, how do I transfer my child to a better and safer public school? What private schools are affordable? What are the options and requirements for getting into a charter school? Neither the School District nor the state Department of Education collects or coordinates school admissions information for these three systems, which means conflicting admissions timelines and as many enrollment processes as there are schools.
As a Partner at Frontline and as a parent of a four-year-old who’s soon to enter kindergarten, I’ve felt the weight of the school search. My neighborhood elementary school is struggling, there are 33,000 students on the waitlist for charter schools, and my wallet starts to buckle at the thought of private school tuition. My neighbors on my block are in the same situation.
I came up with the idea of developing a web resource to help parents navigate all the school admission and enrollment information. The site is called phillyschoolmatch.org, a free online admissions guide for schools in Philadelphia.
 Initial reception has been positive. Parents and community agencies have contacted us saying the site saved them time and aggravation, and they want to share it with their networks. Schools have been grateful, too, and we are eager to help update the information.
Over the course of building the site, we at Frontline gradually changed how we saw ourselves. We started self-identifying as a “social change organization”—not as a consulting firm. We are really inspired by the idea of acting on our own visions for improving our communities in addition to helping refine and implement our clients’ ideas.
We’re now exploring an expansion of the site to other cities. I never would have guessed that so much opportunity would come from letting ourselves dream and directing our company’s resources toward tackling our community’s problems.
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by Marcus Littles
The past year was in many ways an important one for Frontline Solutions. As we enter the New Year, and reflect on Frontline’s accomplishments and challenges, dynamic partners, and cool engagements, many moments from 2010 stand out in our minds. Perhaps one of the more meaningful, instructive, and fun projects that Frontline participated in was the iCount Initiative.
iCount was a Ford Foundation-funded partnership between Twenty-First Century Foundation, Thinking Man Consulting, and Frontline to increase Black male enumeration in the 2010 Census. iCount had an official partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau, and was one of the country’s only initiatives that specifically targeted Black males as an undercounted population.
Frontline spearheaded an extensive selection process to identify grantee partner organizations in Chicago, Jackson, Miss., New Orleans, and Philadelphia to develop grassroots, community-based strategies within Census tracts where undercount of Black males was significant in the 2000 Census. Additionally, Frontline facilitated regular meetings with the local partners throughout iCount to ensure the project was proceeding according to the initiative’s overall strategy and goals and to provide a learning community for the grantees.
iCount was a unique project for FS in that even though it drew upon our extensive experience in the Males of Color field, it was our first time working around issues of the census and redistricting. We were able to partner with community organizations with which we had a long history, and with partners at 21CF and TMC that have long been supporters and friends of Frontline. But we all learned together, and co-invested in an important project that fielded measurable results.
 True to our commitment to learning, Frontline is proud to release our latest publication about the iCount Campaign. Counting the Invisible Man: Black Males and the 2010 Census recounts the 21CF-supported iCount Initiative, and in the process, examines why targeting Black males is vital and why undercounting them is costly. In addition, the paper shares a detailed narrative of iCount’s methodology and implementation; amplifies the strategies, ideas, and challenges articulated by on-the-ground local partners; and identifies some recommendations for targeting Black males for the 2020 Census.
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At Frontline, we are driven and inspired by social change rooted in community, so naturally we wanted to profile Marcus Thompson and Jamaica Gilmer, two North Carolina-based leaders deeply invested in their communities. Thompson and Gilmer make their mark with youth development programs that speak directly to the hopes and needs of kids and young adults.
Thompson grew up in Fairmont, a rural small town about 40 miles south of Fayetteville. Missing essentials like a recreation center, Fairmont is known as a place where there is “nothing to do.” Thompson is dissatisfied with the lack of pride among the town’s youth. “I don’t want them to say, ‘When I leave Fairmont, I’m done.’ I want them to have the love for it that I have for it,” he says.
 Thompson’s program, Project Focus, instills a sense of ownership among its youth members—not just as citizens who collectively own their neighborhood, but also as gifted individuals who own their future. Teens learn their college options by taking tours of local universities, and the personal attention Project Focus leaders give them helps break down walls. “Some of them are hard or rough or say they don’t care,” says Thompson. “I can see through it. I know that they want more.”
 From her base in Durham, photographer Jamaica Gilmer runs The Beautiful Project, a program for Black girls promoting positive identity development. Through the medium of photography, girls and young women better understand what it means “to be beautiful inside and out.”
The program has separate components for the different age groups it serves. Girls ages 9 through 12 are the subjects of photo shoots and take part in interviews; college interns are the photographers/ interviewers who design and complete the final photo story projects.
 Gilmer explains that although this kind of identity development is hard to measure, the signs of success are still apparent: “We asked the mother of one girl what changed after the program. She said, ‘My daughter always talked, always knew how to talk. After Beautiful, she found her voice.”
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As a double major in Public Administration and Business Administration with a concentration in Computer Information Systems at North Carolina Central University, Annette plans on graduating in 2012. She holds executive positions in several campus organizations with focuses ranging from LGBTQ rights and STI/HIV Peer Education to helping fellow students build positive self images through self-expression.
John brings to Frontline a commitment to exposing opportunities and resources in disadvantaged communities. A graduate of Hillside High School in Durham, North Carolina, John is a sophomore at Harvard University, where he studies social and cognitive neurosciences. John joins Frontline this spring as a Project Assistant. He will provide valuable support to Frontline's work mapping youth services in Carrboro and Chapel Hill.
