Helping Change

As you know, in 2021, Frontline Solutions turned Sweet 16, and we decided to mark the milestone with a year’s worth of reflection—about our past, present, and future.. Now, to capstone our Sweet 16 campaign, we’re thrilled to share a very special episode of our podcast featuring our founder, Marcus Littles; Founder, President and CEO of the Power Coalition, Ashley Shelton; co-founder of Black Men Build and Frontline’s Organizer in Residence, Phillip Agnew; and famed visual artist, activist, and mentor, Brandan “BMike” Odums. They discuss creating and nurturing Black institutions, the past and future of organizing, the role of art and care in movement-building, how we can make a liberated Black future inevitable, and so much more. You’re going to want to tune into this one!

In this episode of our Sweet 16 podcast, Frontline’s Senior Director Aiko Bethea, Senior Consultants Jessica Barron and Marion Johnson, and Director of Storytelling Nadia Owusu discuss the current state of the philanthropic sector, barriers to progress related to accountability, oppressive power practices, and harmful white institutional culture. And, they imagine radical new possibilities drawn from their own experiences and from the firm’s 16-year history of working with foundations.

Picking up from where the second episode of our Sweet 16 podcast left off, this month our founder Marcus Littles and senior partner Ryan Bowers discuss how we came into our own. That has meant rejecting the very white consulting firm model that says focus on yourself and be about that paper. Instead, we wanted to build a Black organization, rooted in our values and community. And, even beyond what our clients will pay us to do, we bet on our own big ideas toward racial justice and liberation.

Picking up from where the first episode of our Sweet 16 podcast left off, this month our co-founder and senior partner Micah Gilmer and CEO Melissa DeShields take us back to some of Frontline Solutions’ earliest work. We cut our teeth doing vital research on how the social sector could support boys and men of color. We helped grow that field of practice, and we’re proud of our contributions. But, we also recognized that, despite being central to our analysis, critical conversations about intersectionality, gender, and toxic masculinity often got lost. Now, we have the language and the confidence to make those issues central to everything we do.