Frontline is an integrated social sector ecosystem dedicated to building collective power. We achieve this by leveraging a consulting practice, a nonprofit organization, and various capital investment vehicles, along with our extensive network and 20 years of experience. Our core mission is to support social sector organizations as they navigate transitions, challenges, and opportunities. This includes mobilizing essential resources, incubating innovative ideas, and strengthening vital ecosystems.

In 2025, a profound sense of urgency drove us to intensify our efforts. We were deeply inspired by the courage and determination of our incredible team, partners, colleagues, mentors, and peers across the social sector who bravely refused to retreat in the face of orchestrated backlash and systemic retrenchment against equity and justice. Their resolve redefined this challenging moment for us—not as a time for fear, but as a critical opportunity to build new possibilities together. Here are some of this year’s highlights from our work:

OUR PEOPLE: PROMOTIONS & OTHER STAFF NEWS

• – We celebrated multiple promotions this year at Frontline! A huge shout-out and a warm thank you for all you do. Join us in congratulating our Frontline team:
  • Hafizah Omar, Senior Project Manager
  • Emnet Almedon, Director
  • Jen Heymoss, Senior Director
  • Tracey Ross, Senior Director
  • Nadia Owusu, Lead, Communications & Partnerships
  • Colin de Paor, Senior Director
  • Aisha Alexander-Young, Managing Director
• – New Business Alert! Lucecita Castillo, Lead of Leadership & Learning, launched a wellness and empowerment brand, Black Women Are the Balm. Through her work, Lucy highlights the ways that care of and for Black women is a radical and necessary act of community healing.
• – Our own Jen Heymoss supported the production of a guidebook to support community foundations to strengthen their work. As part of her work with Community Foundation Leading Change, she developed this resource as a complement to their Gun Violence Prevention Network. It draws from the lived experiences and lessons of Network participants and other community foundations advancing safety work in their own communities.

 

OUR PARTNERSHIPS, STRATEGIES, AND APPROACHES

Commemorating Frontline’s 20th Anniversary:

To commemorate Frontline’s 20th Anniversary in 2025, we hosted a celebration and dialogue at The Historic Jenkins Farm in Loxley, Alabama. This gathering brought together the community that has sustained and guided us, convening in a place imbued with deep heritage and significance. The land was originally cultivated by the great-grandparents of our founder, Marcus Littles, and subsequently acquired and stewarded by their ten children, who developed it into one of the most successful Black farms in the South. This remarkable legacy of Black resilience and vision, held by the farm, is deeply ingrained in our purpose.

That gathering was a pivotal moment where we collectively envisioned Frontline’s next chapter and the future of Black institutions. We carried these crucial conversations forward throughout the year, engaging with over 100 visionary leaders in the sector. This process of imagining is particularly vital now, given the intensified pressures, higher stakes, and increasing attacks currently faced by social impact organizations in U.S. history.

Frontline’s Next Chapter and the Launch of Cadre:

Cadre is our dynamic, integrated suite of approaches and strategies, launched in response to identified needs. More than a framework, Cadre is a catalytic investment designed to equip equity-centered nonprofits and philanthropic institutions with the clarity, resilience, and tools they need to navigate change. It embodies a commitment to collective discipline and ecosystem strengthening, driving toward lasting equity and justice through sustainable infrastructure and shared strategy.

Cadre’s pillars are:

1. 1. Aya Fellows Program: A fellowship for teams of social sector leaders focused on strengthening strategies, building infrastructure, and increasing collective power to meet challenges.
2. 2. Strategic Transition Support: An equity-centered approach that guides nonprofits through critical transitions, such as restructuring or mergers, by providing tools for thoughtful, values-aligned decision-making.
3. 3. Ecosystem Alignment: Tailored, cohort-based engagements that bring ecosystem actors together to forge a shared vision, fostering collective strategy and coordinating investments toward long-term goals.

Discover how Cadre can support your work. 

Partnerships and Projects that Energized Us:

At Frontline Solutions, we view learning and evaluation as a process for improving, not just proving. It is an essential component for achieving strategic clarity, strengthening accountability, and facilitating reflection in a complex and ever-changing world. This year, we were proud to partner with impactful organizations to make meaning together, turning data into dialogue and insight into action. Our learning and evaluation projects included:

 

1. – Partnering with Liberation Ventures to conduct an evaluation to assess five years of funding, partnership, and collaboration in the reparations field. Through a survey, interviews, and focus groups, this evaluation draws on data and stories from nearly sixty individuals across the field–elders who have long carried the torch of truth-telling, deeply-rooted place-based organizers who are shaping repair family-by-family, and emerging organizations and funders galvanized by the Black-led, multiracial public calls for justice.
2. – Supporting the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s New Work team to document and assess their processes for program development, with a focus on alignment with the foundation’s core values.

Frontline’s program, initiative, and convening design practice transform ideas into collective action. We partner with organizations, networks, and funders to design and implement programs and gatherings that advance missions, strengthen leadership, and build the connective tissue movements need to thrive. Whether we are helping to launch a new multi-year philanthropic initiative, manage a field-wide program, or design a convening, our goal is the same: to make strategy actionable, relational, and alive. Examples of our partnerships include:

 

1. – Partnering with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to convene their Healthy Communities grantees, staff, and philanthropic and nonprofit leaders. The goal of this partnership and convening was to advance a vision of health as a universal right, not a privilege. The event focused on inspiring participants with a unifying vision, fostering trust, promoting generative learning, and strengthening their collective capacity to ground their work in healing, wellness, and culture.
2. – Collaborating with Vital Strategies to fight the overdose crisis with community power, supporting organizations led and powered by Black, Indigenous, and Latine communities in North Carolina that are seeking to adopt or deepen the adoption of health-oriented and supportive approaches to reduce the incidence of negative health effects and the number of fatal overdoses among Black, Indigenous, and Latine people who use drugs (PWUD).
3. – Supporting cohorts of impactful frontline organizations within The Elevate Initiative through convening and learning opportunities. This support is designed to accelerate economic mobility for communities of color by helping organizations dismantle structural barriers that impede progress.

 

OUR THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

“You can kill a person, but you can’t kill an idea, and you can’t kill love or hurt.”

-Miss Major

At Frontline, we talk a lot about “learning out loud.” For us, that means being excellent partners to our clients and, when appropriate, sharing what we’re learning with the broader field. Check out some of our commentary, research, and analysis on equity, philanthropy, and more.

 

1. 1. Our founder, Marcus Littles, argued in NPQ that Black-led institutions are the historical bedrock of American multiracial democracy, providing the essential infrastructure that drives progress for all marginalized groups. He warned against overlooking these organizations in favor of broader initiatives, calling instead for intentional investment to ensure an equitable and resilient future.
2. 2. In a recent article for NPQ, “Clamoring for Equity: Now is a Builder’s Moment,” Frontline CEO Melissa DeShields, along with Keecha Harris and Carmen JM Simon, issued a powerful call to action for social sector leaders. They advocate that leaders must resist the urge for a fear-based retreat and instead view the current “structural assault” on equity as a crucial opportunity—a “builder’s moment.” Their message emphasizes the need for radical imagination and sustained, long-term coordination to shift focus from reactive commitments made in 2020 toward achieving lasting, systemic transformation.
3. 3. In this Next City article, Managing Director Aisha Alexander-Young critiqued progressive philanthropy for treating Washington, D.C. as a backdrop for federal advocacy while overlooking the urgent needs of its local, Black-led grassroots infrastructure. She called on funders to invest in D.C. as a local ecosystem, recognizing that strengthening its community power is vital to the broader fight for democracy.
4. 4. Marcus Littles led a powerful discussion in this NPQ article with nonprofit leaders Michael Partis and Marcus Pope. The conversation centered on a new vision for Black male leadership, one that moves away from “savior” models and instead embraces care, empathy, and the intentional dismantling of internalized patriarchy. They proposed a leadership style—rooted in the freedom to dream—that acts as both a form of resistance and a pathway toward liberation.
5. 5. We recently released a video highlighting our strengths as a collaborative partner and convener, helping mission-driven organizations build the tools and capacity to interpret data, harness learning, drive meaningful engagement, and co-create and implement solutions that center people, community power, and justice.
6. 6. Our own Tracey Ross and Duy Pham argue that the future of dignified care depends on our ability to reshape a tax system that has long prioritized wealth over community well-being. This “Builder’s Moment” requires philanthropy to move beyond the status quo and resource a power-building ecosystem that centers the voices of families and caregivers in every stage of policy change.

 

LET’S GET FREE

“Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.”

-Coretta Scott King

Thank you for working with us to redefine what it takes to build community power. We look forward to learning and growing with you in the future. For now, though, we’re signing off as our team takes time to rest and restore. Our office will be closed from December 22 – January 5. See you in 2026!

Below are some ways to keep in touch:

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End of Year Message From Frontline Solutions’ CEO, Melissa DeShields.

Frontline Solutions is no ordinary consulting firm. In her year-end letter, our CEO Melissa DeShields reflects on why liberation is our North Star and how we’re guided by people fighting for a more just world.