Educational Navigation™ for institutions and for the people inside them.
What is Educational Navigation™?
Getting through the door of an institution is not the same as thriving inside it. Educational Navigation is the work that lives in that gap: giving students, graduates, and professionals the map to move through environments that were not built with them in mind, and helping institutions become places where that movement costs less. BLAC works both sides because they are the same problem seen from two directions.
Access opens the door. Navigation is everything after.
What is Standing in the Gap™?
Between getting in and thriving there is a gap, and somebody is usually standing in it. A gap-stander is the person who already knows the unwritten rules and makes them available to someone who does not: the alum who made the call, the teacher who explained what nobody else would, the colleague who translated the room. Almost none of this is anyone's job. It is unpaid, unnamed, and absent from every org chart, which means institutions depend on it without knowing who is carrying it or what happens when that person leaves.
Nobody gets there alone. Somebody stood in the gap.
Who We Serve:
The Four Problems We Get Called About
Inquiries come in and stall out. Some families enroll and never quite land, and by year three they are gone. We find what is actually driving it, then rebuild the funnel, the follow-up, and the retention work.
You have the programs. What you do not have is evidence that they changed anything. We build the frameworks that connect what you offer to what students actually experience.
Whole segments of your alumni are on the list but not in the community. We find them, reconnect them, and give them a reason to stay.
Your hiring commitments are real, but they start too late. We work upstream, where the candidates you want are still deciding what is possible.
Why Institutions Choose BLAC
BLAC brings four vantage points to the same problem: independent school graduate, administrator, board member, consultant.
Behind that is Our Faces, Our Voices, a research trilogy built on forty recorded interviews. It produced the Narrative Intelligence Model and the Belonging Blueprints, the frameworks we bring into every engagement.
We are not bringing you a philosophy. We are bringing you a method, and the evidence it came from.
Our Success Stories
Jonathan is thoughtful and efficient in his work with our school community. He is committed to a thorough process and is responsive to evolving needs! We were glad to have Jonathan's help with a quick turn around project and appreciated his clarity, efficiency, and deep sense of partnership.
Alex Halladay
Director of Admissions and Enrollment at The Northwest School
Thank you to BLAC for including me in the great work they’re doing and letting me tell a part of my story and experience as an #IndependentSchool student and educator.
Brandon herbert
Director of Enrollment Management at the Church Farm School
Bridging Legacies Across Campuses (BLAC) is a wonderful creation and vision by Jonathan E. Lee. The platform provides for networking, information, experiences, backgrounds, struggles and success of persons in all walks of life and highlights persons character and endurance which would or could otherwise discourage or destroy the creativity and will and aspirations that each of us is born with in being a productive contributor to the society we live in. BLAC allows people to connect and find common activities, interest building friendships never once envisioned.
Gerald D. Chapman
Law Enforcement/Homeland Security Professional Consultant (Semi-Retired)
The vision of BLAC is at the forefront of the intersection of genuine personal relationships, the community culture of small schools, and the possibility of connection through technology. The need for a supportive network for a diverse spectrum of alumni is high, and the energy, intelligence, and dedication of BLAC's network was apparent before words were spoken. There is limitless potential on an individual, school, and national level for BLAC's mission.
Will Nisbet
Director of Institutional Development at The Hill School
Student. Graduate. Alumni. Professional.
Most consultants meet people at one stage. BLAC works the whole path.
BLAC has spent years sitting across from people at every stage of that path: preparing a fourteen-year-old for an interview, rebuilding a mid-career resume, telling an alum the truth about what they walked into.
That is not a side business. It is where the institutional work comes from. You cannot design a retention system for students you have never had a hard conversation with.
This is what we mean by Educational Navigation, and it is why the two halves of BLAC are one practice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.