From First Meeting to Hair Pair: Chantay Ambrose Builds a Record of Service Through Her Craft

When Chantay Ambrose first connected with Rob’s Barbershop Community Foundation (RBCF), the opportunity was about more than simply doing hair. It was a chance to use her profession where access to regular grooming services was a documented need.

In September 2019, Chantay joined RBCF’s barber and beauty salon team at National Academy Foundation Middle/High School in Baltimore City. A photograph from that period captures one of her earliest meetings with RBCF as she prepared to begin working with students. As a licensed cosmetologist and Empire Beauty School graduate, Chantay was brought in to help case-manage female students' grooming needs.

That first school-based assignment became the beginning of a much longer relationship.

Growing From Service to Sustained Impact

During 2019, Chantay provided 11 hairstyles to 11 individuals through the National Academy Foundation project. She returned in 2020 to provide additional services.

Her work later expanded beyond schools. Through RBCF's Foster Parent Virtual Grooming Project, Chantay provided training designed to help caregivers develop grooming knowledge and skills they could use themselves.

Beginning in 2023, her community work grew considerably through RBCF's partnership with TIME Organization. That year, the project reached 97 unique individuals, with Chantay's work producing 153 recorded outputs, including haircuts, hairstyles, other grooming assistance, and equipment and supplies. The population served included 97 individuals identified as unhoused and having incomes below U.S. poverty guidelines.

Her involvement continued in 2024, when the TIME Organization project reached 92 unique individuals, and 115 outputs were recorded. In 2025, that work reached 116 unique individuals, with 229 haircuts and hairstyles recorded.

Those numbers illustrate something that can be easy to miss when looking at an individual volunteer activity: consistent service over several years can develop into a substantial body of community work.

Showing Up Where the Need Exists

Chantay's involvement with RBCF has taken different forms over the years—school-based grooming, caregiver education, services for people experiencing economic hardship, and community outreach events such as the Baltimore Ravens Back-to-School initiative.

Her approach has remained centered on the people receiving the service.

In describing why she enjoys this work, Chantay has said she likes “meeting new people, hearing their stories, and seeing the reactions after receiving [grooming] services.”

That perspective helps explain why her contribution goes beyond the number of hairstyles completed. Grooming provides an opportunity for personal interaction, dignity, confidence, and care—particularly for people experiencing circumstances that make regular professional grooming difficult to access.

The Next Chapter: Hair Pair

After years of working with RBCF through individual projects and partnerships, Chantay recently took another step: she created a profile in RBCF's Hair Pair Project.

Hair Pair represents a natural progression of the work she began years earlier. Rather than waiting for RBCF to organize each opportunity, the platform lets grooming professionals like Chantay connect more directly with schools and agencies that have identified populations facing barriers to regular grooming services.

Through Hair Pair, Chantay connected with the Diva By City Outreach Program, an experience she described as being about much more than hair. She praised the program for creating an environment where women could feel cared for, relaxed, appreciated, and supported.

For Chantay, joining Hair Pair brings the story full circle.

She began with RBCF by accepting an opportunity to serve students at a Baltimore City school. Over the years, she continued applying her professional expertise in schools, community programs, and outreach projects serving people facing barriers to grooming care.

Now, through Hair Pair, Chantay Ambrose is positioned to identify and build more of those relationships herself.

What started with a first meeting and an opportunity in 2019 has developed into something larger: a cosmetologist building a sustained record of community impact through her profession—and now gaining another tool to determine where that impact goes next.