The Aging in Community Initiative - From Model Development to Model Dissemination

In January 2008 fourteen LSA member organizations were awarded grants from Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Foundation and began a unique journey together. The goal was to work together to build new or improved practice models that support caregivers and help people live independently for as long as possible as they age.

Relying on principles from open source methodology, the group set aside the natural inclination toward proprietary concerns and competition, allowing a more grass roots collaborative process to bubble up. Despite the geographic distances between them, the project participants grew into a dynamic community - learning from one another, cross-pollinating their practices, sharing their financial models and exposing their program strengths and weaknesses - in the service of collaborative innovation.

The work produced a number of positive outcomes. Several new or improved models of caregiver and in-home support have emerged - all community-based, all volunteer-staffed and all involving close partnership between social ministry organizations and congregations. Collectively, the participating organizations trained more than 175 volunteers in the testing of the new or hybrid models, engaged dozens of new congergations and served more than 400 aging individuals or caregivers.

The initiative reached its formal end point in June 2009 and LSA is now immersed in the nest-step process - building dissemination strategies for some of the most promising of the emerging models.

For LSA, the ACI marked the beginning of a new strategic response to the growing trend toward community approaches to aging. In April 2009, LSA entered new partnerships with the ELCA's Lutheran Services for the Elderly Endowment (LSEE) and Criterion Ventures in New York. With LSEE's generous funding and Criterion's expertise in scaling sustainable social ventures, LSA is building new expertise and capacity as an agent of replication. Some of the emerging ACI models will be among the first opportunities to explore what dissemination and scaling strategies will be most effective in spreading practices that work across the Lutheran social ministry system. While focusing initially on aging services, LSA's long term goal is to use its new replication expertise to strengthen the system across all service lines.

LSA thanks Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Foundation for its partnership in the ACI and, especially, Thrivent's Jim Yagow, for the competence and steady guidance he brought to the project on critical issues like financial sustainability.

LSA also gratefully acknowledges all the participating organizations for their enthusiastic commitment to the ACI. Their commitment to the open source process, to learning from one another, to exposing their business models to rigorous scrutiny for sustainability and to accountability for results was unwavering over the course of the initiative. The participating organizations were:

• Bethany Lutheran Home, Sioux Falls, SD
• Diakon Lutheran Social Ministries, Allentown, PA
• Ecumen, Shoreview, MN
• Liberty Lutheran Services, Ambler, PA
• Lincoln Lutheran, Racine, WI
• Linking Employment, Abilities and Potential (LEAP), Cleveland, OH
• Lutheran Community Services Northwest, Tacoma, WA
• Lutheran Family Services of Colorado, Denver, CO
• The Lutheran Home, a Lutheran Life Community, Arlington Heights, IL
• Lutheran Homes Society, Toledo, OH
• Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota, Moorhead, MN
• Lutheran Social Services of New England, Concord, New Hampshire
• Lyngblomsten, St. Paul, MN
• Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Retirement Services, Austintown, OH

For more information contact Cynthia Osborne, 410-230-3546.