Growth Ready: A Center for Enterprise

LSA’s New Work in Replication

In April, 2009, LSA embarked on a new journey - to develop the capacity and expertise to scale effective, sustainable programs and enterprises across the LSA membership system. This new expertise will strengthen LSA in one of its core roles – as a catalyst for the exchange and accumulation of knowledge and capacity within the system. The emergent new program is titled Growth Ready: A Center for Enterprise.

The early development phase of this new work is supported by funding from the Lutheran Services for the Elderly Endowment at the ELCA. LSA has contracted with Criterion Ventures – a New York consulting firm with an impressive track record in incubating and scaling new mission-driven ventures – to help design and build the new engine for replication.

Two-thirds of LSA member organizations provide aging services. Further, the demographic shift that is upon us compels us to build our collective capacity in aging services and to respond to the need for innovation in how care is delivered to people as they age. Therefore, LSA is focusing initially on scalable programs in the aging services arena. Once developed, the new capacity to scale good ideas and programs will be expanded to include other populations and services.

One critical component of LSA’s new venture is the development of mechanisms for identifying successful, sustainable programs. LSA will reach out to member organizations, as well as to the external world, for partnership in identifying good, scalable programs. Once an idea or program is identified, it will enter a “pipeline” through which it will travel as it is vetted for effectiveness, sustainability, adaptability and replicability. 

To succeed, LSA must wrestle with some complex issues and build the principles and protocols for identifying and vetting ideas and programs and for determining the right scale, market and method for scaling any given enterprise. LSA must create clear pathways to help its member organizations adopt new programs emerging from the pipeline and must foster financial sustainability for these programs by creating economies of scale, diverse funding streams, earned revenue and other forms of social enterprise. Hallmarks of the programs and services LSA seeks to grow include:

• Practices and models that help to realize LSA’s vision of a society that values generosity, inclusion, justice and mutual care.
• Programs and services that can achieve scale within the LSA system.
• Sustainable operational models and self sufficient financial models
• National brand development to build broad support for LSA in aging and across all service lines.

This work is exciting and ambitious. By working together to identify, develop, evaluate, invite, share, replicate and scale across the country Programs that have proven successful, LSA will weave together an even stronger national community of providers.

To learn more, contact Cynthia Osborne, Vice President Strategic Initiatives and Program Development at 410-230-3546.