Building the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging’s plan for creating a better future with small steps that start now

PCA is the state-designated Area Agency on Aging for Philadelphia County, responsible for coordinating and administering federal, state, and local funds for older Philadelphians and adults with disabilities to assist them in achieving their maximum level of health, independence, and productivity. It provides a wide range of services, including advocacy, care management for long-term care programs, protective services, home-delivered meals, and the administration of senior centers. Each year PCA touches the lives of more than 140,000 older adults and people with disabilities.

• Conducted an assessment of PCA’s current state, strategy, and staff engagement to glean insights that would inform the organization’s strategic decision-making.
• Focused PCA’s leadership team on big-picture futures thinking, without sacrificing practical, near-term progress toward goals.
• Developed a clear and actionable strategic plan that established people, performance, revenue, and policy priorities for the near, mid, and long-t.erm
• Helped PCA to pursue a structure an implementation plan with specific accountabilities, timelines, and KPIs.

PCA engaged Collaborative Consulting to help the organization formulate a comprehensive strategy with clearly defined near-term, mid-term, and long-term priorities.

The project focused on:

• Benchmarking the current state of the organization, its strategy, and its staff engagement
• Developing a clear, coordinated, and actionable strategic plan and framework for implementation
• Helping PCA’s leadership team step out of their day-to-day operational and administrative work into futures thinking for the organization

PCA engaged Collaborative Consulting to work alongside their leadership team to formulate a strategy to achieve near term priorities and build toward long-term opportunities. Our work together leveraged our subject matter knowledge, structured strategic planning processes, and expert facilitation methods.

Our process began with a battery of staff and stakeholder interviews to understand the starting state of the organization, its goals, and the strategy in place at the time. We also analyzed data from a recent employee engagement survey, resulting in key insights about the people responsible for delivering the organization’s programs and services.

These insights — along with research into market trends relevant to PCA’s area and offerings — informed our strategic planning process, during which we led PCA’s leadership team through a series of facilitated sessions to set strategy and plan implementation. Through our work, we helped the team consider the possibility of long-term thinking to identify high-impact opportunities for the organization’s future, while being rigorous about establishing practical actions that could be implemented right away.

This resulted in a strategic framework establishing priority initiatives across people strategy, organizational performance, revenue strategy, and internal policies — all with 2, 5, and 10-year time horizons.