L.E.K. Consulting
Type of Work: Pro Bono
Client: Zen Hospice Project
The Zen Hospice Project (ZHP) is a Buddhist-centered home for contemplative end-of-life care providing related services to the San Francisco community. It had its roots in assisting indigent patients afflicted with AIDS in San Francisco during the 1980s, and has subsequently expanded its reach to assist patients from all walks of life in dealing with the journey related to dying.
"They were at a crossroads," says Tip Kim, Managing Director and Partner as well as the head of L.E.K. Consulting's San Francisco office. "They had made a profound impact on relatively small number of people, and they were going through a generational change and were trying to figure out what impact they wanted to have in the evolving conversation of end-of-life care."
Kim says the work ZHP does is even more meaningful now given the current state of healthcare. "We believe that the healthcare infrastructure, that value system and, frankly, the economics, are converging on a view that meaningful and quality end-of-life care and alternatives are things that the medical community, the care-giver community and the insurance community are finally prepared to have a meaningful conversation about," he says. "The Zen Hospice Project is a leading advocate in the country about enabling patients and their loved ones to undergo contemplative end-of-life care." They have the perspective that death is not a medical event, but rather a human event."
After a competitive RFP process, ZHP selected L.E.K. Consulting to be its strategic thought partner. "L.E.K. has a specific program to accommodate community-based organizations and doing pro bono work, and I qualified this proposal under that program," Kim says. "I think ZHP viewed us as someone that was in for the long-haul, a firm that they could roll their sleeves up and get to work with. This is not an easy, linear, project. It's an evolving process and engagement and I think they viewed as thought partners, not someone who just viewed this as a project to get done."
The objective of the engagement was for L.E.K. to create, in collaboration with the ZHP, a practical, realizable strategic path forward for ZHP. The results of the collaboration, which has taken over six months of pro bono work on L.E.K.'s part, include the following: The decision to create a definitive "case study" to articulate the mission, objectives, activities, organizational design, outcomes, and benefits of a partnership between ZHP and University of California San Francisco hospitals.
This case study will serve as the center-piece for marketing, publicity, fund-raising, and set the stage for strategic conversations for subsequent initiatives; Secondly, the launch of three distinct strategic initiatives to create a stronger identity for ZHP in the marketplace; Third, the contemplation of incremental initiatives with the potential for order-of-magnitude increase in revenues for ZHP, including new UCSF-like partnerships, and the design of a new organization that will enable it to manage the change.
"Traditionally, not-for-profit organizations think about expansion of mission but they don't necessarily think about how that expansion will happen or would be paid," Kim says. "Initially, the board was focused on doing the Phase III work first. This issue with that is two-fold: One, they would end up diluting the message without a clear identity and more importantly, the need for fundraising would multiply and put the overall mission in jeopardy."
The phasing of the work and identifying those distinct areas of need was something that the organization, and particularly the Board, really came to value, he says. "As someone who has been doing this for 23 years, this was a career-changing or career-defining project. We were humbled, to be perfectly honest. I feel highly invested in the work that we were privileged to do."
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