Kids Are Not Tea

On the Tazo tea box on my desk, there is a description on the back which reads: "A delicately balanced blend of green tea, spearmint, lemon verbena & lemongrass."  If the advertising department at Tazo can write such a eloquent description of simple tea, I wonder how LINC North Texas's work would be written about:  "A superb and robust blend of teachers, students, volunteers and donors gives LINC NT a strikingly bold and reviving capacity for transforming the lives of families and their students, drawing out sweet harmonious notes of community with a nicely developed warmth . . . "

But kids are not tea, and despite all the eloquent wording that could be written about what we do here, one would be hard pressed to measure our impact in any other currency than this: action.  Our aim is to change the lives of those we reach, and we can only do this because of the actions of our teachers, donors, and employees.  These actions not only speak louder than words; they shout.  Though words are powerful, it is the 'walk' that truly fights in the trenches.

At LINC North Texas we strive to walk the walk.  We know that like farmers planting seeds, the grounds are fertile for an abundant crop - that even if we just reach one person, that person has the potential to  reach many others.    We thank you for your continued physical, spiritual, and financial support - your actions speak for themselves.

If you'd like to learn more about being apart of our mission, please contact Brandon at brandon@lincnt.org.

Exponential

What would it look like to achieve exponential growth in an organization?

I would like to take a moment to consider what the word exponential means.  It's a term that we talk about a lot, but I'm not sure that we're looking at the whole picture.  This graph (source: Wikipedia, "Exponential Growth"), shows such a line.  Let's consider each of the three lines as if they were a church congregation.  The red line is "linear" growth.  Every year, 50 new members are added.  That's great growth!  The blue line is "cubic" growth.  Each year, the church grows at a faster and faster rate.  That's even better - this would be a great goal for any church.  But the green line represents what is truly exponential growth.  Each year, the number of members doubles.  This represents incredible growth, staggering to nearly any organization!

But what does this term, exponential, mean to us, really?  It seems that most of us, when we think about exponential growth, think about that overwhelming point of growth....later on down the line.  We are looking at the growth that the graph shows around year 9 and 10.  But if we look back toward the beginning, the line looks stagnant!  Even further down the graph, it takes 9 years to surpass the linear growth, and 10 to surpass the cubic growth!  Many of us would look at the growth happening on the green line for the first five years and conclude that the project was a failure.  In reality, that project is preparing to reach a tipping point where it will far surpass all of its peers.

Let's think seriously about how to start out if we want to achieve exponential growth.  I believe that this graph reminds us that we need to be prepared to start slowly and be okay with staying small for quite a while.  At LINC North Texas, we are blessed to be well down the line.  I would place LINC NT at about the 7 point on the graph - after years of investing in the foundation, we are starting to see incredible things happen, and we as a staff are getting more and more excited about what God has in store for us on down the line!