Adam Marles, president and CEO of Lutheran Senior Services relies on gratitude as his most important leadership skill. “Time spent appreciating the good around me keeps everything in life and business in perspective,” he said. “There is so much around us for which we can be thankful, and remembering to take the opportunity to recognize the positive keeps me grounded and able to focus on the future.”
The future of Lutheran Senior Services continues to look bright under Marles’ leadership. Lutheran Senior Services is a nonprofit aging services provider with a mission to help older adults live life to the fullest while providing services and support to older adults in Missouri and Illinois.
Over the past year, Marles and his team undertook two major repositioning projects to enhance the agency’s ability to partner with older adults to help them stay independent longer while also improving the organization’s bottom line. The first project at Mason Point community converts a 200-bed care center into additional assisted living apartments and creates a new memory support neighborhood for people living with dementia.
“This new neighborhood will provide state of the art technology to provide the best quality of life for our residents while ensuring a welcoming, safe and engaging environment,” said Marles.
The second project at the Meramec Bluffs campus involved converting a former nursing home neighborhood into memory care and will provide interactive areas for residents to have more independence and choice over where and how they spend their time. The organization is also the first to use Tovertafel, or Magic table, a technology from the Netherlands that provides interactive engagement opportunities for people living with dementia both on their own and along with their family, friends and caregivers.
“One of the greatest joys of working in aging services is the opportunity to learn from the older adults who have built the society in which we live and work,” said Marles. “Our field is changing in myriad ways – our team members have different needs and expectations, our payors have different expectations and in particular, the people we serve are changing in both the ways they need services to be delivered and the expectations they have around the delivery of those services.”
In response, Marles said his team is running one hundred miles per hour to stay ahead of the changes with one goal in mind: to serve older adults as they live life to the fullest.
For his dedication to aging services, his team and the community, Marles has been named a Titan 100 for the second time.
