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How can brilliant but isolated experiments aimed at a solving the most pressing and complex social and ecological problems become more widely adopted and lead to transformative impact? Leaders of social change and innovation often struggle to expand their impact on social systems, and funders of such change are increasingly concerned with the scale and positive impact of their investments. In 1998, the Montreal-based J.W. McConnell Family Foundation pursued a deliberate granting strategy known as Applied Dissemination to reframe approaches to replicating successful projects. A few years later, the Foundation began convening its grantees receiving funding from the Applied Dissemination (AD) program to accelerate the impacts of their initiatives, develop a stronger understanding of the complex systems in which they worked, and to collectively begin to address some of Canada’s most intractable social problems. The AD learning group focused on peer-based learning and application, in an environment that created trust and respect among participants. The AD learning group was successful not only in improving individual and organizational efforts to accelerate and scale impact, but also in catalyzing a field of practice in Canada that focused on generating new social innovations, and scaling up and deepening the impact of those innovative initiatives. More than a decade later, the experience contains valuable lessons about effective scaling strategies, and about how to design applied learning approaches to support social innovators.