Every month, L3 runs a 90-minute Community Event to convene the entire L3 Community. If you’re reading this blog post, you’re already in the community! Welcome! As our website explains:
The purpose of the L3 Community is to assemble and activate a national community of professionals and organizations that will support and advance the strategy we call Social Acquisitions for Business Recovery (SABR), or the practice of converting a conventional enterprise into a co-operative or social enterprise or another social purpose form in order to revive and sustain it through an unplanned disruption like the COVID-19 pandemic, or a business succession/ownership transition.
L3 Community
Our Community Events are designed to spread awareness of leading examples of SABR-oriented programs, tools, resources, projects, initiatives… whatever is out there in the Canadian landscape that serves to advance the opportunity for Canadian small businesses in transition to be acquired and converted into social purpose forms. New to the concept of social acquisitions? You’re not alone. L3 has prepared a lot of knowledge products to help demystify the concepts we’re working with.
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SABR Primer (.pdf): This one-page document is a quick overview of what we mean when we say “social acquisitions.”
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L3 Introduction Package (.pdf): Intrigued by SABRs? Great! This Introduction Package tells you everything you need to know about what L3 is and does, and how you can get involved to learn, collaborate, and build our small business sector back better with a vibrant community of professionals from across Canada.
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L3 Introductory Deck (.pdf): Like the package but in a more visual, presentation form, this deck provides an intro so L3 and SABRs, an overview of different types of social acquisitions, with some real-world examples to refer to, and what makes an acquisition “social.”
For more resources, click here to visit our Knowledge Product Page.
L3 Activation Stream
An update from Lili, Community Activation Lead, on the Activation Stream:
Over the past two months, an initial group of Activation Stream Members went through the kick-off process to begin activating their networks. Their goal is to raise awareness of social acquisitions for business recovery amongst their networks, and invite interested individuals to get involved in the L3 Community. The kick-off project entailed identifying 57 networks or organizations that could potentially be interested in SABRs. We’ve had commitment to contacting 8 of these networks or organizations with representation across various provinces.
L3 has prepared a number of resources that can help Activation Stream members reach out to their networks in a customized way and we’ve received good feedback that these resources are helpful in communicating the benefits of SABRs. These are located on the Activation Stream Worksite, a sub-page of the SABR Hub. Check them out if you are interested in sharing! They are for public use.
Our next kick-off round for new Activation Stream Members will begin on October 2nd. Activators are people who are community-builders, passionate about social and small business, whose goal is to raise awareness of SABR solutions. If you’d like to get involved as an Activator or want to check out what you might do as an Activation Stream Member, register at this link. We’d love to have you! As you can tell, there is plenty of great work to be done in mobilizing potentially interested networks!
L3 Design Stream
An update from Tara, Lab Designer, on the Design Stream:
L3 ran five Design Stream meetings since the August Community Update. Attendance was a bit lower than usual, since many Design group members were away on vacation or preparing for the fall. Nevertheless, we made some productive advances in each meeting.
The Non-debt Financing Capacity-Building Group is exploring how to generate awareness and access to non-debt financing instruments for social acquisitions amongst potential investees. The strong focus of discussion this month was the importance of having investees drive the design of financial instruments. Are you looking to support entrepreneurs, acquirers, investees and their capacity to take on non-debt financing? Click here to send a a request for an invite to the next group meeting.
The Business Advisor Engagement Group is exploring how to build a prototype that will generate awareness and familiarity of social acquisitions for business advisors and professionals that serve as first lines of support for business owners. They are at the stage of approaching a minimum viable product strategy around a knowledge product that can be easily compiled and distributed, like a booklet, webinar, or other resource that can introduce some of the basic components of a social acquisition, and give the advisors enough knowledge that they can direct their clients toward more complex resources if a social acquisition is a desirable and viable solution. They are still refining their audience and would welcome Canadian professionals from all spheres of business advisory to join the group and assist with development and testing. Sound like something for you? Click here to send a request for an invite to the next group meeting.
The Long-term Care Facility Conversions Group is a fledgling group that is involved in a community interested in converting a plan for a for-profit senior care home on the Sunshine Coast into one for a multi-stakeholder co-operative. Read more about the case here. If you’re interested in facilitating social acquisitions of long-term care facilities in Canada, have experience of knowledge in this space, or are otherwise interested in getting involved, click here to share your thoughts.
The Municipality and Local Institution Engagement Group wants to design to engage municipalities and local institutions in the concepts and solutions of social acquisitions as a business succession and recovery tool. This group recognizes the deep embeddedness of small businesses in their municipalities, particularly in Northern, rural, and remote contexts. Municipalities can undergo social acquisitions or encourage and support them in a variety of ways, and this group is seeking to collect and distribute this knowledge for Canadian cities and towns. Many different techniques were discussed as needing further investigation, including mortgage bonds, impact and community bonds, zoning and land use policy, and others. Are you interested in bringing municipalities into the social acquisition conversation, or have you worked with municipalities in the past and would be willing to share your experience? Click here to send a request for an invite to the next group meeting.
The Non-debt Financing Instrument group had a lively discussion about the various group members’ experiences of the current Canadian landscape. The group is eagerly pooling their knowledge of existing non-debt financing instruments that already exist or have existed in the past, and were interested in gathering technical details of those instruments and in which circumstances they proved most effective. Do you have experience with building, delivering or receiving non-debt financial products? Want to contribute to the discussion or help build new products to sustainably finance social acquisitions and community enterprises? Click here for an invite to the next group meeting. Click here to send a request for an invite to the next group meeting.
About Legacy Leadership Lab (L3)
L3 is an 18-month initiative by the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience, funded by the Government of Canada’s Investment Readiness program. We are leading online workshops and events to help build expert-driven solutions for Canada’s transitioning small business community. The L3 Community is developing and activating market interventions and prototypes that allow conventional and social finance players, business service providers, and community leaders to facilitate social acquisitions of existing businesses in their own towns and contexts.
About Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR)
WISIR is a research institute at the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Enterprise and Development committed to generating trans- and inter-disciplinary knowledge about social innovations and the social innovation process (the dynamics of learning, adaptation and resilience). Our approach is to pursue collaborative research and projects that bridge University of Waterloo departments, involve researchers from around the world, and engage those beyond academia. We seek to mobilize this knowledge through a range of new curriculum offerings and training opportunities - both within and outside of a university setting.