The Legacy Leadership Lab (L3) was a project led by the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR) with funding from the Government of Canada’s Investment Readiness Program from October 2019 to March 2021. We led online workshops and events to help build expert-driven solutions for Canada’s transitioning small business community. The L3 Community intended to develop and activate 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.
The L3 Community stakeholders involved in designing, delivering, or supporting products, services, and initiatives that enabled social acquisitions in their own communities and contexts were involved in various activities, from participating in L3 Design or Activation Streams, supporting participants of those streams at various points in their development, attending L3 Community events, developing or sharing social acquisition tools and resources over L3 communication channels, or simply following along with L3 and L3 members’ work.
The purpose of the L3 Community was to assemble and activate a national community of professionals and organizations that would support and advance the strategy we called 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 crisis or a business succession/ownership transition.
Learn more and access our full project report at our website.