Social Enterprise Law Seminar

The Sustainable Economies Law Center‘s Social Enterprise Law Seminar will be held at UC Berkeley School of Law on October 11. You can register and view the agenda here.

Learn how to tackle legal issues facing nonprofits, worker cooperatives, and other social enterprises, and meet other practitioners in this growing field, where lawyers and their clients are building local resilience and making a difference in their communities.


This activity is approved for 10 MCLE credit hours by the State Bar of California, including one eliminating bias or ethics credit.

I’ll be discussing Affiliations Between Nonprofits and For-Profits: Possibilities and Problems.

This session on nonprofit law will cover affiliations between nonprofits and for-profits and include contractual relationships, parent-subsidiary structures, commercial coventures, and joint ventures. We’ll explore how and why nonprofits create for-profits to engage in commercial activities and contrast that with running those activities within the nonprofits themselves. We’ll also discuss how and why for-profits create nonprofits and where the resulting relationships go right and wrong. One alternative to creating a nonprofit is to create a fiscally sponsored project within an existing charity. This alternative is often poorly understood, so we’ll spend some time reviewing how fiscal sponsorship can work. Finally, we will provide a high level overview of joint ventures and other forms of informal and formal relationships between nonprofits and for-profits, giving the attendee an idea of the range of possibilities.

Hope to see you there!
– Gene

10/11/19 Update
Great conference with some super informative but accessible presentations.