Our friends at engageSPARK spent months researching the options for incorporating a social enterprise. They have generously decided to share their findings. Although every business will have different circumstances and needs, the blog post serves as a good reference point for informational purposes. Always consult your lawyer for professional legal advice.

From the engageSPARK Blog:

“Choosing a legal form (or structure) for your new U.S.-based social enterprise seems like it would be a piece of cake: (1) call lawyer; (2) tell lawyer what you want to do; (3) lawyer takes care of everything. Actually, it’s not so simple – especially when every lawyer you speak to says that you can’t do what you want to do or each one offers a different solution.

Admittedly, what we wanted to do with our social enterprise and how we envisaged it to be structured legally was complicated. We had several goals to meet that went beyond the typical social enterprise setup. Given that many other social enterprises’ goals might overlap with ours, we have decided to share the lessons we learned after a lot of research over several months.

In this blog post, we’ll outline and discuss the various legal forms we considered for our social enterprise and explain – in plain English – the pros and cons of each one. Before we do that, we’ll describe our organization and its needs so you have the lens through which we analyzed the various legal forms that we considered. Again, as each social enterprise is different, our considerations and conclusions may be different from yours.”

Continue reading on engageSPARK’s Blog —->

Disclaimer: Nothing in this blog post constitutes legal advice; it’s for informational purposes only.