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Our London office hosted its first online HL BaSE Catalyst pro bono workshop.  HL BaSE Catalyst is a programme of pro bono support for social enterprises provided by volunteers from Hogan Lovells and in-house counsel. 

“I found the session very interesting and engaging… It’s great to hear from the inspirational social entrepreneurs."

Client volunteer

The Hogan Lovells team was joined by lawyers from Ford, Kingfisher and Vodafone to provide advice to social entrepreneurs on a range of topics including IP, corporate, commercial and regulatory issues.  The online format meant that we were joined by participants in London, New York, Luxembourg and Lincolnshire!

 At HL BaSE, many of our clients are working to tackle climate change and environmental issues and we were delighted to welcome 3 such clients to the workshop:

  • Plant Your Future works with subsistence farmers in the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest to transform deforested and degraded land into productive agroforestry systems.  It has already planted thousands of fruit and timber trees on deforested areas in the Amazon, empowering smallholders and enabling them to develop more sustainable incomes while contributing to climate change mitigation.
  • Climate Smart Foods transforms native quinoa varieties that are in danger of extinction into scalable, sustainable food products, working directly with indigenous high mountain communities in southern Peru to protect agrobiodiversity.
  • The Maldives Whale Shark Research Programme carries out whale shark research and fosters community focused conservation initiatives in the Maldives.

As our usual wrap-up drinks were not possible we hosted a virtual environmentally themed pub quiz to round off the workshop, and the victor, Jenny Henman of Plant Your Future, will shortly receive her prize of a box chocolates from Harry Specters, another of our social enterprise clients.

We look forward to carrying out further online HL BaSE Catalyst workshops in the near future.