Learning Organizations Laboratory

The Learning Organizations Lab (LabOA) is a research and development project that began at the end of 2017 in partnership with Centraide. The goal of this project is to adapt the concept of learning organizations to the community sector; to identify the key elements of creating a learning culture in nonprofits, and identify ways of reinforcing the nonprofit’ capacity for learning.

Over the past year, we conducted a thorough review of the literature on learning organizations, and interviewed key people in the community and social innovation sectors, as well as academics and consultants. Mindful of wanting to create a model of the learning organization that is both original and connected to the reality of nonprofits, we presented our ideas to other non-profit staff during an Ateliers/C in October 2018, and to a portion of Centraide’s staff a few months later.

The LabOA research report was finalized in December, and introduces a new model of the learning organization. We hope that is it both clear, innovative, and that it reflects some of the key values of our sector.

We are very excited about the second phase of our project, which began in 2019. Based on our research findings, our mandate is to prototype, experiment and evaluate different ways of supporting the creation or the reinforcement of a learning culture within non-profits. We hope this will allow us, in time, to strengthen the learning capacity of many more organizations, including our own!