LAB OVERVIEW
The Redemptive Lab experience is designed with your specific needs and opportunities in mind. The gathering will be fast-paced and fully-scheduled. You will leave with fresh ideas, practical templates/tools, new relationships and constructive feedback from others.
Who: Early-stage founders of for-profit businesses
What: A 3-day, 2-night in-person experience to connect with other entrepreneurs, be mentored 1-on-1 by expertise, and widen your imagination in applying the Redemptive Frame to your business.
Why: To accelerate and deepen the health and growth of your leadership, venture, and impact.
How: By providing meaningful interactions with your peers, mentors and program team members within our limited time together.
Program Overview
Our time together will be built upon deepening your imagination and accelerating your practice of redemptive entrepreneurship in the dimensions of strategy (what you build), operations (how you build), and leadership (why you build). No truly redemptive venture can ignore any of these, as they all must work together for redemptive purposes.
Sunday, April 2nd (founders and team only):
Arrivals, dinner, and personal story sharing
Monday, April 3rd (founders, mentors, and team):
Introduction to the Redemptive Frame, venture presentations*, Strategy and Operations interviews, and mentor 1:1s
*each participating founder will deliver a 4-minute pitch about their venture
Tuesday, April 4th (founders and team only):
Leadership session, reflection and synthesis, and departures
What can I expect from the experience as a founder?
We aspire to meaningfully contribute to:
Your growth and health as a leader. We want to see you grow in your commitment to redemptive business, and be poured into with that goal in mind.
The growth and health of your venture. We want to see Canada flourish with exceptional businesses led by exceptional founders embodying the gospel in strategy, operations, and leadership.
Building your participation and presence in the venture-building community in Canada.
Given the formational nature of the Lab, we hope volunteering mentors and founders alike leave feeling refreshed and inspired.
Is this program suited for me?
Redemptive Business Labs is for early-stage founders of for-profit businesses to grow their leadership and their venture with a community of believers.
We are looking for ventures that are:
“Post hunch”, meaning you have established revenue
Early-stage, ideally within first 5 years of operations
Actively pursuing traction and growth in what they are building
Pursuing their mission through scalable business models
Designing innovative solutions in their respective sectors and/or addressing critical cultural issues through a redemptive lens
Led by Christian venture-builders who are…
Aiming to embody the gospel in their work
Humble and teachable
Working full-time on their ventures
Seeking an accountable community to grow in their faith together
Toronto
Redemptive Labs //
Toronto Redemptive Labs //
Where We Started
The Toronto Redemptive Lab is designed and formatted by Praxis Labs for a localized context. Based out of NYC, Praxis is ten years into their own startup journey, and are very intentional in building a movement and community toward the shared pursuit of Redemptive Entrepreneurship.
We encourage you to take 15 minutes to read through the 2022 Praxis Community Letter for greater context and clarity of the vision as you enter this community.
What is Redemptive?
We strongly believe there is a way of starting and growing ventures that is largely under-practiced, undefined, and full of promise. In our conversations, most Christian founders and funders have a hunch that they are called to a more comprehensively faithful and sustainable approach to venture-building and impact creation. But the how-to’s of such an approach are unclear—mostly because they just haven’t seen it practiced. We believe the venture builder community can, and will, create a line of sight to such a way of leading and building—which we call redemptive entrepreneurship.
To be redemptive means someone is giving or sacrificing to restore something or someone to its proper place. Redemptive founders are those who, being deeply spiritually formed, generously surrender their personal and organizational power for the sake of others. They, along with funders, are led by the Spirit to create sustainable value while leaving opportunity for others (gleaning).
A redemptive enterprise “spends itself” on behalf of the world more than itself. Organized to “bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives, and release from darkness for the prisoners” (Isaiah 61), it seeks to embody these truths to its customers, workforce, and partners.
Our community’s vision is most impactful when we all collectively move together, led by the Spirit to not just do work differently, but operate regularly with grace and forgiveness. Let’s be a collective witness together.