If your work as an advocate includes small business development, the logical partners are all members of the International Council for Small Business (ICSB), which is a network of academics from around the world, specializing in entrepreneurship and small business management.
The Wilford L White Fellowship is named after the ICSB's founder, and in academic circles, it is a prestigious award. I received it at their annual conference in June 1987, in recognition of leadership and commitment to management assistance to small business throughout the world.
The CFIB Board should share this recognition because it was they who encouraged me to set up an education function at CFIB when it was necessary to close down the Canadian Centre for Entrepreneurial Studies in 1973.
And for the next 25 years, one of our education activities was to provide a $2,000 award for the best Canadian research project by a Canadian academic. Then in partnership with the Royal Bank, we helped fund the academic’s travel costs to give their paper at the International Small Business Congress, where I was a member of its Executive Committee. In this way, we helped developed serious academics doing original research on small business development. And they all became government advisors.
One of our accomplishments at CFIB, which was being recognized in my Fellowship, was our efforts to create over a dozen entrepreneurship centres across Canada, which all had massive community outreach in supporting small business development.
At the ICSB conference I am seen being congratulated by Raymond Kao from Ryerson, who was one of the recipients of an Entrepreneurship Centre created ten years after I closed my original Centre.
In the US there are literally thousands of academic centres associated with Universities and Colleges that are funded by wealthy individuals anxious to link their name to a worthy cause. And leaving small fortunes in their wills to these Centres can be deducted from estate taxes. Our secret in Canada in building centres was to create local academic celebrities that could raise funds on their own.