wisewords
Merging Social Investing and Philanthropy
A Conversation with Author Woody Tasch
by Linda Sechrist
I
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n Inquiries into the Nature of Slow
Money, author Woody Tasch points the way to strategies for fixing the
economy, from the ground up. His prin- ciples of responsible investing connect investors to the places where they live and to the land, offering life-affirming, culturally rich alternatives to global markets run amok.
What do you mean by the term slow money?
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There are two aspects to slow money. The first is intertwined with the slow food movement, initially begun as a re- sponse to the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in Rome, Italy. Now, this grassroots social movement, with some 85,000 members, promotes a way of living and eating that strengthens the connections between the food we eat and the health of our communities, our bioregion and our planet. The second aspect is about creat-
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ing a grassroots financial movement. The initial goal is to attract the attention of one million or more Americans who are willing to invest a small fraction of their investment dollars in small-scale agriculture. This supports the health of the individual and ultimately, leads to a more robust community. Slow Money is a new nonprofit that organizes local and national networks and develops new financial products and services to bring money back down to earth. We are currently
Westchester/Putnam Counties
steering significant new sources of capital to small food enterprises, appro- priate-scale organic farming and local food systems.
In addition, we seek to catalyze the emergence of the new nurture capi- tal industry—entrepreneurial financing aimed to support soil fertility, carrying capacity, sense of place, cultural and ecological diversity and nonviolence— all of which connects investors to their local economies. Present examples in- clude credit unions, co-ops, community supported agriculture and community development venture capital funds like Community Development Financial, which is already in place.
At the heart of our organization
are two questions. What if we put soil fertility into return-on-investment cal- culations that serve people and place as much as they serve industry sectors and markets? What if we could design capital markets built around preserva- tion and restoration, rather than extrac- tion and consumption?
So, by contrast, how would you define fast money?
Fast money refers to investment dollars that have become so detached from the people, places and activities being financed that it is impossible to say whether the world economy is going through a correction in the markets trig- gered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, or whether we are teetering on the edge
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