ous to me that I don’t care how much
money I make,” stated a woman in
Ashland, OR, during a Slow Money
discussion. She went on to explain
that the benefits to her and to her
community—more organic farms,
more organic food available locally, a
more robust local economy—were so
obvious to her that she didn’t need to
wait for a group of experts to come
around and put it into numbers. This
highlights one of the key differences
between Slow Money and market-driven investing. Slow Money is agnostic
about returns. It is more about making a difference than making a huge
profit. The return on some investments can be very positive and some
are negative, but that is not the driving factor. The drive is that if we all
make even just a small investment in
our communities, we can make a
huge impact.
Slow Money is part inspiration,
part activism, part new-kind-of-finan-cial-prudence. After all, in a world of
1,000 point drops in the Dow in 20
minutes (remember that?) and sovereign nation defaults; a world of
GMOs, GPS-driven tractors and farmers who haven’t seen an earthworm
on their land in decades; a world in
which melamine, salmonella and E.
coli are ready to hitchhike into our
food from just about anywhere on the
planet—what is more prudent than
the idea of a million people investing
1 percent of their money in local food
systems within a decade?
450 attendees from 34 states and six countries, and garnered significant media coverage (Wall Street Journal, L.A. Times, TIME.com and
Business Week). $260,000 was invested in four of 26 presenting small
food enterprises.
At Slow Money’s second national gathering in Shelburne Farms,
VT, this past June, 600 people from more than 30 states and several
foreign countries came together to hear presentations from 26 small
food enterprises and from thought leaders including Bill McKibben,
Joel Salatin, Eliot Coleman and Gary Hirshberg. A number of process-
The Strategy
The Slow Money strategy is built
around four elements: a national network, local networks, the non-profit
Soil Trust and for-profit Slow Money
investment products.
National Network. The national
Slow Money Alliance links farmers,
food entrepreneurs, donors, NGOs
and investors. Slow Money’s inaugural
national gathering, held in September, 2009, in Santa Fe, NM, hosted
