Investing in Local Food and Organic Farms
The Slow Money Institute has incubated innovative projects, such as 2Forks Club in Carbondale, CO
Slow Money Institute is a non-profit organization dedicated to catalyzing the flow of capital to local food systems, connecting investors to the places where they live and promoting new principles of fiduciary responsibility that “bring money back down to earth.”
Slow Money Maine helped Amber Lambke and Michael Scholz of Maine Grains raise money to transform a jailhouse into a mill for locally sourced, organic heritage grains.
The Slow Money Institute catalyzes the formation of self-organizing local groups, which use a diversity of approaches: public meetings, on-farm events, pitch fests, peer-to-peer loans, investment clubs and, most recently, nonprofit clubs making 0% loans. Since 2010, more than $79 million has flowed, via dozens of local groups, to 806 food enterprises, in deals large and small.
The Slow Money movement was inspired by the vision presented in Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green, 2008) by Woody Tasch.
Woody’s new book SOIL: Notes Towards the Theory and Practice of Nurture Capital forges the experience of the last 10 years into a new vision of nurture capital—it’s poetic, photographic, philosophical and “lively serious.”
A Slow Money event at Lone Hawk Farm in Longmont, CO
Slow Money events have attracted thousands of people from 46 states and 7 countries. Over 31,000 people have signed the Slow Money Principles.