Inside the Fast Growing World of Slow Money

By Woody Tasch, chairman & founder of Slow Money

For the past five years, Slow Money has been working along the boundaries of angel investing, impact investing and philanthropy to catalyze the flow of capital to small, organic food enterprises that are rebuilding local food systems. As the preceding sentence implies, this work takes a number of different shapes, including local networks, investment clubs, pitchfests and, very recently, our Beetcoin campaign, which combines online donations with event-driven 0% loans to create what we hope will become a long-term, scalable funding resource deployed alongside local Slow Money investing activities.

As of mid 2014, over $38 million has flowed into small food enterprises in the U.S., Canada, France and Switzerland, via 21 local networks and 13 investment clubs. Our first Beetcoin campaign began October 1 and will end November 12, at Slow Money 2014 Gathering in Louisville, KY where 21 entrepreneurs will be presenting on stage and the two top vote getters will share Beeetcoin proceeds. More details on the event on the Slow Money website at the end of this article

The overall context for Slow Money, and the introduction of Beetcoin, are described below, which is excerpted from Commons nth: Common Sense For A Post Wall Street World, a pamphlet available free from Slow Money.

INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE AND INDUSTRIAL FINANCE are two sides of the same coin.

The food system is great at producing cheap, shelf stable food, but equally great as a contributor to many significant systemic problems: soil erosion, carbon in the atmosphere, an obesity and diabetes pandemic, aquifer depletion, loss of biodiversity, and high costs of intermediation (less than ten cents of every consumer food dollar gets to a farmer). The finance system is great at facilitating enormous capital flows and wealth, but equally great as a contributor to many fundamental systemic problems: unequal distribution of wealth, short term thinking in the executive suite, securities that are too complex to regulate, banks that are too big to manage, and layers of intermediation that are rigged in favor of (to use the words of John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, one of the world’s largest asset management firms) “the croupiers.”

Read Woody's complete article at- http://bit.ly/1qh3zwj

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