Interviews
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Slow Money: Bringing Money Down to Earth
Interview with Woody Tasch, founder and president of Slow Money, a nonprofit that connects investors to local economies.
by Brooke Jarvis
posted Nov 16, 2009
Woody Tasch has thought a lot about money: what it does, how it moves, and how to connect people who have it with people who need it. He's been a venture capitalist, a treasurer and advisor to foundations, and the chairman of a network of angel investors. He even helped found a field of investing with the rather surprising name "community development venture capital."
But he found that even socially responsible investing couldn't do much to fix an economy that focused too much on extraction and consumption and too little on preservation and restoration.
In 2008, Tasch wrote Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. Soon after, he founded the Slow Money Alliance, an NGO devoted to the principles of slowing money down, reconnecting it to the Earth, and respecting carrying capacity, the commons, sense of place, and nonviolence. Tasch calls it the transition from "Making A Killing" to "Making a Living."
YES! Magazine Web Editor Brooke Jarvis spoke with him about "nurture capital," local food systems, and why we all may soon be thinking differently about money.
Brooke Jarvis: What does the Slow Money movement mean by slowing money down and bringing money back to Earth?
Woody Tasch: Three trillion dollars a day zooms around the planet in currency markets alone. Our current financial system has, by cutting money off from people and place, allowed it to start circulating at such crazy speeds and in such complexity that no one can really understand it anymore. Even the experts don’t understand the consequences of what’s now going on. The derivatives and sub-prime mortgage mess is just one manifestation of that.
The way we slow money down is by bringing it down to Earth: connecting it directly to the land and to places where investors live. As long as how you’re investing is completely disconnected from where you live—meaning it’s just dictated by distant markets, distant companies, abstract securities—then the money can kind of circulate in this wild, crazy, volatile, and ultimately destructive fashion. If you bring money back down to Earth, connecting it to the place where you live, and all the way to the land itself, then you will be slowing money down and having a healthier outcome for all concerned.
Read the whole article here.
Chronogram
Community Notebook
Putting the Brakes on Fast Money
An Interview with Woody Tasch
by Carl Frankel and illustrations by Jason Cring, April 27, 2009
Woody Tasch is all about the money.
But not in an evil, greedy-bastid way. For two decades, he’s been pioneering the integration of financial investing with social responsibility. It’s an enormously important undertaking. When investment dollars go to conventional businesses—and the great bulk of funding still does—orthodox business practices are endorsed and sustained. The result: more social injustice and environment decline. When dollars stay local, on the other hand, environmental costs are reduced because there are lower shipping costs, jobs are created that aren’t subjected to the vagaries of global corporate decision-making, and the money circulates in the community, making for a much more robust local economy.
In the 1990s Tasch served as treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and was the founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance. Subsequently he was chairman of Investors’ Circle, a network of angel investors, family offices, and social-purpose funds and foundations that since 1992 has invested $133 million in sustainability-promoting ventures and venture funds.
Tasch’s latest venture is the Slow Money Alliance, which aims to bring investment dollars to the emerging alternative culture centered around “slow food,” a growing global movement that celebrates community life through locally grown food and eco-gastronomy. The Slow Money Alliance’s mission, offered here in an abbreviated form, is to “support small food enterprises, catalyze increases in foundation grantmaking and mission-related investing in support of sustainable and local economies, and incubate next-generation socially responsible investment strategies.”
Read the whole article here.
Global Public Media
Crop to Cuisine: Slow Money
21 May 2009
In this episode of Crop To Cuisine, we connect the dots between out outdated and broken economic system and our food system. We speak with founder of the Slow Money Alliance, Woody Tasch (You can get Part II of the Tasch interview at www.croptocuisine.org.) We also visit a local farm to see how Slow Money principles can take shape and sustain a farm well into the future. We also hear from Master Gardener Carol O'Meara as the gardening season takes off.
Listen Now
Lionel interviews Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money author Woody Tasch in this clip from the February 4, 2009, episode of The Lionel Show.
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