As the recession unfolds, it seems that small is the new big, slow is the new fast, and change is the new stability. So, with traditional investment plans now essentially amounting to financial suicide, the time has come to get creative with our cash. Luckily, opportunities abound for investing in fledgling projects that have time on their side.
NPR's All Things Considered recently profiled farmer Dante Hesse who runs Milk Thistle farm in Ghent, N.Y. In lieu of a traditional bank loan, Hesse is appealing to his (loyal but small) base of customers to subsidize the $700,000 that he needs to expand the farm and grow the business.
His plan is representative of a new approach to business that could come to displace the current hegemony of mainstream U.S. economics. Woody Tasch is a guy with 30 years experience in economics and venture capitalism who just wrote a book called Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money. Its a manifesto for the Slow Money Alliance, which Tasch founded. The mission of the alliance is "to design new capital markets built not around extraction and consumption, but around preservation and restoration." Their vision? "Billions of dollars a year supporting tens of thousands of independent, local-first enterprises at the base of the restorative economy."
In his NPR interview, Tasch said that its time to challenge the assumption that growth is good and the marketplace knows best, saying "I've just had it with all of this so-called 'making-a-killing expertise,' which is actually killing the planet. I think one of the antidotes is daring to move to the other side of our brain, and kind of put down all that economic and fiduciary nonsense and just act like regular people." Love it!
Get the book here or read an excerpt of it here.
Get the milk here.
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