March 11, 2010: Global
First Slow Money Newsletter: Calling All Earthworms
[Editor's note: We recently received this "chairman's letter" from Woody Tasch, founder of the Slow Money Alliance, one of the critically important new developments in the local food and farming revolution, and we felt it was worth sharing in its entirety. If you find this all inspiring (we sure do) please consider giving Slow Money a boost by voting for them as one of the top ten ideas for change in America at Change.org: http://bit.ly/slowmoneyidea. "Investing 1% of our money in local food systems and small food enterprises. A million of us. Within a decade. That's where we of Slow Money are headed. And you can help just by voting for Slow Money today on Change.org. There are five days left to pick the top ten ideas for change in America. Help make one of them Slow Money! There is nothing more revolutionarily prudently common sensical in this upside down world of bail outs and bonuses, junk food and junk bonds than this: Slowing some of our money down, bringing our money back down to earth. 1% for here. Vote for slow money today on change.org."]
On New Year’s Eve, BusinessWeek reporter John Tozzi set the bar very high for us: he cited Slow Money as one of the “big ideas for 2010.” This capped a year in which NPR had previously called us a movement and ACRES USA had called us a revolution.
That’s a lot of excitement for a small NGO. A lot of excitement.
The excitement is not just coming from journalists. It’s coming from many of you, with whom we’re now connecting around the country—from the most sophisticated financiers to the most finance-phobic foodies. We all share the desire for a new economic story, a story that goes beyond the dysfunctions of Wall Street and Washington, a story that offers genuine alternatives to industrial agriculture and industrial finance. The first 4,000 signatories to the Slow Money Principles and first 800 members of the Slow Money Alliance are part of this new story.
To make this story real and lasting, and to achieve the catalytic potential that so many of us sense, we are now heading toward the following goals, which we are sharing with a larger audience for the first time in this first Slow Money Letter:
- One million signatories to the Slow Money Principles; on our way to
- One million members of the Slow Money Alliance; on our way to
- One million investors investing 1% of their assets in local food systems.
The first million within two years; the second million within five years; the third million within a decade.
Here’s how we are going to get there:
After several months of preparation, we are launching our social media campaign, of which this letter is a part. We’ve retained one of the most experienced internet advocacy and communications teams in the country. You will be hearing from us on a regular basis going forward. . .but not to worry. . .the same people who brought you “Staring the Pig in the Face” and the “It Was the Cow and the Pig” punchline will be bringing you print and video material suitable for smiling and passing on. We hope. . .NOTE: We are currently in second place in the social entrepreneurship category on Change.org. VOTING FOR US THIS WEEK, HERE, could make us one of the ten ideas that get delivered to the White House. (Also NOTE: The first conference call of our emerging social media campaign was held a few weeks ago and was “off the charts,” shattering benchmarks for quantity and quality of participation, according to our communications consultants. 160 folks from all around the country called in. CLICK HERE to listen to the call.)
Our second national gathering in Shelburne Farms, VT, June 9-11, will be another step forward. Joel Salatin, Bill McKibben, Eliot Coleman, Alisa Gravitz, Robert Zevin, Will Raap and many other financial, agricultural and cultural leaders will be on hand. There may not be a better spot in the country to consider the crossroads of capitalism and agriculture than this beautiful, historic site. (At our inaugural national gathering in Santa Fe last September, 450 folks from 34 states and six countries came together to meet dozens of small food entrepreneurs and explore the larger issues of money, food and soil. Attendees called it “a turning point” and “life-changing.” CLICK HERE to see a summary of the proceedings, hear the voices of many participants and see the media coverage.)
While we build our national network and presence, action on the ground is unfolding at the regional 
level. In Philadelphia, Madison, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Raleigh/Durham, Boulder, the Hudson Valley, Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, San Francisco, Maine and elsewhere, folks are now organizing slow money clubs and funds. This activity is emergent—that is to say, it is early, young, full of promise, but with lots of organizing and entrepreneurial challenge ahead. To see reports from these regions, CLICK HERE.
We’ve gotten word from Australia that a good bit of Slow Money organizing is unfolding there, “bringing money back down to earth, down under.” Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money has been published in Italy and Korea and is due out imminently in Japan.
Collaboration with sister organizations continues to build. This Slow Money Letter contains interviews with Judy Wicks, the co-founder of BALLE, and Paolo di Croce, General Secretary of Slow Food International (CLICK HERE for interviews). These networks are building the business-to-consumer and farmer-to-consumer relationships that are vital to local economies, and we look forward to bringing the investment piece to their ongoing efforts. We are also exploring ways to work with Roots of Change, the Real Food Challenge, the Responsible Endowments Coalition and the social entrepreneurship programs of New York University and several other universities and educational institutions.
Founding members of the Slow Money Alliance are stepping up to the plate. We have received donations of stock from two founding members. We are exploring a commitment of 1% of company revenues from another. A start-up organic beverage company, inspired by the Slow Money Principles and participation in Santa Fe, is going to market as the first “50/50” company, committing 50% of profits to charity and featuring Slow Money in its branding.
We are exploring partnerships with established financial institutions to create vehicles for individual investors. With the Calvert Foundation, we are exploring the feasibility of Calvert Foundation Slow Money Notes. With RSF Social Finance, we are exploring collaboration on the “local exchange” that they are hoping to test in the Bay Area, focusing on small food enterprises, later this year.
We are exploring with major foundations and high-net-worth investors their interest in providing support and investment capital. We are actively seeking funding for The Slow Money Institute (which will focus on incubating new investment vehicles, such as Slow Munis and CSA.USA, organizing regional Slow Money Institutes, and publishing), growth capital for the staffing and communications budgets of the Slow Money Alliance, philanthropic seed capital for the Soil Trust (the pool that will be capitalized, eventually, by a million small contributions from members of the Slow Money Alliance), and various strategies for utilizing our network and organizational capacity to begin putting initial commitments of investment capital to work in small food enterprises and new intermediaries.
We did not arrive at this ambitious agenda out of our own entrepreneurial zeal. We arrived at it by listening to you.
And if you will allow me a little First Slow Money Letter Founder’s Leeway, I’d like to share with you a few more thoughts about what we’ve learned from listening to you.
What has brought us all together over the past year or so is the desire for solutions that recognize the seriousness of the structural economic problems, do not try to solve them superficially or fix them only for the short term, and, therefore, have the potential to make a real and lasting difference. At least as it relates to the issue of food (but, we all suspect, as it relates to pretty much the whole enchilada, the whole hog and the whole earth), this means solutions built not around growth-first multinational corporations, ever-more-complex securities and ever-faster trading, but around a large number of small, diversity-enhancing, social-capital-building, long-term-thinking nodes of entrepreneurial activity. What in the world fits this description better than a CSA, a farmers market or a small food enterprise?
If we take a sufficiently broad view, we see how relatively simple and common-sensical, yet how revolutionary and necessary, is our ultimate objective: one million investors investing 1% of their assets in local food systems within a decade.
The Broad View
Since World War II, we have lost millions of farmers and tens of millions of acres of farmland and hundreds of billions of tons of topsoil and too many trillions of soil micro-organisms to count. We have filled our soil with chemicals and our stores with junk food. We have filled our portfolios with junk bonds and our heads with investments that we do not understand.
Somewhere along the way, it seems, we all signed up for the 100 Million Cars In China Club and the 500 Million Twinkies Per Annum Club and the Trillionth McDonald’s Hamburger Club. Somewhere along the way, it seems, we handed our money over to Masters of the Universe, hedge fund managers and computer programmers.
But that was then. That was the second half of the Twentieth Century, when, while slipping into deficits of culture and finance of globalization-sized proportions, some of us put on earphones, some of us lost ourselves in cyberspace and some of us burrowed deeper underground in order to survive.
And this is now, the first half of the Twenty-First Century. It is time for us to reemerge, reconnect, resurface, doing what only we earthworms can do: begin restoring the fertility of the soil and the health of the economy, from the ground up, starting with food.
The Good News
The good news is, it’s already happening. Small food enterprises are bubbling up all around the country–new organic farms, niche organic brands, urban gardens, green rooftops, organic seed companies, composters big and small, edible schoolyards, developers of biologically benign agricultural products and technologies, local slaughterhouses and grain mills, artisan cheese makers, vertical gardens, microbrewers, biodynamic vineyards, community kitchens, slow food and local food restaurants, hydroponic growing systems, sustainable fishing and forestry enterprises, neighborhood food markets and farmers markets and CSAs.
Now the task at hand is to connect investors and investment capital to these enterprises, so that they can proliferate and flourish, in ways that are realistic, healthy and sensible, preserving their independence and missions, rebuilding the health of communities, bioregions and local economies.
This will take some doing, some gumption, and yes, some financial engineering. But it is a new kind of financial engineering. This is not the job of quants and fiduciaries as much as it is the work of earthworms—investors and entrepreneurs who understand that in today’s world, our happiness, our quality of life, and, perhaps, our very survival depend upon discovering new ways to put back as much as we take out.
And it will take a change of heart. A change in the hearts and minds of a million contributors and a million investors. “Wildly heartening,” is how one person in Ashland, Oregon responded. “Local is the distance the heart can travel,” is how founding member Odessa Piper put it during our Slow Money Institute in Madison, Wisconsin.
The Movement
Which brings us back to the excitement of this movement, this revolution of which we are all a part. I’ve heard too much from too many of you, felt too much, not to believe that this is, indeed, the start of a movement.
A million individuals affirming the Slow Money Principles will create a strong, new values-led voice on the national scene, contributing to the search for new farm policies and economic policies that go beyond band-aids and bailouts. A million members of the Slow Money Alliance will create a flow of $25-$50 million per annum of a new kind of seed capital, the world’s first grassroots, non-profit investment fund of its kind. A million investors investing 1% of their assets in local food systems will create a whole new financial sector—the nurture capital industry. 
Some have suggested that in pursuit of this agenda, leading with a million-signature campaign is not strong enough, not action-oriented enough. From where I sit, however, it is clear that in our case, “well begun is half done” means taking the time to affirm a new set of values that will inform our work going forward. If we fail to do so, we will be dragged backwards, we will find ourselves sliding down the slippery slope back toward the very industrial measures of investment success that we seek to reform. It is toward a new vision of fiscal prudence that we seek to move and our first steps in this decades-long project must be guided by an unwavering set of first principles.
If it is prudent for the largest institutional investors to fund the venture capital industry, investing tens of billions of dollars per annum in a few thousand highly speculative, high-tech companies, then we must see to it that it becomes prudent for millions of us to fund the nurture capital industry, investing billions of dollars per annum in tens of thousands of lowly-speculative small food enterprises and local food systems.
What fun. . .Hard work. And fun. As much fun as an earthworm in a garlic bed. . .
Talking over dinner to a friend awhile back, I realized, “It’s garlic. That’s where we are. Slow Money is in the garlic stage. Over the past year or so, Slow Money has prepared the bed and planted garlic. It’s in the ground, over-wintering, waiting, storing energy, getting ready to sprout.”
In 2010, let’s enjoy the first green shoots together: momentum on the Slow Money Principles campaign, our next national gatherings, our next few thousand members in the Slow Money Alliance, and the initiatives that are emerging at the local level in many communities.
I am obliged to conclude this message, in this age of abbreviated internet communications, by referring to those oft-quoted words of wisdom (Pascal, Twain, Shaw and Emerson have all been cited), “I’m sorry this letter is so long. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.” To which I would suggest we all add, “I’m sorry, but we must slow our money down. There isn’t time to let it keep moving faster.”
My optimism about the path we have chosen is buoyed by the reservoirs of shared inspiration, empowerment and engagement that we have tapped together, and by the spirit with which so many of you have already come forward.
Thanking you all for that, and for your patience with this opening message, and in anticipation of all the anti-fiduciary-razzmatazz, pro-earthworm work that lies ahead,
Woody Tasch
Chairman
