Slow Money and the State of Soil
“Beetniks Against Global Warming.”There’s a placard you never saw in Paris.
Because to a Beetnik—someone who has participated in a Slow Money Beetcoin campaign or anyone whose occasionally countercultural tendencies are tempered by an appreciation of local entrepreneurs and farmers— investing in a small food enterprise near where we live is as important as traveling thousands of miles to negotiate international targets on CO2 in the atmosphere.
Which is not to compare the two. But it is to say that even while faced with global social and environmental challenges of imponderable complexity, we can affirm the significance of the slow, the small, and the local.
This is what those of the Slow Money persuasion did, once again, in 2015. More than $6 million has gone this year into 83 small food enterprises, bringing the total since 2010 to more than $46 million into 450 deals. The 2Forks Club (Carbondale, CO) made its first loan this year—a $23,500 zero-percent loan to Zephyros Farm of Paonia—and the Knives and Forks Investment Co-op (Vancouver, BC) introduced a new model to our family of investment clubs. Our first regional online Beetcoin campaign exceeded its target, raising more than $56,000 for several Colorado food enterprises (more details here- https://slowmoney.org/beetcoin). Slow Money Minnesota launched. Slow Money North Carolina hosted its first regional gathering. Slow Money Northeast Kansas held its first entrepreneur showcase.
We are building a movement of individuals who—not content to delegate our fate to politicians, CEOs, technologists, economists, regulators, certifiers, fiduciaries, and pundits—are choosing a constructive, hopeful course of action. We are affirming our sense that in the world of faster and faster, bigger and bigger, more and more global, we need not only new technologies and new policies, but also new sensibilities and new behavior, without which the words sustainable and transparent and accountable and socially responsible and metrics and impact will mean little in the end.
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