Slow Money

The slow food movement has always appealed to me. The revolutionary aspect of it not so much, but the slow part--yes, yes, finally!! Weird as this may sound, when I first looked into the philosophy it was like I had found some kind of explanation for the way I like to live my life. More on that in some later post, but lets just say that my personality is the slow variety. In the sense that I like to wait to see how things unfold. I like to take the time to cook and experiment with cooking even if that means eating at 10:00pm. I think of any project I start, especially the creative ones, as ongoing and in some cases lifelong. I like to go out of my way. The reciprocal of all this being, of course, that I mostly don't like to be rushed or rush things...as often as that is practically possible.

Anyway, I was delighted to hear about a guy called Woody Dasch and a concept called slow money. NPR started the segment with the story of a young dairy farmer in upstate New York who wasn't able to get a loan from his cooperative for expanding his organic dairy product line. He's got no collateral save for the cows. His solution is to ask the people who buy his milk at the NYC farmers market to make loans to him as investors. $1000 for a 6% return. He needs $700,000. It's an example of investing in something local, something that will take time to mature but benefits more than just an investor by building something real in a real community. What puts this in perspective more than anything, of course, is how very, very ungrounded our financial meltdown has been--made famous by complex financial instruments with nothing beneath them but bad, bad mortgages.

For me, micro lending programs done by community groups in many third world countries sprang to mind. I'd love to hear people's ideas and thoughts on slow money. Thanks for reading.