Authors: Carol Peppe Hewitt

Financing Our Foodshed (2 page)

BOOK: Financing Our Foodshed

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I am deeply appreciative to New Society Publishers for bringing these Slow Money stories to the large audience they deserve.

And very special thanks go to Linda Glass, the most talented editor I could ever have. There were times as I read her edits that I thought, “That’s exactly what I
meant
to say, but better!” She was a delight to work with, and I am enormously grateful.

In these past few years, I have greatly enjoyed working with the Slow Money network leaders around the country. I admire and appreciate their invaluable creativity, commitment, and enthusiasm as together we work to grow and strengthen this important movement worldwide.

I spent many productive hours on the phone with Woody, Arlo Hesse (creator of Credibles), Marco Vangelisti (who most recently helped launch the national Soil Trust), and Michael Bartner, who keeps the national Slow Money organization going. We served as Woody Tasch’s steering committee, grappling with how to make this movement into a powerful and effective world-wide community-financing organization. Their persistence and intelligent guidance have provided me with continual inspiration and support.

I am enormously thankful to my husband, Mark. We run a pottery business together
and
just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. Only because Mark continued to create thousands of beautiful pieces of pottery each year, was it possible for me to get Slow Money NC up and running, and then to write this book.

Lastly, my thanks go to you, my reader. I hope you will enjoy these stories and will help bring even more folks into the fold of Slow Money. It is only together that we can accomplish this urgent task of creatively financing our foodsheds.

Foreword

by Woody Tasch

The search for antidotes to Wall Street excesses and global financial uncertainty, and the search for good things to do with our money, take us here: to screened mutual funds and shareholder activism, to credit unions and coops and community banks, to Washington regulators, to impact investing and triple bottom line metrics and microfinance.

And, as of the past few years, courtesy of the emerging Slow Money network around the country, these searches also take us to another place: back to our own neighborhoods where, one loan at a time, individual investors are connecting with local food entrepreneurs and, together, beginning to rebuild local food systems and fix our economy from the ground up.

In a way, nothing could be simpler.

I can still hear Carol Peppe Hewitt saying at a Slow Money national gathering: “It really isn’t complicated. There are local food entrepreneurs who need money and local investors looking for good places to put their money. We just need to connect them.”

Carol’s work in North Carolina, doing just that, is a vital part of a process that has facilitated the flow of more than $21 million to 180 small food enterprises around the country since 2010. As of the end of 2012, Slow Money had 17 chapters, including one in France, and six investment clubs. Some 24,000 people had signed the Slow Money Principles. In a way, nothing could be simpler.

Courtesy of the past few years traveling around the country on behalf of Slow Money, I’ve come to believe that there are a few million of us out there who feel, in our bones, just how important and rewarding this “nothing could be simpler” really is. That’s why many observers have called Slow Money a movement,
entrepreneur.com
listed it as one of the top five trends in finance, and some have called it a revolution.

Slow Money Principles
In order to enhance food security, food safety and food access; improve nutrition and health; promote cultural, ecological and economic diversity; and accelerate the transition from an economy based on extraction and consumption to an economy based on preservation and restoration, we do hereby affirm the following Slow Money Principles:

I.

We must bring money back down to earth.

II.

There is such a thing as money that is too fast, companies that are too big, finance that is too complex. Therefore, we must slow our money down — not all of it, of course, but enough to matter.

III.

The 20th Century was the era of Buy Low/Sell High and Wealth Now/Philanthropy Later — what one venture capitalist called “the largest legal accumulation of wealth in history.” The 21st Century will be the era of nurture capital, built around principles of carrying capacity, care of the commons, sense of place and non-violence.

IV.

We must learn to invest as if food, farms and fertility mattered. We must connect investors to the places where they live, creating vital relationships and new sources of capital for small food enterprises.

V.

Let us celebrate the new generation of entrepreneurs, consumers and investors who are showing the way from Making A Killing to Making a Living.

VI.

Paul Newman said, “I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer who puts back into the soil what he takes out.” Recognizing the wisdom of these words, let us begin rebuilding our economy from the ground up.

In the scheme of things, Slow Money numbers are still very small. But they point in a promising direction. Not just in the direction of
more.
But in the direction of a kind of investing that offers a fundamental alternative to the world of invisible, anonymous financial transactions.

Are we witnessing the slowing of a great historical pendulum, on its way, still, towards the peak of an economy based on extraction and consumption, but slowing in preparation for its swing back in the other direction, towards an economy based on preservation and restoration? Perhaps.

This can be a frightening prospect — for what could be more frightening than the wake of a quadrillion McDonalds burgers? Or it can be a hopeful prospect, carrying with it all manner of emergent economic possibilities. Paul Hawken lays out the vision for an “ecology of commerce.” Our friends at BALLE point to the emergence of “local, living economies.” Journalist Amy Cortese and economist Michael Shuman point to
locavesting.
And lately, there’s been talk of
insourcing
that comes after decades of irrationally exuberant outsourcing.

Are we witnessing the early stages of the emergence of a
nurture capital
industry? After venture capital comes nurture capital, concerned less with the pursuit of extraordinary financial returns, courtesy of capital intensive high tech innovation, and concerned more with carrying capacity, sense of place, care of the commons, nonviolence, and ecological, cultural and economic diversity.

If this sounds a bit abstract, improbable or highfalutin, well, then, sit back and enjoy the pages that follow. Relax your inner fiduciary. Because nothing is more beautifully back down to earth than the experiences Carol Peppe Hewitt shares.

Warmth, common sense, compassion, courage, social entrepreneurship, fiduciary activism, and even a few dashes of American Dreamism and In Soil We Trustism — elements of all shine through
these stories of small food businesses, the entrepreneurs who create them and the local investors who are supporting them. If we take these stories to heart, we will know that what is at work here is more subtle and more beautiful than merely adding
social capital
and
natural capital
to
financial capital
in order to rejigger our means of accounting.

What do we hear when food entrepreneur Abigail Wilson says that “opening and operating the bakery is, for me, synonymous with going to graduate school”? First, we hear something that would make most professional investors run for the hills. Second, we hear a call to get beyond the false specializations of the global and return to the true generalizations of the local. We hear a call to reconnect to the places where we live, to take some of our money out of ever-accelerating and increasingly complicated and volatile global markets, and put it to work in things that generate tangible, immediate value to our families, our communities and our bioregions.

And of the risks?

An economist or a financier would have a field day deconstructing what you are about to read as a manual of High Risk, Low Return investing. To which I would offer the old aphorism: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To an economist, everything looks like an opportunity to Buy Low and Sell High.

Happily, Lyle Estill, one of the cast of characters to which you are about to be introduced, is neither an economist nor a financier. He is an entrepreneur, philanthropist and author, and his vision says so much about where we’ve been as a culture (Wall Street) and where we need to go (Main Street). Here’s how he addresses some of the most fundamental fiduciary issues on the Q&A page of Slow Money North Carolina’s website:

How are you qualified to handle my money?

We are not. We have a deep seated belief that we can use capital to increase the resilience of our local economy, and we feel we need to try to do something.... We are not “money managers,”
or “loan officers,” or particularly skilled in finance. But we know people. And we have built successful ventures the hard way. We know the local food players in our community. And we understand business in Chatham County. Finally, we have some time on our hands, so we want to give this a try.

Wow. Come on. Let’s all let out a great big old Apple’s-Stock-Price-Isn’t-The-Measure-Of-All-Things “Thank you!”

Each of the small food businesses that Slow Money investors in North Carolina are supporting is a perfectly, imperfect meeting place of what E. F. Schumacher called “meta-economic,” what Wendell Berry calls “economics for a renewed commonwealth” and “imagination in place,” and what Carol Peppe Hewitt calls “a helluva way to run a produce section.”

Can we find the gumption to carve out a few dollars and some time to support this new economic imagination, this grassroots economic activism? Will it make a difference?

Carol’s experience in North Carolina suggests, laughs, imagines, dares, demonstrates and encourages us that we can and it will.

— Woody Tasch

February, 2013

Woody Tasch
is an experienced venture capital investor and entrepreneur who found a way to marry Slow Food and impact investing. He called the idea “Slow Money” and under his inspirational thought leadership has created a movement and a burgeoning organization of local Slow Money networks throughout the US and beyond. Founder and Chairman of Slow Money, headquartered in Boulder, CO, Woody is also author of
Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money.

Introduction

Foodshed
is a relatively new term that describes the regional ecosystems we each live in. Our foodsheds get us from soil to salad, from the ground to ground beef.

As I write, the Slow Money movement swirls around me. The project that I helped start here in Pittsboro, NC, is now one of many. Slow Money groups have started up in nearly 20 places in the US and one in France as well. But it is this one, in North Carolina, that I know most intimately.

Over the last two years, I have sought out lenders and borrowers who want to take part in this alternative financing venture. Each of the Slow Money loans has its own personal story because money went from one caring, real-live person to a deserving other. Not just on paper, not just on the books, but between two or three people over a cup of coffee — or over a plate of heart-shaped gluten-free cookies.