Slow Money, the nonprofit formed to apply big-league investment savvy to grow small farms and community-based food businesses, just launched its first philanthropic fund, the Soil Trust, this October and will choose its first investments next spring, April, 2013.
The group, based in Boulder, Colo., will channel donations small and large into a pool of capital. The money will be lent to or invested in small businesses working to rebuild local food economies.
Fertile soil means a healthy economy
Slow Money’s guiding principal is to protect the nation’s soil fertility in order to safeguard its economy. It looks for investment targets that will meet that mission.
Before creating Soil Trust, the nonprofit says it helped investors channel money into local food enterprises. Examples: a $600,000 investment in a family butcher shop in New York; a $14,000 loan to a small food-distribution company in North Carolina to buy a cold storage truck; and $82,000 invested in a northern California farm shop.
Donations, not investments
The money for Soil Trust will come from donations from people who believe in the group’s call to use capital to nurture business alternatives to industrial-scale food production.
Slow Money itself will get about 5% of the annual donations made to Soil Trust in return for its role as manager and investor advisor for the philanthropic fund.
What’s next? The group will screen possible investment candidates at its next national conference, to be held April 2013 in Boulder.
“We have an industrial food system that is as imbalanced as the credit markets are, in terms of loss of biodiversity and aquifer depletion and soil depletion, leading to food systems as vulnerable to a massive correction as the credit markets are.”
— Woody Tasch, founder of the nonprofit Slow Money Alliance, quoted in my Los Angeles Times’ Small Business column in 2009.