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Slow Money.  This is another cutting edge development that should be of interest to those of us who are disturbed by the effects of the movement of capital in our society.  It’s a powerful perspective on the role of investment capital in forming the world to better our vision, and healing the wounds of our exploitive past. I asked Woody Tasch, the originator of the concept, for his elevator speech to pass along to you. You might recognize his name as the Founder of Investors Circle. Here’s a taste from Slow Money.

“Even before current meltdown, several things were apparent: 99.5-99.9% of our investment and philanthropic dollars were going to industrial agriculture, and monoculture. This amounts to cheap, highly processed food, billions of food-miles, GMOs, significant problems of food security due to centralized processing and poor to non-existent quality controls in China and elsewhere, etc. We could say, “we might as well round down to zero” in terms of resources invested in sustainable agriculture.

At the same time, social investors have become increasingly frustrated by the indirectness and ineffectiveness of diversified mutual funds as tools for changing corporate behavior and foundations have become slowly but inevitably more cognizant of the silliness of a system that has $550 billion invested in economic growth so that it can give less than $1 billion of grants per year to environmental problems.

Slow money is a new investment theory/philosophy/organization that is bringing together the country’s leading organic farmers, food company CEOs, NGO leaders and funders to catalyze the flow of investment capital to small food enterprises, appropriate-scale organic farming, local food systems, and, last but not least, soil fertility. But bigger than the local food system thing is the future of capitalism and philanthropy and globalization thing. Tectonic shifts are beginning under the boundaries of for-profit and non-profit: slow money will play a key role inventing new forms of intermediation.”

For more from Woody Tasch see.