Thursday, November 12

WOODY TASCH

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money

(investing as if food, farms, and fertility mattered)

7:30 PM

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money presents the path for bringing money back down to earth -- philosophically, strategically and pragmatically, and with an entrepreneurial spirit that is informed by the work of thousands of CEOs, investors, grant-makers, food producers and consumers who are seeding the restorative economy.

The months and years ahead will surely see a flood of books proposing micro- and macro-economic fixes to the financial crises of the day. Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money brings a different vision -- a meta-economic vision, looking above the top line and below the bottom line, a new way of seeing what is going on in the soil of the

economy. This is the path towards a financial system that serves people and place as much at it serves industry sectors and markets. This mission emerges from Woody Tasch’s decades of work as a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer,

and entrepreneur. His explorations shed new light on a truer, more beautiful, more prudent kind of fiduciary responsibility, a fiduciary responsibility that is not stuck in the industrial concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but which reflects the new economic, social and environmental realities of the 21st century. These explorations take us from the jokes of his father to the insights of his son, from the Board rooms of foundations and start-up companies to the farm fields of Vermont, from gopher holes in New Mexico to the possibilities of an alternative stock exchange, from Carlo Petrini to Muhammad Yunus, from Thoreau to Soros.

• Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small, and local?
• Could a million American families get their food from CSAs?
• What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live?

Such questions -- at the heart of Slow Money -- are the first step on a path to a new economy and a new culture.

JOHN BLOOM, director of Organizational Culture at RSF Social Finance, and the author of the new book The Genius of Money: Essays and Interviews Reimagining the Financial World, joins Woody Tasch in discussion this evening.