Watch the recording of our recent web chat where PCI Local Economies Fellow Michael Shuman joined Slow Money Founder and Chairman Woody Tasch to discuss the wide-ranging benefits of investing in local food systems.
Woody Tasch is Founder and Chairman of Slow Money a national network and a family of local networks, linking local food with local investment. Woody pioneered the integration of asset management and philanthropic purpose in the 1990s as treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance. For ten years, through 2008, Tasch was chairman of Investors’ Circle, a network of angel investors, family offices, and social purpose funds and foundations that has invested $150 million in 230 early stage sustainability-promoting ventures and venture funds, since 1992. Woody is the author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green)
Michael Shuman is director of research and economic development at the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. He holds an AB with distinction in economics and international relations from Stanford University and a JD from Stanford Law School. He has led community-based economic-development efforts across the country and has authored or edited seven previous books, including The Small Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition (2006), Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in the Global Age (1998) and Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Acheive Real Prosperity. In recent years, Michael has led community-based economic-development efforts in St. Lawrence County (NY), Hudson Valley (NY), Katahdin Region (ME), Martha’s Vineyard (MA), and Carbondale (CO), and served as a senior editor for the recently published Encyclopedia of Community.