Financing our Foodshed: Growing Local Food with Slow Money

In towns and cities across North America, a quiet revolution is underway. Fed up with sending their money off to make a fast buck in faraway markets, people are putting their money to work where they live, in markets they trust and understand—starting with food.

Financing Our Foodshed is a collection of real life stories of these Slow Money pioneers and the local food entrepreneurs, sustainable farmers, bakers, and restaurateurs that they have chosen to support.

Fueled by their desire to do more than just eat local food, lenders of "nurture capital" are making low-interest, peer-to-peer loans to the people who produce, process, distribute, and sell food. Meet passionate entrepreneurs including:

• Abi, a talented artist-turned-baker, who borrowed the funds for a commercial oven to start a gluten-free bakery
  
• Angelina, owner of a Greek local foods restaurant, who refinanced exorbitant credit card debt incurred by renovations
  
• Chatham Marketplace, a much-loved grocery co-op whose monthly loan payments were reduced by a third, thanks to an ambitious collaboration between sixteen investors

Financing Our Foodshed tells the compelling stories of ordinary people doing something extraordinary, and will appeal to anyone who understands the critical importance of sustainably grown local food and resilient local economies, and wants a blueprint to get us there.

Carol Peppe Hewitt is a business owner, social entrepreneur, and lifelong activist. She is co-founder of Slow Money NC, working to help finance North Carolina's sustainable food and farming economy by guiding patient capital to small-scale farmers and businesses in North Carolina.