Slow Money Texas - Financing

Creating Financing Opportunities

Slow Money Texas is nurturing a range of investment conversations in order to actively develop funding channels for local and sustainable food enterprises. Slow Money Texas will encourage the establishment and expansion of the following range of financing alternatives:

GRANT PROGRAMS
...from public and private sources that focus on sustainability and organic foods;

TRADITIONAL & ALTERNATIVE LENDING
...via banking, community development funding initiatives and peer-to-peer investment approaches;

RISK CAPITAL
...invested by individual angel investors as well as early stage and growth capital from institutional venture capital and private equity sources.

To fill gaps in the capital market for this emerging investment space, Slow Money Texas will:

- Facilitate fund formation around Slow Money principles

- Bring investment banking, legal and consulting services to the sustainable food sector

- Establish funding sources as Blended Value organizations

- Engage proven entrepreneurs and encourage innovation

- Raise awareness of the need and opportunity described by Slow Money

- Encourage investor expectation for Blended Value return

What are Slow Money principles?

The Slow Money movement is basically about bringing money back down to earth and investing in things that matter to us in our daily lives rather than investing in complex ways that we do not understand or trust. The Slow Money Principles call us to invest as if food, farms and fertility matter, connecting investors to the places where they live, creating vital relationships and new sources of capital for small food enterprises. The Slow Money vision is that the 21st Century will be an era of nurture capital, built around principles of carrying capacity, care of the commons, sense of place and non-violence.

What is Blended Value?

Blended Value is a different perspective on measuring investor return, as described by here by Jed Emerson, founder of BlendedValue.org:

"Value is what gets created when investors invest and organizations act to pursue their mission. Traditionally, we have thought of value as being either economic (and created by for-profit companies) or social (and created by nonprofit or non-governmental organizations). What the Blended Value Proposition states is that all organizations, whether for-profit or not, create value that consists of economic, social and environmental value components-and that investors (whether market-rate, charitable or some mix of the two) simultaneously generate all three forms of value through providing capital to organizations."

A Blended Value Perspective

"We need to have a fundamental shift in our understanding of the nature of value. Think about it on an individual level. The reason you want to make money is to be secure to live a certain way. Simply having wealth doesn't produce that end. It doesn't matter if you have a six-figure salary if you can't breathe the air or drink the water. A better question to ask would be, What are the elements of a life worth living, and how can I assemble them? Not, How much do I earn? Likewise, in our approach to value, we need to think more about the end rather than the means. The larger question is: As a civilization, what do we need to thrive?"
— Jed Emerson, "60 Seconds with Jed Emerson",
Fast Company, 3/1/2004