Today we measure the speed of money. Woody Tasch discusses his book, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. And Katy Lederer transforms her experience working in the fast money culture of Wall Street into poetry in the book , The Heaven Sent Leaf.

We’re all reeling from the roller coaster-ride of fast money, where trillions of dollars transact daily across silicon microchips, and trillions evaporate in the shifting sands unfettered capitalism. The solution? Slow money, according to Woody Tasch, recent founder of the nonprofit by that name. In his book, also called Slow Money, Tasch consciously riffs on the notion of Slow Food, the Italian-gone-global movement of reconnecting our eating with the land that produces our food. As he hints in the subtitle of his book — Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered — Tasch plays on the agrarian metaphor of slow money as compost in which to nurture a new kind of economy.

For a decade, until 2008, Woody Tasch chaired the Investor’s Circle, angel investors who deploy patient capital toward a sustainable future. In the 1990s, Tasch served as treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation. There, he and foundation president Steve Viederman first critiqued the dissonance between foundations’ grantmaking, which aligns with their missions, and investing, which often counteracts social and environmental commitments of their missions. They sought to harmonize their foundation’s mission with its investing, which typically accounts for 95 percent of an endowment, as well as its granting, which accounts for the remaining 5 percent.

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