Thanks to Twitter, I learned about the Slow Money conference — I hadn’t heard of it until I saw Stowe Boyd’s 140-character updates Thursday.
BusinessWeek writes:

There’s a conference going on in Santa Fe this week about Slow Money. The idea behind slow money, modeled on the 20-year-old slow food movement, is to create an infrastructure for investing in local food systems.
Financial markets exist to connect people who have extra capital (in retirement accounts, pension funds, nonprofit endowments, personal savings, etc.) with people who need it (to go to college, buy homes, start and expand companies, buy inventory and equipment, etc). In the old model, a bank, fund, or other institution is usually the intermediary in the marketplace. That intermediary invests capital from savings wherever it has the greatest return for the institution’s shareholders — and sometimes that meant a lot of money flowed to destructive assets, like subprime mortgages.
The new model is a way of allocating capital that accounts for other factors, like how it affects the local community. When businesses borrow or get investment directly from their customers (in the CSA model, for example), that means that customers’ interests are aligned with creditors’ or shareholders’ interests — they’re the same group. In a local economy, they’re part of the same community, too, so they have incentives to create value beyond just pure financial returns, by doing things that benefit the local environment and community. (E.g., a farm chooses not to use pesticides that pollute the local water system — a benefit local shareholders see.)

The Slow Money Web site describes it more simply:

Slow Money.  It’s a new economic vision.  It’s an emerging network of investors, donors, farmers, and activists committed to building local food economies.  It’s about the soil of the economy.  It’s the beginning of the “nurture capital” industry.

Slow Money founder Woody Tasch explains his view in this YouTube video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJuUcaVtifg]
I’ve blogged before about committing to supporting your favorite businesses, which the 3/50 project made more formal with the call to spend at least $50 each month at three local businesses.
Slow Money appears to take it to the next level, calling for investment with a social mission. The Slow Money principles say:

Paul Newman said, “I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer who puts back into the soil what he takes out.” Recognizing the wisdom of these words, let us begin rebuilding our economy from the ground up, asking:

•  What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live? 
•  What if there were a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?  
•  What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?

What do you think about investing locally? About businesses committing to giving away a percentage of their profits? About businesses raising capital from customers?