Field Guide to Investing in a Resilient Economy

In her classic paper, “Leverage Points, Places to Intervene in a System,” Donella Meadows explained that if you want to change a system one of the most important places to intervene is through the narrative within which the system operates.  With our Field Guide to Investing in a Resilient Economy we utilize the power of narrative to repurpose capital as we chronicle the progress of transformative, real-world investment models. 

Healing the earth, healing community, healing finance
 

The Field Guide will focus on three meta-themes.  We have begun to explore the first of these, “healing the earth,” with our first Field Guide study,  Grasslands, a custom grazing business in South Dakota and Montana that utilizes holistic land management practices to harness the power of the photosynthetic process and convert it into financial, human, and ecological capital.  Capital Institute Founder John Fullerton is a principal investor. The subject of our second Field Guide study, the Evergreen Cooperatives initiative, is a remarkable experiment in “community healing”:  a group of worker-owned, anchor-institution-based “green” cooperative companies that are catalyzing true democratized wealth-building in Cleveland’s inner city.  We take up our third theme, “healing finance,” with the story of The Patient Capital Collaborative, as we explore the evolution of the architecture of the financial system itself.