Local baker needs a backer? You could loan him the dough he needs.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—After the stock market rose and fell by 400 points for four consecutive days, one Reuters financial journalist called last week's Wall Street roller coaster "one of the most volatile weeks in memory." The economy took a dive, and politicians and pundits started hand-wringing about a double-dip recession. And just yesterday, stocks plummeted another 400 points, leading to more financial panic.

But long before last week's sell-offs, even before the 2008 recession, Woody Tasch gave up on Wall Street. "I remember in the 1980s, there was a lead story in the Wall Street Journal along the lines of 'AT&T Lays off 18,000 People,' and that day, the stocks shot up," he says. "And I thought to myself, that's really weird."

So he founded the Slow Money Alliance, a nonprofit that hopes to do with money what the Slow Food movement has done with food. "Our current financial system is way too interconnected, too fast, and extremely volatile and dangerous," he says. "So take your money out of it and put it into something that's more direct. And what's more high impact than helping a CSA [community-supported agriculture program] expand, or helping an organic creamery get started?"

The Slow Money Alliance has been around for about three years, encouraging financial investments in just that type of thing—local food producers who are focused on sustainable agriculture and just lack the financial means to get access to the wider market.

THE DETAILS: Slow Money North Carolina, a chapter formed only a year ago, gave its first loan to a local baker who was baking bread for a community-supported agriculture (CSA) group. She needed to expand production, which required an expensive new mixer, so the group loaned her $2,000 with 3 percent interest. "Banks are not going to loan you $2,000, $4,000, $6,000 dollars," says Carol Peppe Hewitt, cofounder of Slow Money NC, "and yet that can be enough to make or break a start-up or an expansion of a sustainable business." The baker's loan has already been paid back, and over the course of the year, they've loaned $33,000 additional dollars to seven small food enterprises committed to producing or selling sustainable foods.

Slow Money is the financial road that's needed to rebuild the local food system. "It's like when we got rid of the railroads. We also pulled up the tracks," says Hewitt. "We've done the same thing with food. When we stopped producing local foods, we lost the distribution system." Slow Money loans help the local baker or the organic cheese maker, who can't produce enough to supply a big-box store with the quantities those stores need.