Dear Friends
The last decade has been a sobering one for traditional investing, with the stock market barely keeping pace with inflation. While it has been catastrophic for many individuals, the economic crisis presents us, as a community, with the opportunity to reshape how we think about money in a fundamental way.
What is investing? What is money for, actually? What does prosperity consist of? Our old paradigm is coming up short of answers to these questions. A new paradigm is forming around localization, socially responsible investing, fair trade, and sustainability. At the Alliance, we call it the local living economies movement, and we are proud to be a part of it.
The entry point to the new paradigm is to see our community’s economy for what it really is -- a network of people caring for, and providing for, each other. We need to see through the dollars that our economy is denominated in, to our everyday personal acts of responsibility, acts measured in the true human currency, the currency of caring.