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Local investing will change the face of small towns

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Small town businesses are starved for capital, but small town people continue to bank and invest their money with corporate behemoths based on Wall Street. What if we could change investing from a gamble in the stock market into a local development tool? Local investing is the answer.

Local investing
Local Dollars, Local Sense and Locavesting
complement each other as guidebooks
for a new type of local investing. 

If small towns could redirect even a tiny percentage of funds invested outside their town, they could change the face of their town. And many towns already have.

Michael Shuman has written your guide, Local Dollars, Local Sense.

Shuman has a long history of activism for local business. His book is an activist’s guide to remaking your town.

Several months ago, I interviewed Amy Cortese, the author of Locavesting. She is a journalist and writer. Her book is more of the consumer version than the activist.

Both books are useful. In fact, Cortese and Shuman shared early manuscripts with each other to reduce overlapping examples and to make the books complement each other. And I predict you’re going to be hearing a lot more about local investing from both authors over the coming years. Watch for them at conferences and events.

Local Dollars, Local Sense and Locavesting are both required reading for everyone in small town or rural economic development today. Local investing is that important. 

Small business owners looking for alternative financing will find descriptions of many different tools that can work: community ownership, cooperatives, royalty financing, CDFIs, and more.

Economic developers will find many entrancing ideas in this book, backed up with examples and studies.

You can purchase these books through your local book store or Amazon:

Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity–A Community Resilience Guide

Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How To Profit From It

Disclosure: these Amazon affiliate link benefits our contributor Jon Swanson’s not-for-profit projects.

Is your town doing something cool with local investing? We’d love to hear about it.


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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.

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