How Crowdfunding and the Share Economy Are Growing Sustainable Food Systems

From: Occupy

Fri, 8/29/2014 - by Bronwen Morgan

This article originally appeared on Shareable

At the end of the first week of August 2014, two different crowdfunding pitches closed almost simultaneously. FarmDrop, based in the UK, had raised three quarters of a million pounds, which was not far from double their original goal, from 359 investors. Open Food Network, based in Australia, had raised Aus$35,877 from 398 investors. Peering through the windows opened up by these two initiatives gives a clear view of rather different trajectories of the burgeoning "sharing economy."

Crowdfunding’s heady mix of creative expression, cultivating an audience of potential investors, media-savvy PR pitch, and technical provision of ‘due diligence’ information about business plans and risk seems appropriate to the somewhat contradictory ethos surrounding the spread and growth of the sharing economy. As William Deresiewicz argued in the New York Times in 2011 in "Generation Sell":

"Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business.... The small business is the idealized social form of our time. Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan."  MORE

Fri, 8/29/2014 - by Bronwen Morgan

This article originally appeared on Shareable

- See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/how-crowdfunding-and-share-economy-are-growing-sustainable-food-systems#sthash.YKovNSMM.dpuf