About Carol
CAROL PEPPE HEWITT is an author, business owner, rabble-rouser, and pioneer in the Slow Money movement.
Since co-founding Slow Money NC in 2010, she has catalyzed over 85 low-interest loans totaling just over one million dollars to 41 small farmers and local food businesses in North Carolina – building resilience in the local economy from the coast to the mountains. And those numbers are climbing every week.
Carol’s book, Financing Our Foodshed: Growing Local Food With Slow Money, published by New Society Publishers in April 2013, tells the compelling, real life stories of twenty-two of those Slow Money entrepreneurs – folks who grow, process, distribute, and sell us local food – and the motivations behind the people in their communities who become their lenders.
A successful business owner herself, Carol understands the challenge of raising capital to start-up, run or expand a small business. Growing up in rural NW Connecticut, she watched as one by one the working farms disappeared. Now she works to change that trend, guiding patient capital to small-scale farmers and the businesses that support them in North Carolina, where she and her husband, Mark, have lived for the past 30 years.
Carol also helps run the Shakori Hills GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance in Silk Hope, NC that brings over 8000 people together twice a year for four days to enjoy a wide diversity of music, dance, food and fun. The festival has a deep commitment to sustainability, and Carol runs the popular “Coffee Barn.” At the last festival, she and fellow author and co-founder of Slow Money NC , Lyle Estill, created an “Authors’ Corner” at the Sustainability Gazebo, for book readings and book sales.
Check out Carol’s calendar for appearances at festivals, fairs, conferences, and bookstores – and come hear about these inspiring Slow Money stories!
You can also order a copy of Financing Our Foodshed here.
Enjoy a minute of fun by Lyle Estill – videographer extraordinairea – about the day in March, 2013 when Carol’s books arrived in his warehouse.
"Each of the small food businesses that Slow Money investors in North Carolina are supporting is a perfectly imperfect meeting place of what E.F. Schumacher called “meta-economic,” what Wendell Berry calls “economics for a renewed commonwealth” and “imagination in place,” and what Carol Peppe Hewitt calls “a helluva way to run a produce section.” Can we find the gumption to carve out a few dollars and some time to support this new economic imagination, this grassroots economic activism? Will it make a difference? Carol’s experience in North Carolina suggests, laughs, imagines, dares, demonstrates and encourages us that we can and it will." WOODY TASCH, founder, Slow Money
