Amy Cortese

Amy Cortese

AMY CORTESE is an award-winning journalist and editor who covers topics spanning business, finance, food, wine and environmental issues. Her work has appeared in the the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, New York, Business Week, the Daily News, Portfolio, Mother Jones, Afar, The American, the Daily Beast, Talk, Business 2.0 and Wired, among other publications. Her book, Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit From it (John Wiley & Sons, June 2011), draws upon her experience covering these diverse realms to explore how a small shift in investment away from multinationals towards locally-owned enterprises can reap enormous economic and social benefits for individuals, their communities and the country.

Amy also selectively consults and crafts white papers, annual reports and strategic literature for corporations and other organizations, including several top Fortune 100 firms. She has been a contributing author at New Paradigm, a Toronto-based think tank that researches technology, innovation and society, and works with Corporate Agenda, a strategic communications and design agency in New York. Amy has contributed to The Business of Wine (Greenwood Press, 2009), and edited The Spiritual Guide to New York (Spirit Guides, 2003).

Tired of the Wall Street casino? Frustrated with government policies that favor giant corporations that outsource jobs and run roughshod over workers and communities? Looking for alternatives that put your money to productive, socially beneficial and profitable use? Then this book is for you.

Locavesting takes you behind the scenes of the local investing movement, where, in dozens of towns and cities across the country, a vast experiment in citizen finance is taking place. From Brooklyn, New York to Port Townsend, Washington, residents are banding together to save their small businesses and Main Streets from extinction. Just as locavores eat a diet in a 100-mile or so radius, these pioneers - call them locavestors - are beginning to invest that way. Locavesting explores the models they are creating to help finance small, locally-owned businesses - the engines of job growth and innovation that underpin the economy and contribute to healthy, vibrant communities. In Locavesting, you’ll meet these pioneers and explore the often ingenious ways--some new, some as old as capitalism itself--they’ve come up with to take back their financial destinies and revitalize the places they call home. From community capital to crowdfunding to local stock exchanges, Locavesting provides a road map for rebuilding our nest eggs, our communities and, just perhaps, the country.

Praise for Locavesting:

“An inspiring look at what local businesses can achieve.”

--JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, economist and 2001 Nobel Laureate

“Buy this book before the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) bans it! Locavesting demolishes the myth that the best investment options lie in the financial-doomsday machine we call Wall Street. Fasten your seatbelts for a mind-blowing journey where you will learn about dozens of highly profitable community investment opportunities. Amy Cortese takes you on a breathtaking ride.”

-- MICHAEL H. SHUMAN, author of the Small-Mart Revolution and Going Local

“Investing locally makes sense as long as you do it with your eyes wide open. And this book is a realistic, up-to-the-minute exploration of the field. After all, it was the local community that invested in Ben & Jerry’s--and it worked out pretty well for them.”

-- BEN COHEN, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s

“Simple, brillant and well informed. Good for what ails us as a county and a society.”

—TED LEONSIS, former president and vice chairman of America Online

“If Michael Pollan changed the way you think about food, let Amy Cortese change the way you think about finance.”

—JAY LEE, founder, Villager Finance