Folks that already know Revalue, know that one of the things we stand for is community investing. The drivers behind the growing interest in community investing are several:
1) A growing interest in having a direct impact in the local economy,
2) A desire for more transparency and connectedness in investing – knowing where one’s money is and what it’s doing,
3) Investing that is more aligned with one’s values and interests, and
4) A partial diversification from the global economic system that at best appears to be opaque and synthetic, and at worst rigged and manipulated.
Those are all valid reasons and many of our own clients reflect them.
There’s another reason that we are interested in community investing, and that is its effectiveness. When done right with a spirit of collaboration, community investing can go beyond providing financial returns. It can actually promote connectedness, improve the quality of due diligence, and help investors better understand investment risk and in some cases also help reduce it.
In fact, crowdsourced due diligence is one of the most exciting things that we think is happening on the investment landscape, and we have seen it at all of our local investing training simulations. These are training sessions held by Revalue to give community investors a sense of what it is like to invest in a local business. There is a mock pitch of a fictitious company based on one in real life that participants review. The company is by no means perfect and the intent is to be as realistic as possible.
What’s interesting is that when participants form teams and collaborate, they collectively ask questions of our mock company that are truly sophisticated, and can rival the grilling done by professional investors. In our sessions we have seen participants with a background in accounting ask finance related questions. This is followed by people who understand distribution and logistics who focus on operations!
It’s all about community intelligence. What we know and bring to table individually in terms of knowledge, experience, and insight is far less than what an entire community of like-minded people can bring in aggregate. What’s important is a common set of values, an intent to collaborate, and a desire to create value. In short, working like a community.
Our site will be enhanced to keep that in mind. While we will be offering content, education, and advice to customers, we are unique in that we will also actively encourage our customers to collaborate with other customers and community members (non-customers) in a public setting, to further enhance empowerment and awareness.
To that end this is one of our wildly important goals: Creating an insanely large community of like-minded people. We hope you join us!
