The NoVo Foundation, Peter Buffett, and the city that wants to fix capitalism.

Every October, Kingston, N.Y., a city of 23,000 people in the Hudson Valley, attracts throngs of visitors to the O + Festival, a weekend celebration of art, music and wellness.

The O + Festival — it’s pronounced O Positive — is no ordinary civic gathering. It is, improbably, an alternative to America’s profit-driven health care system: The artists and musicians who participate can barter their work for medical or dental care. Help paint a mural, get a cavity filled.

In a story about Kingston headlined The US city preparing itself for the collapse of capitalism, The Guardian last fall called O + Festival an “anti-capitalist, anti-establishment healthcare network” and an “example of a model that could supplant corporate America.” The story explains:

Locals have launched a non-commercial radio station, Radio Kingston WKNY, with widely representative, hyper-local programming that broadcasts via power generators if the grid goes dark. A regional micro-currency called the Hudson Valley Current now exists to, according to co-founder David McCarthy, “create an ecosystem that includes everyone.”

Agricultural initiatives like Farm Hub work toward equitable, resilient food systems. A network of bike trails quietly connects local towns to local farms (for the day when there is no more gas for our cars). And organizations like RiseUp Kingston…facilitate civic engagement, combat displacement, and advocate for policies to address an increasingly dire housing shortage.

What the story neglects to say is that all these organizations — the O + festival, the radio station, the farm hub, the local currency project and Rise Up — share a powerful patron: The NoVo Foundation, led by Peter Buffet, the youngest son of legendary investor Warren Buffett, and Peter’s wife Jennifer. In 2010, Peter and Jennifer Buffett bought a 19th century farmhouse for $1.2 million in Kingston, a historic city perched on the west bank of the Hudson River, about 100 miles north of Manhattan.

“What started as a weekend getaway,” Buffett says, “became a core piece of what we’re doing at the foundation.”

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