Just Money: An Introduction to Monetary Critique and Reform
Date: October 22, 2025
Time: 12-1:30pm ET
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Location: Virtual
Cost: Free For All, Registration Required
Program Description:
What will it take to achieve a Conscious Revolution toward a just and sustainable society? An oft taken-for-granted part of our market economy is money itself. But what is money? Where does it come from? Who creates it and how? How does our current money system direct the allocation of resources? How does it affect our relationships with each other, locally and globally, and with the rest of nature? Does it support or undermine democratic practices?
Is our money system the only one possible? What are its strengths and weaknesses, its pros and cons, and what is its historical track record? What kinds of alternatives are there? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
These are questions that will be raised and explored together in this introductory session on Just Money with members of the Alliance For Just Money. Come share, listen, learn, and discuss with John, Lucille, and the Conscious Leadership Community why, how, and whether to change our money to change our world.
Facilitator
John N. Howell (He/Him)
John N. Howell is an Associate Professor Emeritus of Physiology at Ohio University with a B.A. from Kalamazoo College and a Ph.D. from UCLA. His research focused on vertebrate skeletal muscle, its cellular mechanisms of contraction and its control by the nervous system. He currently serves on the Boards of the Athens County League of Women Voters, the Alliance For Just Money, the Ohio University Emeriti Association, and is a General Committee member of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, representing the Lake Erie Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. He serves on the Legislative Action Committee of the Alliance and presented a summary of the proposed American Monetary Reform Act at the June 2022 Annual Meeting of the Alliance. He is the recipient of many teaching awards and has over the last decade presented talks on the monetary system and its need for reform to community groups, university student groups, religious groups, the League of Women Voters, and the American Monetary Institute. He lives with his wife in Athens, OH, where he enjoys tending scores of oak and other trees he has planted.
Lucille Eckrich (she/her)
Lucille Eckrich (Ph.D., SUNY Buffalo) has been active in the American Monetary Institute since 2005. She is an Associate Professor Emeritus at Illinois State University, where she taught in the College of Education 2001-2020. Her undergraduate degree was in African studies and economics from the College of Wooster in 1979, after which she worked in Botswana for three years and then did anti-apartheid and urban education work in Chicago until she started graduate school in 1990. She came to a critique of modern money through her 1998 dissertation on Value in Economics, Ethics, and Education. Her first publication on the topic was in 2004 entitled “The Inefficiency of the “Cult of Efficiency”: Implications for Public Schooling and Education.” In 2013 she co-authored “Ivory Tower Graduates in the Red: The Role of Debt in Higher Education,” and in 2017 she authored two chapters in a book she co-edited called The Neoliberal Agenda and the Student Debt Crisis in U.S. Higher Education. Those chapters and her 2013 article situate the student debt problem in the context of monetary critique and reform. Lucille is a founding member of AFJM, served on the Organizing Committee that led to its founding in July 2018, and has served as an officer and on numerous committees ever since. She lives in central Illinois, is married to a German cabinetmaker, and has three adult children, two grandchildren, and five siblings.