Advisory Board
We are grateful to our advisory representatives, who are already educating women (and the men who love us) about the economy’s many moving parts: finance, banking, data measures, economic and environmental justice, climate change, corporations and law, jobs, agriculture, housing, and healthcare—by organizing change with women-valuing knowledge and leadership at the grassroots and national level.
Crystal Arnold
Crystal Arnold
Crystal Arnold helps others define financial success in their own terms & cultivate true wealth. She is the founder of Money-Morphosis, the director of education at the Post Growth Institute, and is a money-wise woman and mother. Isn’t it odd that as important as money is in shaping our lives and the rules Western society, most people have a hard time talking about it? This has to do with our stories around money. In the interview link below, Crystal talks about how she defines wealth, the ways in which our monetary system affects our world, local economies, not–for–profits, the role of women in shifting our economic story and more. Her podcast, Money Wise Women, will connect you with a raft of smart women, talking about this tough subject. Crystal inspires us to look at economy in new and resilient ways. We hope you find this interview inspiring too.
Facebook > @moneymorphosis
Twitter > @crystal1320
Websites:
Ellen Brown
Ellen Brown
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.
She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.
Twitter > @ellenhbrown
Facebook > @EllenBrownAuthor
Websites:
Dr. Riane Eisler, JD, PhD (hon)
Dr. Riane Eisler, JD, PhD (hon)
Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, attorney, consultant, and speaker. Her work has transformed organizations, policies, and people worldwide, and her book Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (co-authored with anthropologist Douglas Fry, Oxford University Press 2019) shows how to construct a more equitable, sustainable, and less violent world based on partnership rather than domination.
Dr. Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS), dedicated to research and education, Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, an online peer-reviewed journal at the University of Minnesota that was inspired by her work, keynotes conferences nationally and internationally, addressed the United Nations General Assembly, the U.S. Department of State, and Congressional briefings, and speaks at corporations and universities worldwide on applications of the partnership model introduced in her work.
Eisler was a child refugee from Nazi Europe, and that experience eventually led to her multidisciplinary re-examination of human societies and human possibilities. She is internationally known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, now in 27 foreign editions and 57 U.S. printings, the first book reporting her findings. Her book on economics, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, was hailed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking.” Other books drawing from Eisler’s research include her award-winning Tomorrow’s Children, Sacred Pleasure, and Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life, statistically documenting the key role of women’s status in a nation’s quality of life. Her earlier Equal Rights Handbook was the only mass paperback on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.
She has taught at UCLA, CIIS, and the University of Alabama, and written over 500 articles in publications ranging from Behavioral Science, Futures, Political Psychology, The Christian Science Monitor, Challenge, and UNESCO Courier to Brain and Mind, Human Rights Quarterly, International Journal of Women's Studies, and World Encyclopedia of Peace, as well as chapters for books published by trade and university presses (e.g., Cambridge, Stanford, and Oxford University).
Through the Center for Partnership Studies’ Caring Economy Campaign she developed new metrics demonstrating the economic value of caring for people, starting in early childhood, and of caring for nature, and is now developing a Social Wealth Index, updating and consolidating these metrics to provide a concise guide to business and government in our post-industrial era. She pioneered the expansion of human rights to include the majority of humanity: women and children. Her research provides a new perspective on our past, present, and possibilities for the future, including a new social and political agenda for building a more humane and environmentally sustainable world.
Eisler is the only woman among 20 major thinkers including Hegel, Adam Smith, Marx, and Toynbee in Macrohistory and Macrohistorians in recognition of the lasting importance of her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist. She has received many honors, including honorary PhDs, the Nuclear Age Peace Leadership Award, the Feminist Pioneer award, and inclusion in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers as one of twenty leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King.
Facebook > @Riane-Eisler-Center-for-Partnership-Studies-106341879405238
Instagram > @rianeeislercenter4partnership/
Twitter > @RianeEisler
Websites:
Gwendolyn Hallsmith
Gwendolyn Hallsmith
Gwendolyn Hallsmith is the Executive Director of Global Community Initiatives, a non-profit organization she founded in 2002. She is the author of six books on sustainable community and economic development and has worked with communities all over the world to foster caring communities, local economies, good governance, efficient services, and healthy ecosystems. She founded Vermonters for a New Economy to work on economic solutions at the state level, and the Headwaters Garden and Learning Center, an ecovillage in Cabot, VT. She and her husband, Michael Taub, sing in a folk duo called The New Economistas. This summer, she organized a flotilla in New York City to welcome Greta Thunberg to the U.S. and used a Facebook group called #YouGoGreta to do it. Her books, The Key to Sustainable Cities, and Creating Wealth, are available for no cost in the #YouGoGreta Group Files.
Facebook > https://www.facebook.com/groups/YouGoGreta
Instagram > @gwendolynhallsmith/
Twitter > @ghallsmith
Websites:
Caroline Shenaz Hossein
Caroline Shenaz Hossein
Caroline Shenaz Hossein is Associate Professor of Global Development Studies and Political Science at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada. She holds a Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Africana Development & Feminist Political Economy and an Ontario Early Researcher Award. Author of the award-winning Politicized Microfinance: Money, Power and Violence in the Black Americas and editor of The Black Social Economy, Community Economies in the Global South and Beyond Racial Capitalism. She is the founding member of the international Diverse Solidarity Economies Collective (DISE), highlighting the need to amplify culturally diverse community economies to counter the systemic economic exclusion of marginalized populations. See more at Twitter @carolinehossein and www.africanaeconomics.com
Twitter > @carolinehossein
Websites
Fernanda Lugo
Fernanda Lugo
Fernanda Lugo is an environmental activist in her community in El Paso, Texas, and is the Outreach and Media associate for Alliance For Just Money, and a steward with the American Monetary Institute. If monetary matters are new to you, you can learn about it in plain language from her video presentation here.
Fernanda works at the national level raising awareness and building bridges between organizations that could benefit from knowing more about our deep-rooted systemic problems, including a currency created from debt. Fernanda always asks what’s one layer below a problem, or what is upstream. She volunteers with Citizens’ Climate Lobby, where she first realized how the economic system can be utilized to incentivize or disincentivize certain behaviors, such as polluting.
Fernanda has a Master’s in biobehavioral health from Penn State, and experience in health research in family health, health disparities as well as environmental health. She investigates and shares sustainable nature-based solutions and works to grow local social capital, by facilitating working groups to obtain grants that can help her community build and create, with a creativity endangered by the forces of capitalism.
She believes one of the missing links is simply the power to organize people with resources, empowering people to question the nature of what we call money. The power of money—but also barter and exchange— can help us meet the goals of a just society, with planetary wellbeing and optimized human health. She works towards a Just Transition, including land restoration and soil remediation, and believes fields sustaining our ecological health can have access to livable wages, healthcare, and dignified work.
Fernanda practices and offers eco-crafts, and eco-exhale yoga in her local community of El Paso and occasionally online (see offerings! https://lumiferz.wixsite.com/fernanda-lugo ). She is currently learning to facilitate collaborative murals and is creating a collective vision of a just and democratic economy singing tree. She is an avid learner of permaculture, foraging, herbalism, and languages.
Websites
Didi Pershouse
Didi Pershouse
Didi Pershouse is the founder of the Center for Sustainable Medicine as well as the Land and Leadership Initiative, an online school. She is the author of two books: The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities, and Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function.
Growing up in a family of high-tech medical pioneers, she saw the often destructive effects of radiation and other invasive treatments. This led Pershouse to pioneer a systems-based ecological medicine. Her sliding-scale practice included community acupuncture, nutrient-dense diets, and resiliency counseling. In The Ecology of Care, published in 2016, she connected the dots between soil health and public health, and the role of beneficial microorganisms in maintaining a healthy climate inside and outside our bodies.
Her work examines the relationships between soil health, shifting weather patterns, capitalism, and human health. In 2017 she published a teacher’s manual for Soil Health and Watersheds that has been used in over 40 countries, and was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day. Pershouse now travels widely, leading participatory workshops on the living soil sponge, which makes life on land possible.
Her teaching and facilitation engage farmers and ranchers, schools, policy makers, investors, and environmentalists in building working groups to reduce flooding and drought, improve local economies, and improve soil health, public health, and climate resiliency through changes in land management. She is the board chair/president of the Soil Carbon Coalition.
In the spring of 2018, she helped launch the "Can we Rehydrate California?" and "Soil Sponge" initiatives with a series of U.S. workshops. She also leads retreats to develop and support resilient environmental leadership based in principles borrowed from the Benedictines: beginning with stability and commitment, centered in deep listening, while remaining flexible in thought and action.
Twitter: @DidiPershouse
Instagram: @DidiPershouse
Websites
Jules Salinas
Jules Salinas
For over 35 years, Jules (Juliann) Salinas has been committed to social and environmental justice, particularly focused on the empowerment and leadership of women. She brings a deep understanding of the connection of agriculture to the intersections of climate change, public health, and women's equity. Excited to apply decades of nonprofit leadership and fund development experience to the important work of WFAN (Women's Food and Agriculture Network), Jules became WFAN's executive director in 2021.
She had previously served as the Associate Director and Interim Executive Director for Enlace Communitario, an Albuquerque organization with a mission to reduce domestic violence in the Latinx immigrant community. Earlier, Jules served as Assistant Director of GWTP (Greater West Town Community Development Project) in Chicago, Illinois, where she led the successful development of an onsite community garden providing service learning to local high school students. She also organized GWTP's first urban agriculture conference.
Jules holds a BA in political science and an MBA with specialization in environmental management. She is bilingual in English and Spanish and strongly believes we're at a critical tipping point, globally and locally—and that a collective, feminist approach to rebuilding society, predicated on an inclusive, re-imagined economy, is the only sustainable way forward.
On a personal note, Jules is working to expand her women's beekeeping education and hive-wellness group, which maintains over 15 hives in and around her home on unceded Pueblo Tewa and Keres land, known today as Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Websites
Peaco Todd
Peaco Todd
Peaco Todd’s teaching career spanned nearly thirty years, first as an assistant professor of management and humanities at Lesley University and then as a professor of liberal studies at Union Institute and University. An appreciation for the absurd inspired her involvement in the annual Ig Nobel Award Ceremony, and her love of words, images, and humor evolved into a career as a cartoonist, author, and prize-winning poet. Current projects include a graphic memoir about growing up with a severely depressed mother and a series of cartoon features about climate change.
She’s sailed from Spain to Dubai aboard the Rogue Wave, and most recently traveled to Africa to join those working to end poaching of endangered elephants, rhinos and other iconic animals. She created Earth Comix, a 501(c) educational organization; its comic books highlight efforts to end poaching of endangered elephants, rhinos, and iconic animals also threatened by climate change. She illustrated Rickey Gard Diamond’s award-winning book Screwnomics, rediscovering the role of economics in women’s lives.
Twitter > @PeacoTodd
Websites
Jhumpa Battacharya
Jhumpa Battacharya
Jhumpa is the Vice President of Programs and Strategy at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. In this role, Jhumpa is a key contributor to the thought leadership of the Insight Center, provides cross-program content support and strategic guidance, and oversees the racial and economic equity portfolio. She directly leads work identifying policy and narrative solutions to racial wealth inequities. Jhumpa is a national expert on racial wealth inequality and gender and also on the impact of mass incarceration and policing on wealth.
A former Director at California Tomorrow, Jhumpa has roots in youth organizing and youth development, and brings over 18 years of experience advocating for and creating policy and system changes towards racial and economic equity. She has provided her leadership, racial justice analysis and thinking on various national and local research and capacity building projects focused on creating systems that address and meet the needs of communities of color, low-income communities and immigrants.
Her expertise includes developing equity-based policies; practices tools and frameworks; conducting best practice research; technical assistance and capacity building; incorporating community and student voice into policy and programming; and facilitating complex dialogues on race, culture, and immigration.
Jhumpa has been published in The Nation, Ms. Magazine and Truthout. Her work has also been covered in major publications such as the New York Times, Mother Jones, Fast Company, CityLab, the San Jose Mercury News and other news outlets. Jhumpa is a board member of the Pacifica Family Fund, which works to provide quality prenatal and birth midwifery care to low-income families, families of color, teenagers, trans and non-gender conforming people.
Twitter > @jhumpa_b
Website: https://insightcced.org/
Rickey Gard Diamond
Rickey Gard Diamond
Now a Ms. Magazine columnist, Rickey began learning about economic systems as a single mom on welfare. She edited a newspaper on poverty issues while getting an education, and in 1985, became founding editor of Vermont Woman, where she continued as a contributing editor for 34 years. She taught writing and literature at Vermont College for over 20 years, publishing fiction and non-fiction. Her novel Second Sight, and her short story collection, Whole Worlds Could Pass Away, include class, gender, and money troubles.
To make economics a friendlier subject for women, she translated masculine obfuscation in a talk, “Economics is Greek to Me,” at the March 2008 Summit for Economic Justice sponsored by the National Organization for Women, The Institute for Women's Policy Research, and the Council of American Negro Women. After 2008’s crash, she designed seminars combining literature, language and economics; her research led to a series of articles that won a 2012 National Newspaper Award for in-depth investigative reporting, citing her “atypical sources”—mostly women, she noted.
Accepted for a writing residency at Hedgebrook, she worked on a new story-based feminist economic primer, including cartoons illustrated by Peaco Todd. She wondered why money, race, and sex seemed intertwined, with billionaires mostly white males, and the poorest most often women of color. The resulting book, Screwnomics: How the Economy Works Against Women and Real Ways to Make Lasting Change, was published by SheWritesPress in 2018, and won the Independent Book Publishers Award Silver Medal in 2019 for Women’s Issues. Screwnomics’ workbook, Where Can I Get Some Change? prompts women’s local conversations and is available as a free PDF at www.screwnomics.org. Her Ms. column, Women Unscrewing Screwnomics, focuses on women making change in a field exclusively male until fairly recently.. She welcomes your stories, questions, and insights for her column and her blog. Contact her at websites below.
Facebook > @rickeygarddiamond
Instagram > @rickeygarddiamond
Twitter > @RickeyGDiamond
Websites:
Marybeth Riley Gardam
Marybeth Riley Gardam
Marybeth grew up in New Jersey, attended Seton Hall University and the New School for Social Research, and started her career as an advertising executive, before directing development at a nonprofit hospital. In 1984, she moved to Macon, Georgia, with her husband and helped set up a Migrant Farmworker Coalition, serving as Director of the Central Georgia Peace Center, and leading efforts of Central Georgians for Central America.
In 2000 her family moved to Iowa. In 2001, post 9/11, she set up Women for Peace Iowa, later joining with Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom US Section, Des Moines branch. Attracted to WILPFus.org because of its long history of connecting economic justice and human rights to the pursuit of peace, she served on WILPF US Board of Directors for three years, where she continues to serve as WILPF’s Development Chair. Since 2008, she has also served as Chair of WILPF’s issue committee, Women, Money & Democracy, currently overseeing its creation of a Feminist Economic Toolkit and updating WILPF’s successful corporate personhood study course.
While on the steering committee of Move to Amend.org, Marybeth began a number of MTA Iowa affiliates, seeking to get money out of elections and reverse the 2010 Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United, which equates campaign money with political speech. MTA is a grassroots effort to reverse this decision with a US Constitutional Amendment.
In her free time, Marybeth enjoys reading Louise Penny novels and playing with her new grandson Oliver. She lives in Florida currently with her husband of 38 years.
Facebook > @wilpf
Instagram > @wilpf
Websites:
Jensyn Hallett
Jensyn Hallett
Jensyn currently leads strategic partnerships and business development efforts with Invest for Better, an organization helping women take ownership of their finances and shift them to align with their values, building wealth while making a positive impact on the economy.
As an advocate for impact investing and a fellow of the Just Economy Institute, Jensyn strives to create an ecosystem that supports the purpose-driven economy. She is the founder and CEO of Alivest, a company dedicated to helping others develop integrated and intentional strategies, designing people-centered solutions and capital strategies that engage the full spectrum of funding.
Jensyn returned to her home state of Arkansas a decade ago, motivated to promote positive change within the local community. Driven by her passion for gender equity, she founded Southern Capital Project, a nonprofit with a focus on ensuring women in the South have equitable wealth-building opportunities.
Her influence extends beyond organizational leadership as she serves as a governor-appointed member of the Arkansas Economic Development Minority and Women-owned Business Advisory Council, teaches the state's first impact investing course at the University of Arkansas, and recently began teaching a purpose economy course with the Clinton School of Public Service, inspiring the next generation of changemakers to harness the power of finance for good.
Websites:
http://www.investforbetter.org/
https://justeconomyinstitute.org/
http://www.alivest.co/
http://www.southerncapitalproject.org/
Katonya Hart
Katonya Hart
Ms. Katonya Hart came to Charleston, West Virginia, by way of the Charleston Job Corps Center. She is an advocate for furthering art and education. She forms partnerships that seek to support art, education, economic justice, individuals, community, and spiritual growth through positive empowerment. She believes there is power when two or three gather together in unity to create collaborative and cooperative works.
Katonya is a state leader of the NAACP and has been elected to the National Board of NOW (the National Organization for Women). She is a Regional Representative on the WV Women's Commission and was co-founder of Black Policy Day at WV's statehouse, also participating as an artist and conversationalist in Listening for Racial Understanding, an art and recording project traveling the state. Through these groups and others, she has coordinated and/or participated in events aimed at out-reach and education. Her advocacy addresses issues in the community at many levels. Her art takes the form of theater, wearable art, and the written word. She has acted in, written, supported, and organized numerous theater and poetry events in her community.
Facebook > https://www.facebook.com/KatonyaHart/
Twitter > @KatonyaHart
Georgia Kelly
Georgia Kelly
Georgia Kelly is the founder and director of Praxis Peace Institute, a non-profit peace education organization that is focused on transforming society through a systems approach to peace, social and economic justice, environmental sustainability, and civic participation. She has created several multi-day conferences in California and Europe that deal with the intersection of these topics.
She has developed educational seminar/tours in Italy, Croatia, Cuba, and at the Mondragón Cooperatives in Spain. From her experience at Mondragon, she has focused on cooperatives as an ethical and socially just economic model for the 21st century.
She is the editor and co-author of Uncivil Liberties: Deconstructing Libertarianism, a critique of libertarian ideas and laissez-faire capitalism, and author of The Mondragón Report, a profile of twenty-two participants from various Praxis-Mondragon seminars, which demonstrates how they have used their newly acquired knowledge in creating economic alternatives in the U.S. Available as a free PDF here: http://www.praxispeace.org/mondragon.php
Georgia has also been a life-long activist, beginning as a peace activist during the Vietnam War and later studying conflict resolution and negotiation, which she teaches today. It was organizing teach-ins during the Vietnam War that laid the groundwork for the educational programs she produces today for Praxis Peace Institute.
She has chaired and been active in many issue-based campaigns, including chairing the Marin County chapter of former Governor Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign in 1992 and serving as a delegate at the Democratic National Convention in New York that year. Addressing a wide swath of issues, she is also a founding member of Sonoma Calm, an organization that successfully banned gas-powered leaf blowers in Sonoma.
Since 1998, Georgia has spent many months in the Balkans and lived in Croatia during the onset of the Yugoslav civil war. This experience brought her back to peace work and, under the auspices of a Marin non-profit, she organized a peace-inquiry conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia in June 2000. Praxis Peace Institute, which was formed on the last day of that conference, was organized to continue the inquiry into the reasons for war and peace. She organized three additional conferences in Dubrovnik and maintains contacts in the Balkans.
Praxis Peace Institute’s conferences have examined the influences of culture, education, civic participation, economics, and the climate crisis. Currently, she on the Advisory Board of Atelier for Community Transformation (ACT), based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The next Praxis conference, “Economics, Justice and the Climate Crisis,” will take place in Sonoma, CA, Nov. 30-Dec. 3, 2020.
Georgia is also a professional harpist, composer, and recording artist. Her record label and distribution company eventually signed on with CBS and Sony, and her albums charted in the top ten of Billboard’s classical cross-over and new age charts. They are still available on iTunes, Spotify and other online outlets, as well as her music website.
Facebook > @Praxis-Peace-Institute-132651813456041
Instagram > @praxispeaceinstitute
Websites:
Jamila Medley
Jamila Medley
Jamila is a passionate and knowledgeable advocate for growing the cooperative economy. In her work with existing and startup co-ops, she and her staff provide support for leadership development, cooperative economics education, navigating group dynamics, and creating systems that can adapt to support group process and learning. She holds an MS degree in Organizational Dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania. She previously worked at the American Association for Cancer Research where she supported professional development and inclusion for people of color and women with careers in cancer research. She was introduced to the co-op business model when she joined the staff of the Mariposa Food Co-op. She now serves on the board of directors for Media Mobilizing Project and works as a consultant with Columinate Co-op. A native of Brooklyn, NY, she lives in Philadelphia’s Mount Airy neighborhood, and enjoys making her home a sanctuary. She says joy is an act of resistance.
Facebook > Jamila Medley
Twitter > @jmedley16
Websites
Carmen Rios
Carmen Rios
Carmen Rios is a pioneering digital activist, currently consulting digital editor at Ms. Magazine and the host of Bitch Media’s Popaganda podcast. She was a cofounder and contributing editor at Webby Award-nominated Argot Magazine. Most recently she spent three years as Managing Digital Editor at Ms. Magazine, was previously the Feminism Editor, Social Media Co-Director, and Community Director at Autostraddle for six years; a founding blogger and activist with the SPARK Movement; a longtime contributor at Everyday Feminism and Mic. Her writing can be found at BuzzFeed, The Atlantic’s CityLab, ElixHER, GirlBoss, the Women’s Media Center and Feministing. She lives in Los Angeles and is building a better feminist internet.
Facebook > Carmen Rios
Twitter > @carmenriosss
Website
Shanda Williams
Shanda Williams
Shanda Williams (she /her) has been a professional in the insurance and banking industry for almost 20 years. A native of Hartford, Connecticut, Shanda first came to Vermont in 2017. Her interpersonal experience with people from all over the world has given her expertise in interacting and connecting with people of various diverse cultures and socio-economic backgrounds. She is currently a committed changemaker, reparations activist, equity strategist, and BIPOC community advocate. She facilitates BIPOC groups for My Grandmother's Hands: Unraveling Racialized Trauma and is creator of the Money Matters: Financial Liberation and Wellness series, for which she was recently awarded 2023's "Innovator of the Year" by Central Vermont Economic Development Corporation. Her intent is to increase equity opportunities for BIPOC homeownership while helping others to heal financial trauma. She took part in AEOO's October 2023 Zoom of Our Own event, Overcoming Financial Trauma: What's Systemic? What's Personal? What Helps? Shanda is also a practicing Small Business Consultant and was an organizer of Vermont's two Money Matters conferences in 2022/2023. Her primary goal is to bring people together through the power of love, song, word, and healing. She hopes and aims to build bridges while embracing change through the power of healing racialized trauma, one person at a time.