Margrit Kennedy

Margrit Kennedy (November 21, 1939 – December 28, 2013) was an internationally renowned architect, urban planner, and an advocate for making buildings more environmentally friendly. From when she realised the flaws of the current money system, she thoroughly investigated its mechanisms and became an influential figure in the area of community currencies and alternative money systems.

It was in 1982, that a talk by a fellow architect, Helmut Creutz, who had already deeply looked into the monetary system, opened her eyes for this system being incompatible with an ecologically sound future.

She later described the experience like this:

"I suddenly understood why the economy and ecology can never be united in this monetary system. [...] Had I found the missing link? Could compound interest be the unseen destructive mechanism in the world's gearbox? Could one small flaw in the design of our monetary system be responsible for everything from corporate bankruptcies to unemployment, environmental destruction and war? Was there really an irreconcilable contradiction between ecology and economics as a result of the exponential growth of money? In any case, I suddenly realized what people meant when they always said at the end of my ecology lectures that: 'It doesn't pay off'. Plain and simple, it meant that the profits of such projects would not be able to compete with the current interest rates. Neither the interest demanded by the bank nor that which one would accrue if one were to put the money — instead of investing it in ecological projects — into a savings account." (Source: Peter Krause – Margrit Kennedy, 2020)

From that time on, she became a researcher into money systems that serve both humans and the biosphere, and became a fervent advocate for them. She gave numerous talks, interviews in magazines, and wrote a number of books.

She was, together with Bernard Lietaer, involved in the creation of the Chiemgauer Regiogeld, and she founded the Network for Monetary Diversity (Monneta).