Knowledge and empowerment

I reject the enclosure of professional knowledge. I hate it when skilled professionals like accountants use their knowledge as a lever or a weapon to benefit themselves at the expense of their clients: shaming them, gaslighting them and disempowering them. Knowledge should be free. The application of knowledge to specific circumstances is a skill which can justifiably be charged for – not the knowledge itself.

I promote empowerment through sharing skills, coaching, participating in community practices and projects, sharing perspectives around money, and working with others to develop more empowering perspectives and skills.

Another site of empowerment is helping you weave together your values with the current social realities of capitalism, dispossession trauma and oligarchy/kleptocracy.

My vision

I want to live in a community where people feel confident in all aspects of money – skilled, competent, and able to maximally utilise money resources. I seek to use my power to empower my community.

I see Bloodwood Accounting as a vehicle for community development towards this vision of empowerment.

Privilege and power

I aim to harness my privilege for wide benefit. I’m immensely privileged, right near the top of the privilege pyramid. I feel strongly that everyone should be treated as well as me: respected, listened to, and automatically read as a legitimate and fully authorised social agent. My intention is to use the power in my privilege to ensure that I benefit no more than and no less than those around me who are impacted by my power – what I call the parity principle of power.

Respect, consent and privacy

Respect and consent at all times, including self-consent, is one of my core orientations. I apply this to you, trying to be as explicit as I can about getting consent from you about all things, including supporting you to stay in self-consent. I also apply this to me: remaining alert to how clear do I feel in my connection with you, and also am I feeling choiceful about the work I do.

Part of respect and consent is privacy. I do as much as I can to ensure everything you share with me stays private. This is about privacy at the technical level online – using high quality secure software and solid procedures. It’s also about privacy when talking with other people in our community, or even when I see you out and about I won’t bring forward our professional connection unless you do. Some people call this “double confidentiality”, and it’s really important when we’re in community together.

Respect, consent, and privacy are all about co-creating and holding with you a clear and resilient container in which we can do our work together.

Tax and society

My view is that in essence tax is an impersonal and therefore fairly “neutral” way for people to contribute to common resources. By “neutral” I mean it takes no notice of socially significant characteristics like race, gender, age, gender, sexuality, or even whether people are working illegally or not. If you get income you pay tax on it.

Ideally, too, the tax system will be structured so that people contribute in proportion to what they have.

In practice, though, it is of course highly political and, especially under hard right governments, deeply unfair and inequitable.  In addition of course, what it is spent on is in some areas shockingly repulsive and deeply offensive.

But this is the system we have. My professional relationship with it is to work with you to help you navigate the current reality while always affirming the values of ‘beauty, kindness and justice’.

I support the principles of the Fair Tax Mark – a now-global initiative started by a bunch of co-ops in the UK, which is about both paying one’s full share of tax and being transparent about it. I haven’t actually signed up to it yet but it’s on my list.