Accountability Caucus

   The Accountability Caucus is a group of mental health client activists who are working to upgrade the California clients movement by constructing a new tradition based on accountability. We stand for these objectives/principles as our initial talking points:

1. Constructive activity, not attack politics, based on the recognition that ours arises as a wounded community;
2. Development of an alternative program for client activism that stresses personal responsibility and competence in meeting the challenges of empowerment;
3. Specifically, this alternative is a micro-empowerment program, which strengthens client involvement through:
   1. recognizing triggering behavior and upholding suitable ethical standards for such;
   2. fighting discrimination by insisting that people treat us like reasonable beings;
   3. defending the meaningful role of personal sensitivity and empathy; and
   4. opposing an excessively or solely biological approach in favor of a humanistic, spiritual, client-driven model; and
4. Advocacy against the values of tokenism and in favor of the empowerment values which help us hold to account the oppression of the client culture.

   We believe that clients are persons of quality whose mental health issues and experiences express both talent and personal challenge. We deserve respect based on our capacities, our resilience, our abilities, and our contributions.
   We urge clients who share these principles to join with us and to help re-center client activism in California around the new tradition of accountability. We will organize as a fellowship of involved, reflective, watchful persons seeking serious dialogue with other parts of the clients movement.

Agnes Arvai (Sonoma)	Jim Bosworth (Stanislaus)
Corinne Camp (Sonoma)	Sharon Clausen (Santa Barbara)
Debi Davis (Riverside)	Stephan DuBose (Santa Cruz)
Terry Fleming (Santa Clara)	Selina Glater (Santa Barbara)
Tom Harkins (Humboldt)	Tom Jurgensen (Santa Clara)
Maria Maceira (Stanislaus)	Annette Maguire (Santa Clara)
Alison Mills (San Mateo)	B.J. Morganti (Stanislaus)
Andrew Phelps (Berkeley)	Syl Plowright (Sonoma)
Jose Rangel (Santa Clara)	Dick Ratledge (Butte)
Bonnie Schell (Santa Cruz)	Phil Winn (Santa Clara)