Root & Web Community Financial

Our Vision

Our Services

At Root & Web Community Financial, we dream of a regenerative financial system. We dream of a system in which the needs and wellbeing of our communities and our planet are prioritized over quick profits and mass wealth accumulation. In which all individuals have access to the housing, food, water, income, healthcare, education, and resources they need to thrive without fear and scarcity. We imagine a world which wealth is spread throughout our communities, rather than concentrated at the top. In which money can be used as a tool for healing our people and our land. We dream of the end of colonial frameworks and the rise of justice, wellbeing, and healing for humans and the broader natural world.

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Our Services

Our work focuses on helping individuals, families, friendship groups, polycules, and other communities with compassionately exploring and better understanding their financial experiences, habits, beliefs, traumas, and emotions. Through this exploration, we work to build values-aligned financial habits, obtain resources and information, and connect with support partners in order to dream and build towards stable and thriving futures. We combine traditional financial planning tools and research-backed practices with liberatory frameworks in order to work towards collective financial wellbeing. We additionally offer small business development as well as both individual and as small business tax return preparation.

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Meet the Owner

Margaret Nickens (they/he) is the founder of Root & Web Community Financial. As a queer, nonbinary, and polyamorous person, they set out to offer financial services aligned with clients’ values and lived realities. Their path began through personal financial struggle after a divorce, when mounting debt and a lack of tools left them feeling overwhelmed and out of control.

Becoming a Certified Financial Planner® helped Margaret build stability and important knowledge, but they found traditional approaches incomplete without addressing the emotions, shame, and trauma behind financial behavior. Through the Trauma of MoneyTM certification program, they integrated trauma-informed, emotion-centered methods into their work with the hope of creating meaningful change for themselves and their clients.

Margaret now reimagines financial planning as a communal practice—moving beyond individual and nuclear-family models toward shared support systems inspired by liberation frameworks. With Root & Web, they bring together trauma-informed care, values-aligned planning, and collective approaches to help communities build lasting financial security and abundance.

Services and Offerings

Services

More information coming soon!

Upcoming Classes

From Personal to Communal Finance (coming Summer 2026)

Many of us have heard or used the term “personal finance.” The term conveys a tenant of our capitalistic system – we “should” evaluate our own finances in a hyper-individualized vacuum. In other words, we are taught, heavily incentivized, and at times, forced to make financial decisions alone or within a traditional nuclear family structure. However, what if your income simply cannot cover all of your own expenses? What if you feel like you will never be able to build savings on your own? What if you do not currently, or do not plan to, live within a traditional nuclear family structure? On the other side of the coin, what if you have more money than you need, money you want to use to support your community but do not know how to do so? Money could flow like healing, needed water through our financial system, but instead, money gets blocked by racist, colonialist systems that leave so many people thirsty and leave others with wells that are overflowing. “Personal finance” cannot fix this issue. Instead, we need to dream collectively about our financial needs, desires, and futures, so we can build communal economies. In this class, we will cover the basics of communal financial planning, including collective budgeting and saving, debt management and elimination, investing, and more. We will combine traditional financial planning tools with concepts born from the disability justice movement, anti-capitalist financial planning communities, trauma-informed care models, and decolonial frameworks. This class is for the dreamers, pollinators, activists, and all others who want to build towards collective healing and liberatory futures.

Introduction to Values-Aligned Investing ( Coming Summer 2026)

We live in a contradiction: the same financial system that funds fossil fuels, mass incarceration, and predatory lending is also where our retirement savings live. This class offers a harm-reduction framework for navigating that tension — starting from the honest premise that there is no perfectly ethical portfolio, but that more intentional choices are absolutely possible. Just as harm reduction in public health asks "how do we minimize damage in an imperfect world?" rather than demanding purity, values-aligned investing invites us to do better without waiting for perfect. And here's the truth: community-minded people need money too. Financial stability isn't a sellout — it's what allows us to show up, give generously, and sustain the work we care about. Together we'll explore the core tenets of values-aligned investing, socially responsible investing, impact investing, and divest/invest strategies, while also getting practical: how to build a values-aligned portfolio within your workplace retirement plan, and how to go further on your own. No prior investing experience required — just a willingness to sit with complexity and make more intentional choices with what you have.

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