News and Announcements

State of the Alliance - September 17, 2026

(09/19/2026)

This is the second in a series of weekly informal updates from the PLA President. Ideally, I'd like these to go out every Tuesday; unfortunately the beginning of the week was stacked this week, so I apologize for the delay.

The PLA Board's primary focuses in the last week have been our listening session, financials, and committee management.

Our listening session this Tuesday went well, allowing community members to speak directly to the Board uninterrupted for nearly two hours; our DEI consultant Erin Waters did an excellent job opening a brave space and facilitating conversation. We received a lot of feedback, much of it on issues of racism and accessibility, in both the listening session and our open feedback survey, and the Board and Ms. Waters will be working to highlight the common threads and address them in our work and to the public in the coming weeks and months. The feedback survey remains open, and we're checking it regularly for new submissions:

https://www.portlandleather.org/survey.php?menu=showsurvey&surveyid=4

Also in the last few weeks, the Executive Committee (myself, our Treasurer Ace, and our Secretary Bec) have been getting more access to our financial systems in the transition away from former Board members. This has allowed us to look into budgeting as we try to make sense of the PLA's financial position after months of disruption, as well as addressing many community concerns around the PLA's financials.

Among these, we've been able to confirm that the PLA is up-to-date on all its tax filings, and helped address some errors in the IRS's website's own displays of the filings; we're still working on using the Propublica filings to update our own members-only website's list of tax documents, but all the relevant information is publicly available through Propublica (sourced from the IRS's raw database).

We've also been able to use the financial systems to begin a deeper dive on other issues raised with the PLA's financials. This has included our investigation into conflicts of interest from Board members teaching paid classes for the PLA, as well as getting up to speed on several years of information about the embezzlement discovered in 2023. A more formal statement on the former issue will come in the near future, along with some proposed policy changes; the latter situation seems to be well summed-up by the former Board's statement put out last month: https://fetlife.com/The-PLA/posts/14291393

Finally, a lot of the work of the last week has been gathering together the committees of the PLA, figuring out meeting schedules and committee memberships, and aiming to salvage or rebuild processes for things that weren't well-documented by prior chairs. Not a lot to show from this work yet, but we hope to have CEC programming continuing soon, as well as the PLA Space up and running.

Finally, the Board met Wednesday night with the person directly harmed in the racist incident at LLC. The meeting was productive, and the repair work continues.

Yours in Leather,
Andy, PLA President

State of the Alliance - September 8, 2026

(09/19/2026)

We've heard a lot of feedback looking for transparency and open communication from the PLA Board, and in the last three weeks we've done our best to increase the amount of emails and other official communications going out. However, the tone of these official statements and the motions of Board meetings are often pretty formal, so I had the idea of a more informal weekly update from the President about the work we're doing as a Board. This post represents my own personal views, and shouldn't be taken as representing the entire Board's perspective or guarantees for the future.

To start, at last week's September Board meeting, we elected three additional Board members and accepted Forrest's resignation. MxDaisyChains was elected to the Vice President seat, Ace to the Treasurer seat (Bec did not contest and took a Member-at-Large seat instead), and Lisa to a Member-at-Large seat. We didn't elect a Secretary in that meeting, but Bec has been elected to that seat since the meeting. So, for the first time since July, all our officer seats are filled through the November elections.

With this change, a lot of the last week has been dedicated to onboarding new Board members and finishing the offboarding of the prior Board. This has included position-specific onboarding for those in officer seats, as well as appointing committee Chairs for the various standing committees of the PLA. The following is the list of committee Chairs as of today:

Membership: vacant
Board Development: Carslyle
Policies & Procedures: @vvbudh
PR & Outreach: Lisa
PLA Space: Bec
Digital Operations: Bec
Special Events: Lisa
Community Education: Andy
Kinkfest (Core Team): Carslyle

Note that the Policies & Procedures Committee is being chaired by a non-Board member, @vvbudh, who was already on the committee and volunteered to take on the Chair role. In the name of opening up more leadership positions beyond the Board, tapping enfranchised non-Board committee members to be Chairs is something we're looking at for other committees as well. The vacant Membership Committee Chair position will be filled by a Board member before the October Board meeting, as that seat comes with certain responsibilities around our upcoming membership election in November.

We've been working through these committees to resume some of the PLA's normal operations, largely on hold amidst all the turnover in the Board. Bec has been working with the Digital Operations Committee to review how we store information and manage certain digital processes, and where these can be made more secure, robust, or streamlined. I've been working with the Community Education Committee and MxDaisyChains to identify some classes on race and racial justice in kink and sex-positive spaces for the PLA to host in the coming months, which Board members will attend alongside the community. Tonight, the Policies & Procedures committee met to discuss additional work on our accountability policies and ways to create a third-party review process for the Board.

The largest endeavors, in scope and budget, are Kinkfest and the PLA Space. Carslyle has been building the KF27 Core Team, and I've been reviewing our budgets for KF expenditures. On the PLA Space side, we had a small work party this weekend focused on minor tasks to repair some seating, move mats from Dungeon Equipment storage, and install more-accessible handles on our restroom doors. We also met with a general contractor about our city permits for the renovations to the space, and I made a request to the city for a reserved ADA parking spot on the street. This would be in addition to the ones we have in our private parking lot, and would best serve the PLA space's second entrance to the street. I'm working on a post about the current accessibility of the space for mobility devices, and our plans to improve it, which I hope to publish on the @PLAspace account this week. We have plans for similar reviews of the space for Deaf/HoH and Blind/low-vision accessibility.

Relatedly, we are looking for licensed tradespeople for some small jobs and pulling related permits for the PLA Space. Our most immediate need is for a licensed electrician, as some of our ADA upgrades can't be done without electrical work in the building. However, we'd also like to have a licensed plumber in our rolodex as we continue to improve the space for everyone. If either of those is you, please send an email to plaspace@portlandleather.org and we'll be in touch.

And that's all I have for this week! If you have any comments or concerns for me, I'm always available over email at president@portlandleather.org, or you can email the Board as a whole at board@portlandleather.org. We also have a feedback survey tied to next week's listening session, open at https://www.portlandleather.org/survey.php?menu=showsurvey&surveyid=4

Yours in Leather,
Andy, PLA President