News and Announcements
State of the Alliance - September 24, 2026
(09/24/2026)
This is the third in a series of weekly informal updates from the PLA President. Originally, I planned these to go out every Tuesday, aligned with Board meetings; perhaps I'll embrace the timing that's worked the last few weeks and commit to publishing them on Thursdays instead.
Following from the financial findings from last week, much of my work this week has been focused on budgeting. The PLA doesn't have a Board-approved budget for the current fiscal year (July 2026 - June 2027), which has made it difficult to identify financial risks or plan appropriately for new expenses. My goal is to present a FY27 budget at the October board meeting in two weeks to rectify that. In particular, the PLA's accounts are lower now than in recent years, so providing a balanced-to-profitable budget for FY27 is a necessity. I'd like see the PLA on a path that will allow it to rebuild enough cash on hand to absorb another major disruption like we experienced in 2020 without bankrupting the organization.
To support that, I've been working with the major committees to do financial planning for the fiscal year. Most of the Special Events Committee's work is done for the year, but Community Education, Kinkfest, and the PLA Space all have significant expenses. Of these, the Community Education committee has very predictable costs, and Carslyle and I have been collaborating on the Kinkfest 27 budget based on figures from previous years and quotes from the venue and other major partners for this year. I'm working with the PLA Space team to identify which of our improvements are likely to happen this budget year and attach estimates for those expenses, as well as forecasting income from renting the space.
This weekend, the PLA Space committee also met to do some overall planning and do some work in the space. This included @Blank101 finishing installation of a better-than-new leg for a pew that's part of our seating in the space, and the committee working together to remove part of an interior threshold making our space less accessible to wheelchair users. We also discussed a lot of the logistics of rentals, bills, and maintaining the space as we look to having it operating regularly.
On the Community Education front, we finished rescheduling Christina B. Dynamite's Sanguineous Scene Safety class at Sanctuary, from August to October 11th. Details on that can be found on Fetlife and Forbidden Tickets. We've also booked two classes from BIPOC presenters on social justice and conflict resolution in the scene, both scheduled for November. More details on those will come when our promotional materials are ready.
We are also still working to process the feedback we received at our listening session last week, as well as through our feedback survey. That survey remains open here for anything you'd like to pass onto the Board:
https://www.portlandleather.org/survey.php?menu=showsurvey&surveyid=4
And as always, my inbox is open at president@portlandleather.org, and the Board as a whole can be reached at board@portlandleather.org. Feel free to reach out to either with any questions or concerns for the Board.
Yours in Leather,
Andy, PLA President
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,
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
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
