News and Announcements

State of the Alliance - October 30, 2026

(10/31/2026)

This is your weekly informal update from the PLA President. I'm working back towards Thursday updates after last week's was delayed to Saturday.

Fairly brief update this week as we prepare for our Board meeting next Tuesday. Remember to check your email for your ballots for the general Board elections and vote before then!

The PLA Space has now hosted multiple private events, and we have some estimates now for work on the exterior door to remove the most significant obstacle to the accessibility of the East Room. We're still comparing bids from a few different contractors, so no timeline is available on that at this point. If you're interested in touring or booking the PLA Space, or have questions about it, please reach out by email to plaspace@portlandleather.org.

For Community Education, we have Mx. Knotty's floor rope predicaments class tomorrow at the PLA Space! We also have the two classes we announced last week at the end of November: Power, Privilege, and Intersectionality with Dr. B at Sanctuary, and In the Community from Sera Miles over Zoom. And we plan to add to our foundational class offerings in November, supplementing our monthly consent class from Kol and Dynamite with an additional class to be announced in the coming days.

For Kinkfest, applications are still open for those looking to vend, present a workshop, and volunteer now, with attendee tickets going on sale starting November 20th. Our application for the BootySoBig scholarship tickets for BIPOC and/or disabled community members is also still open.

We have also been working to take action on some of the feedback we received about Kinkfest in our listening session. We heard that last year's Vendor Hall layout posed both accessibility issues and problems of visibility for certain vendors; this year's Vendor Hall layout is being revamped to address those issues, and we'll provide more info from the Vendors team as we're able. We also heard widespread dissatisfaction with communication for volunteers last year, which is being addressed by a new Volunteers Director through new processes and better accountability to internal communication within the Core Team. Accessibility issues around the hotels and shuttle service are front of mind as we negotiate with the hotels and build out our accessibility volunteer needs this year. And finally, as I mentioned last week, we're doing major work to rewrite and codify our policies around bans and removal from Kinkfest, which we'll make available when ready.

For those and also the non-KF portions of the feedback from our survey and our listening session, we plan to address them all in our Board meeting this Tuesday, with additional statements and communication to follow.

As always, my inbox is open at president@portlandleather.org to any questions, concerns, or feedback, and the board as a whole can be reached at board@portlandleather.org. We also are still monitoring our general feedback survey here:

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

Yours in Leather,
Andy, PLA President