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