Changes to Announce

Ignition Community,

We on the Board have been listening to you and have some changes to announce that address many of the concerns that you have raised. Thank you, everyone, for giving us your feedback either publicly or in private conversations. Without an ongoing dialog, there would be no opportunities to improve ourselves or our service to all of you. We are committed to holding ourselves accountable to the Ignition community, to each other, and to Ignition Northwest’s bylaws.

Here are the steps that we’re taking:

Changes to the Board

Our Treasurer, Jess Bacon, has resigned. We have posted her letter of resignation on the Ignition website at https://ignitionnw.org/, emailed it to the Firestarter mailing list, and posted it in our INW Facebook group.

Ethan is stepping down from the President role. Frida will step up as our Interim President while an accountability process begins and we endeavor to fill vacancies to get the Board back up to its full size.

During September’s Board meeting, the point was raised that we did not provide the amount of advance notice required by our bylaws for accepting nominations (2 months) or publishing a list of candidates before opening an election (an additional 10 days). It’s important to us that we do things by the book, so we’re proceeding as if the results of the August election are not valid. Our plan for the election process is laid out in the section below.

Our bylaws prescribe a clear process for filling vacancies between elections. The Board may appoint a new Board member to fill a vacated seat. Such an appointment requires a 2/3 vote of the remaining Board members. In order to keep the board staffed sufficiently for event production and non-profit operations to continue running smoothly, we have unanimously appointed the two members with the largest number of votes from the August election, Jess “Megaphone” Burford and Scott “Feynman” Blomquist to fill the seats that were made vacant by the resignations of Dr. Who and Bacon.

Immediately Running Elections

Usually the election cycle begins with nominations in November, voting in December or January, and new members seated in March. Because the board continues to have vacancies, we are beginning the nomination process early, and will closely follow the required timelines, with nominations opening by October 9. You can expect a Candidate Town Hall in mid-January, immediately after the winter holidays.

Accountability process

Board members not involved in the misconduct reports are recruiting a team of neutral parties to independently investigate the recent reports against a Board member. In the event that we cannot assemble a fair and impartial team from within or from neighboring communities, the Board pledges to hire outside mediators with experience in restorative justice. No Board members will be involved in conducting the investigation. The Board agrees to honor the recommendations made by the assembled team.

What’s next

We are listening and we value the community’s input. The immediate actions that we’ve presented above only cover the short term. We’ve also been working on a comprehensive vision for 2024, which includes continuing the effort to restore or re-envision the Radical Accountability Council and efforts to address the volunteer burnout that we have all faced.

Please reach out if you have any questions or concerns. We look forward to seeing all of you at the next town hall (planning in the works; date and location to be announced soon) and some of you on the Board nomination forms!