I have been involved with fandom community organizing for over a decade and non-profits for over 16 years. In that time, I have served on a number of organizations’ boards and volunteer teams, I have been the administrative manager for a small non-profit and in academia, and I have led a number of fandom group projects. Specific projects I have worked on in these capacities include managing the classes and workshops for a local book arts center, being the Executive director of a queer fandom convention, editing/compiling a fandom zine, and running three PhD programs at a state University. Not to mention all of the Renegade projects and events that I have been involved with, which I will go into more detail on in a later question.

What techniques do you use to manage pressure on yourself? How would you handle stepping up into a more visible and personally accountable position? Tell us about a time you had to manage a particularly heavy workload. How did you handle it?

To manage pressure I keep track of each of the many projects and responsibilities that I have on going through both paper and digital lists, datebooks, and tracking systems. And the way I manage the pressure of keeping all of that straight? I work very hard to be clear about my boundaries with myself and others and what sort of space and therefore energy I can give to something in my life. I have worked hard to teach my brain in the last few years the importance of scheduling time for me and what is personally important to me as well as keeping my work schedule in check. As the current sitting president I am comfortable with the visibility that may come from remaining in this position. I have long been open about my involvement in fandom and I have spent a number of years advocating for fandom and trying to encourage others to find joy in the space that works for them. To that end, I have already spoken publicly and have been interviewed for articles and in a podcast about fanbinding and Renegade. I have even given a presentation about my fanbinding hobby for my department at work! And I remain happy to do so for as long as anyone is willing to listen.

Please provide a brief history of your volunteer work with Renegade. What projects and teams have you worked on, what have you enjoyed about them, and how would you describe your contributions? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.

I have been volunteering with Renegade since 2021 when I helped to set up our first ever fanbinding panel and workshop showcase at HavenCon 2022. Since then, I have helped to organize our volunteer team, create the Renegade CoC, and been a mod for the volunteer server. Renegade events wise, I have been a mod for a number of our events including 4 years of Binderary and FFWAD events, both the Renegade wide in person retreats as well as the inaugural Renegade California mini retreat. On a more organizational note I set up and have been managing Renegade’s Merch and Membership fee processing and lead the team that crafted the Renegade Bookbinding Guild Bylaws and did our incorporation filings.

I love getting to help make so many of Renegade’s events happen, and I hope to get to keep running and participating in them for years to come. But the thing I am most proud of is getting to help see this community grow and continue to support each other and getting to be a part of the efforts that have resulted in us becoming the 501c3 organization that we are today. We are helping to keep what has long been a niche hobby alive and accessible to more and more individuals each day and I am glad to get to be a part of a community that is so creative and supportive and I look forward to to the opportunity to continue to do so.

Choose one or two goals for Renegade that are important to you and that you would like to prioritize during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?Where would you direct our organization over the next 3 years?

As I mentioned earlier, we still have some organizational ground work that needs done and I want to make sure we get that shored up in this next board cycle so we can feel comfortable knowing that there is a strong knowledge base that is easily accessible to future board members and volunteers, so our organization stays strong for the future. What does this work look like? Continuing to build out the operating protocols and templates documents for each of our various events and volunteer teams. As well as getting our volunteers trained and comfortable with these systems.

Longer term, my top interests for Renegade remain building ties with other nonprofits and community groups of similar interests so we can help to build an organizational community that Renegade can work with in the future to help spread the word and establish ourselves as a fandom support pillar. As part of this I would love to see Renegade expand the quantity and types of bookbinding and fandom information that we are able to share and direct interested individuals towards. Also related to this is the potential for the expansion of the in-person retreat to serve more as a bookbinding and fandom convention where craft and community knowledge is shared.

The pie in the sky dream to me remains for Renegade to someday have a physical location where we teach book craft, offer fandom discussions, and serve as a physical repository of bound fics and other physical fandom ephemera.

What is your definition of a “book”?

Last time I answered this I started by focusing on the literal definition of a book and while the autist in me is still standing with those definitions in hand I am going to focus this time more on what a book means. Because a book is so much more than an object. Its existence represents the hard work of multiple parties and in many cases the love and lives of even more. I think books are one of the most powerful things that have existed, changes in their purpose and how they are made has shaped so many portions of history. And I am excited to see fanbinding as a part of the bookmaking tradition!

I have been coordinating Renegade’s volunteer efforts from the outset, and enjoyed helping those efforts grow wherever I can. I also brought with me a portfolio of fandom event experience - previous to Renegade and over the course of a decade, I ran three Big Bang writing challenges in various fandoms, a Fic Exchange, and a Remix writing challenge, among other smaller projects and collaborations. My first volunteer opportunity with Renegade was the Typesetting & Bound Fic Exchange 2021; I’ve assisted with the Renegade Exchange every year since, and helped start/run several new events, including Binderary, the Retreat, and the California Server Mini-Exchange & accompanying Mini-Retreat meetup. I have also been working behind the scenes on many infrastructure projects, such as getting the satellite servers up and running, designing and launching the website, assisting in the formation of the 501c3 and election process, to name a few. In my day job, I have run teams of 50+ people and consistently organize deadlines and actionable deliverables as part of my duties. I possess the variety of skills and experience necessary to serve as a productive member of the Renegade Board.

In my first term as Vice President, I facilitated the implementation of our organization-wide infrastructure build, creating the pipelines for volunteer access to Renegade’s tools and documentation. From this point, the events teams are now in the process of editing their event-specific documentation, so that we can create templates, to be used by the Satellites for the creation of their own local events. A couple of these templates are now being tested by the California Exchange, California Retreat, Europe Retreat, and Great Lakes Retreat before wider roll-out.

What techniques do you use to manage pressure on yourself? How would you handle stepping up into a more visible and personally accountable position? Tell us about a time you had to manage a particularly heavy workload. How did you handle it?

I would be able to serve in a more visible and personally accountable position; at the moment, I am the Board Member all events teams report to, in addition to serving as the team lead for the Retreat, and the point of contact for new events proposals. At my day job, I am the client-facing point of contact between my company and the projects we work on, as well as the internal point of contact for my team and any other departments they need to interface with.

I’ve often had to handle heavy workloads, especially at my day job; at several points I have been responsible for running up to four projects concurrently. I prioritized effectively, communicated with my team to ensure their needs were met, and on the personal side, carved out time for myself and regulated my personal pressure. During those times, I also notified the Renegade volunteer teams I was serving on about my limitations, to ensure necessary operations were carried out without me holding anything up.

Please provide a brief history of your volunteer work with Renegade. What projects and teams have you worked on, what have you enjoyed about them, and how would you describe your contributions? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.

Facilitated the creation of Renegade social media accounts.

Worked to establish our Membership list, Bookbinding 101 kit, and other resources still in progress.

Assisted in the creation of our AO3 collections.

Assisted in the creation of the volunteer discord, satellite servers, CoC, and Renegade bylaws.

Set our Renegade events calendar, since the creation of our overall Events volunteer team.

I have been part of the Exchange mod team for the past five years, and part of the Binderary and Retreat teams since the inception of the events.

Speaking directly to my events contributions, the Exchange team has been hard at work integrating our system improvements to the master spreadsheet to maintain and easier flow of information for the event. We expanded our email system this year to utilizing MailChimp, and I worked in conjunction with our other powerhouse mods (six and Aether!) to understand the tools and begin implementing them for wider rollout to the other events.

As for what I enjoy about my work, it remains the same across the board: the community. I do what I do because I love working with our other dynamite volunteers, and I love being able to help facilitate the community bonding that comes along with each new project.

Choose one or two goals for Renegade that are important to you and that you would like to prioritize during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?

As Vice President, I have two distinct functions: overseeing the Events team, and assisting the President in carrying out their organizational vision. In regards to the Events team, I have put in some serious work on the creation of Events documentation, which establishes official guidelines for how Renegade events are created, run, and maintained. We still have some sections to flesh out and continue improving, but a bulk of work has been completed on this goal.

The next goal is to dive into specific events details; helping the teams create their own nitty gritty documentation, both to make it easy for events to continue well into the future, should the current volunteers ever need or want to step down, and to create the aforementioned templates, so Satellites can have the tools at their disposal to run their own local events. I would also like to work with each team on a more individual basis to understand their needs and find the best avenues for streamlining processes, to reduce the mod workload in whatever helpful way I can!

The longer term goals include integration with other volunteer teams, to ensure our events are running cohesively with our organizational vision.

What is your definition of a “book”?

Wikipedia defines a book as “a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images.” I find myself inclined to agree; a book is a vessel to tell a story, in whatever form that may take. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations, as I’m sure anyone who looks at the Edible Book Day page on our website would tell you. It’s also an archival piece of our history; we are the only ones who will endeavor to preserve, and so we must!

I'm detail-oriented, attend all the board meetings (or read the minutes/recaps) already, and tend to take notes at all my volunteer meetings already. I work well with the current Volunteer Director, and was one of the initial volunteers to be involved with the Historian aspect of the Guild. I'm quite capable of putting together the needed materials and keeping our records consistent.

What techniques do you use to manage pressure on yourself? How would you handle stepping up into a more visible and personally accountable position? Tell us about a time you had to manage a particularly heavy workload. How did you handle it?

I'm management professionally, and an organizer by nature. I'm capable of delegating when I need to, and communicating what needs to be done when and by whom. Outside of the board members themselves, I'm certainly already one of the most visible volunteers and server members, and I've been here since the beginning.

Please provide a brief history of your volunteer work with Renegade. What projects and teams have you worked on, what have you enjoyed about them, and how would you describe your contributions? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.

Brief?? I kicked off our first Exchange in summer 2020, and have yet to relinquish that responsibility (we're six Exchanges in). I've also been involved in running two Retreats, multiple smaller events, and getting the 501(c)3 details (mostly Code of Conduct and logistics) worked out. I'm a regular face around the Main server, and also have finagled my way into the majority of the satellite servers (gotta collect them all). Do I need to say more? I can.

Choose one or two goals for Renegade that are important to you and that you would like to prioritize during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?

I would like to prioritize an archival system and accessibility, as well as clear communication among members. Translation is one form of accessibility, as is alt text on all images on our front-facing website pages. I think working with our social media team on informative graphics, whether for event promotion or wrap-up, or for general information about bookbinding, needs to be bumped up on the priority scale, as sometimes we miss the mark on timeliness.

What is your definition of a “book”?

A "book" is a collection of thoughts, generally written down, that can take many physical forms. It is a method of conveying an idea to another without necessarily needing to do so in person or while actively engaged in conversation. (Yes, an email could constitute a book under this definition, but keep in mind I have read emails longer than 50% of the works on AO3.)

I have a bachelors degree in accounting and previously worked as an accountant for 10 years. I have been setting up and improving Renegade’s financial system since inception during my current term as Treasurer.

What techniques do you use to manage pressure on yourself? How would you handle stepping up into a more visible and personally accountable position? Tell us about a time you had to manage a particularly heavy workload. How did you handle it?

Bookbinding continues to be my go-to hobby for stress relief. I find the mental focus needed to plan and execute designs to be very effective in shifting my focus away from more stressful tasks.

Please provide a brief history of your volunteer work with Renegade. What projects and teams have you worked on, what have you enjoyed about them, and how would you describe your contributions? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.

I have been serving as Treasurer since Renegade’s inception in 2024. I continue to be a mod in the California regional server, and have been since its inception in 2022. I have also served as mod for Binderary 2026.

Choose one or two goals for Renegade that are important to you and that you would like to prioritize during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?

Now that we have our payment and inventory processing established, we should start focusing on merch to raise funds. Treasurer also needs to prioritize a clear and concise training materials for future treasurers.

What fundraising initiatives, if any, would you be interested in pursuing on Renegade's behalf?

I would like to start offering special merch gifts for donations over a certain amount.

What is your definition of a “book”?

To me a book is something made to share ideas. It can be physically printed and bound, or in digital form, or in audio form.

In my professional career, I have had experience in managing large teams of people, both in-person and remotely. I have managed social media accounts for a large organization with strict guidelines and policies to follow. I have served as my organization’s representative at international cooperation events.

When I do not have direct experience for certain tasks (legal forms and donor campaigns), I am comfortable reaching out to others who do for advice.

What techniques do you use to manage pressure on yourself? How would you handle stepping up into a more visible and personally accountable position? Tell us about a time you had to manage a particularly heavy workload. How did you handle it?

The most important technique for managing pressure is prioritization. What are the tasks and how critical is each to the functioning of the organization? What are the deadlines? Who needs what information, and when? The second most important technique is communication with your team members, particularly if workloads or deadlines need to be shifted.

In general, I am comfortable being in high-visibility and personally accountable positions. In several of my official positions I have held large amounts of legal and fiscal responsibility. It is fairly frequent that I am handed a heavy workload. In such cases, I do what I mentioned above - identify the most critical tasks for my personal life, for my job, and for Renegade, and prioritize them accordingly. If it is a particularly high workload time that was not predictable (due to some sort of sudden crisis), I will identify low-priority tasks that can be put to the side or delayed in order to accomplish the most important ones, and then return to them after the top priorities are addressed.

Please provide a brief history of your volunteer work with Renegade. What projects and teams have you worked on, what have you enjoyed about them, and how would you describe your contributions? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.

I started volunteering with Renegade when we first started organizing a volunteer crew in the lead up to HavenCon in 2022. As part of the prep for HavenCon, I was the team lead for the development of our first Renegade Publishing information flyer. I also organized and moderated Renegade’s first ever convention panel at the event.

Also in 2022, I was part of the group that spearheaded the development of Renegade’s Code of Conduct. Leaning on my past experience in organizations where members maintain a standard of conduct, I wrote the guidelines for how Renegade handles a Misconduct Review Board (thankfully, rarely used!).

Over the past few years as Public Affairs Director, I have assisted our members in preparing articles for publication, representing Renegade in interviews, and to represent Renegade at conventions. I have worked on building legal consent forms for photo submissions and transfers of copyright ownership for use in Renegade’s media presence and operations. And all members of the board continue to work on building the guiding documents and policies for all of Renegade’s behind the scenes operations.

Choose one or two goals for Renegade that are important to you and that you would like to prioritize during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?

Renegade has a lot of enthusiastic members who want to spread the word about how to make your own books! Over the last year, Robin and I initialized and implemented Renegade’s Event Proposal form so members could submit their ideas for what Renegade should be doing. Most of our submissions so far have been requests to represent Renegade at various conventions. One of my goals is to finalize our Renegade Representative guide documentation and establish a budget to support those who want to get out there and teach others. Establishing what we are able to provide for support year to year will allow us to determine how to prioritize these requests, and hopefully also increase that amount of support.

What is your definition of a “book”?

In my mind there are two forms of a book—there is the book as a physical object, and there is the book as a conceptual object. The book as a physical object has pages secured together to allow for human communication (words or otherwise). As a conceptual object, a book is a container for that communication, and may not necessarily be physical (for example, an ebook), but does serve as a demarcation for a defined set of information to be transmitted to others.

In my non-cyberspace life, I am a public librarian. Two parts of my job highly relevant to the Volunteer Director position include my coordination of the Teen Summer Volunteers since 2018 and advocating for use of brand identity within company promotional materials systemwide. I have participated in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training, including additional optional trainings provided by my workplace. I hold a bachelor degree in Communication which I bring to bear in a variety of ways including clear and concise communication. Outside of my education and work experience, I also bring a great and long-running love of organization via spreadsheets and a willingness to learn new skills and programs to keep organizational coordination and communication up to date. The past two years I have been a part of the Renegade Board of Directors as Volunteer Director. I have been a part of the Renegade Bindery Discord Mod team for 5.5 years. I am currently the Volunteer Historian Team Lead with a focus on such projects as statistics for participation in events hosted on the Renegade Bindery server and the Annual Renegade Census.

What techniques do you use to manage pressure on yourself? How would you handle stepping up into a more visible and personally accountable position? Tell us about a time you had to manage a particularly heavy workload. How did you handle it?

Being able to bounce ideas back and forth and brainstorm solutions is one of the key ways I manage pressure. I have a great team with the current Renegade Board of Directors who have been very helpful in managing both the pressure and visibility of the role. As a mod on the Renegade Bindery server, I've been here for all of the server members and now as Volunteer Director, for the various volunteer teams to ensure the community remains just that: a community.

My first summer as a librarian I was running daily programs for 10 weeks. The change in responsibilities and the rapid pace of summer created a lot of stress. Two weeks into the summer, I received a huge amount of help from my manager’s willingness to talk to me about what to prioritize and which tasks should receive less focus during the summer season. By halfway through the summer I had improved in my ability to handle the number of things on my plate and had a much easier time prioritizing on my own for each one since."

Please provide a brief history of your volunteer work with Renegade. What projects and teams have you worked on, what have you enjoyed about them, and how would you describe your contributions? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.

I began moderating the Renegade Bindery Discord Server about 3 months into its existence. Moderating a server of over 3000 members means a lot of backreading! Being a part of the moderation team has been a joyous experience in bringing some (but not too much) order to the chaos of a group of creative people working to share skills and express themselves in a little haven from censorship. While I’m a librarian with a communications degree for a reason, I also love spreadsheets a lot and was the person to initiate the Renegade Annual Census to get a snapshot of the Renegade community and a feel for how they see fanbinding as a craft and part of fan culture as a whole. With that in mind, I lead the Historians team on the volunteer server, working to ensure we keep statistics of things like server events such as Binderary and the Exchange. I feel like statistics and archival go hand in hand to some degree because wanting to see the shape of something and wanting a record of something are quite similar! It will likely come as no surprise that I have also contributed to the AO3 volunteer team to archive the fanworks included in events and suggested in the Renegade Bindery server. The past two years as Volunteer Director have been full of documentation of procedures and sorting out strategies for recruitment, avoiding volunteer overload and working out what Renegade Bookbinding Guild looks like as an organization.

Choose one or two goals for Renegade that are important to you and that you would like to prioritize during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?

In our first two years as the board of Renegade, we've been focused on setting up the board to be able to continue for years to come. Recruitment has not been as high of a priority until now, but as we move forward: One of my goals is to increase volunteer recruitment from regions outside of North America. By including the voices of more European, Asian, Australian, and South American people in our volunteer pool, we can continue our events across time zones. We increase the accessibility of Renegade as a whole by having more volunteers who may speak languages in addition to English. If even a few of these volunteers would be willing to serve on the Translation team for even a short time, Renegade can expand our mission to share skills to more people worldwide. Having representatives on the Renegade volunteer team from a variety of places helps us reduce western-centric biases and colonialism in our policymaking.

What is your definition of a “book”?

I think books are one of the most important things that humans have ever invented! What I believe a book is hasn't changed. A book is a functional piece of art built to contain, preserve, and transmit ideas across time, space, and culture.

To quote somecunttookmyurl.tumblr.com Jun 30-Jul 2, 2021:

…every human being across history has said, “I was here. I lived. I loved. I made something. I laughed. I cried. Please do not forget me.”

…

I wrote it for you, stranger I will never meet

and if you print it then maybe somebody finds it, somewhere, in the back of a drawer in 100 years and hold it in their hands and love me as I love them

Do not forget about me, please

And to me that is what books are about.

I'm in volunteer management roles in two other organizations--one entirely in-person, and one entirely online--and am middle-management at my day job. So I am very familiar with different methods of task tracking, data and database management, and personnel wrangling. My online volunteer experience includes doing what was effectively HR--tracking volunteer roles, tool access, etc--as well as running recruitment. All three have also involved managing or settling interpersonal disputes, and making sure people are able to work together.

What techniques do you use to manage pressure on yourself? How would you handle stepping up into a more visible and personally accountable position? Tell us about a time you had to manage a particularly heavy workload. How did you handle it?

" I'm pretty good at juggling multiple different projects, and using down time during one task to work on another. My workdays tend to be fairly flexible, so I can pack a lot of different tasks into them (as long as I stay focused, which is paradoxically easier when there are more tasks to do.) I've found it's especially helpful to intersperse the tasks that require a lot of thinking with the ones that are more simple and repetitive. (And then after that period was over I read fanfiction on my phone for about a week straight to recover.)

I've already been in (marginally) visible positions as a satellite and retreat mod, so I'm not too worried about that aspect.

Please provide a brief history of your volunteer work with Renegade. What projects and teams have you worked on, what have you enjoyed about them, and how would you describe your contributions? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.

My first Renegade project was the My Immortal group typeset, very early on, which was an interesting experiment in project tracking and group creativity. I assigned chapters to participants, checked that they were completed, and made a very fun color-coded spreadsheet that was appreciated by an audience of me. I was also our local volunteer for Retreat in 2025, where I did research for our retreat proposal, was one of the volunteers who scouted and toured the location, and helped manage local volunteers and track supplies. Most importantly, I ordered the hats. Currently I am one of the admins for my regional server.

Choose one or two goals for Renegade that are important to you and that you would like to prioritize during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?

I think the most important, from the volunteer directing side, is helping maintain a deep bench of volunteers. We've got some really fantastic events and programming, as well as a wonderful current Board, so I'd want to make sure people have the team support they need to keep from getting overwhelmed or burned out. Working with others is built in there, as I'd need to have enough communication to know when something is going awry.

What is your definition of a “book”?


That guy in Firefly played by Ron Glass who's a traveling space preacher. Also a nickname for the sad French man in The Old Guard.

As some already know from the many, many group orders in the Renegade Group Buy satellite server, I love working in spreadsheets and tracking information. As a satellite server mod, I am experienced in ensuring members are following the server rules. I’ve also led a major revision of rules and guidelines for the Group Buy server.

What techniques do you use to manage pressure on yourself? How would you handle stepping up into a more visible and personally accountable position? Tell us about a time you had to manage a particularly heavy workload. How did you handle it?

I am a planner and very deadline-oriented, and will allocate and prioritize time for tasks. I typically break the end goal down into chunkable items that have their own internal deadlines to ensure everything is finished when it needs to be. I will also rely on others as needed to help distribute any heavy loads.

My previous job was running a major funding process, which involved managing dozens of high level managers to meet shifting deadlines. By scheduling out tasks and understanding when and where to prioritize attention, I was able to keep the overall process under control which allowed me time to focus on the emergency fires.

Please provide a brief history of your volunteer work with Renegade. What projects and teams have you worked on, what have you enjoyed about them, and how would you describe your contributions? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.

I’ve been a moderator for the Renegade Group Buy and California satellite servers since 2022 and 2023, respectively. I enjoy making sure the servers are running smoothly and with an appropriate amount of chaos.

I was also the workshop moderator for the Renegade Retreat in 2025, which involved coordinating seven member-led workshops and managing their space requirements. I loved getting to meet so many workshop leads and participants, and enjoyed the logistics puzzle of distributing equipment and materials.

Choose one or two goals for Renegade that are important to you and that you would like to prioritize during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?

I would like to further streamline guild member applications and renewals to make membership management as easy as possible. As Renegade enters its second year as a non-profit, I look forward to helping establish processes to ensure the organization runs smoothly and for many more years to come.

What is your definition of a “book”?

A book is an object that contains, or can potentially contain, information which can be interpreted and understood by looking at it without additional devices (unlike, say, a USB drive). And yes, this means a taco can be a book. A delicious, delicious book.