Four board members of the PLDA have tendered their resignations blaming a lack of transparency and intransigence at board level for their decision.
Katja Winkelmann, president elect, Stephan Horn, circle of sponsors liaison officer, Berry Van Egten, treasurer, and Ruairí O’Brien, director for education, have resigned from the organisation.
In a joint letter which has been sent to the PLDA membership they said: “After the many years of internal arguing and missing transparency that we have all experienced as members of the association we wanted to help change the PLDA from within, we wanted to represent you and your wishes to make the PLDA strong again.”
The letter continues: “It was our intention to represent the interests of the PLDA membership, the CoS and the lighting designer community and our profession by reducing the problems that made board discussions so difficult and decision making so rare by taking a ‘pro-active and open dialogue’ to our board work.”
The letter went on to state that the resigning members felt that this was not an approach that was supported elsewhere: “All members of the board did not sadly support this new approach; there was a certain reluctance to make changes in the communication internally with the members of the board and externally with the members of the association. In the difficult times that we as an association face where we presently have to fight for our existence we consider this method or philosophy to be the wrong one to follow, it is a method of the past that has not proven to be the correct way, in fact we feel that it is a great part of the PLDA problem that members have not been included enough in the ‘problem solving’.
