The Short Story

KaeLyn Rich (she/they) is a queer feminist, a direct action organizer, a nonprofit leader, a word wrangler, and a professional speaker. Her community organizing experience dates back to stuffing folders for her parents’ union meetings around the dining room table. She’s an adoptee immigrant from South Korea, a comfort food foodie, and a persistent devotee of the serial comma. She lives in Rochester, NY with her spouse, an ocean-loving dragon-riding kiddo, a socially awkward cat, and two rascally rabbits.

Photos by Erica Jae

The Long Read

KaeLyn is the Vice President of Organizational Advancement at UltraViolet, a community of more than one million people that drives feminist cultural and political change through people power and strategic advocacy. As a core part of the small, nimble executive team, she’s a true organizational effectiveness generalist and “Jill of many trades” overseeing operations, people culture, finance, and development. Every day is a little different, and a lot of fun! Previously, she was the Executive Director of Bitch Media, an independent nonprofit feminist media organization best known for the essential Bitch Magazine.

She’s a freelance writer and author whose first book, Girls Resist!: A Guide to Activist, Leadership, and Starting a Revolution (Quirk Books), a YA activism handbook was released in August 2018. She’s a contributing writer for the popular queer online publication, Autostraddle, where she formerly authored biweekly columns on community organizing and queer parenting and writes other various content about queer politics, life, and culture. Her writing has been featured across the internet. In 2017, KaeLyn was featured in Her Voice Carries, a public mural art project about women lifting up other women and in an Emmy-nominated documentary film by the same name.

KaeLyn has two decades of nonprofit advocacy and leadership experience. Ranging from hyper-local grassroots campaigns to leading the field work of large statewide issue coalitions to organizing retreats and leading strategic planning. KaeLyn spent eight years working for the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), managing regional offices across the state as the Assistant Advocacy Director for Chapters and, before that, directing a regional office as Genesee Valley Chapter Director. KaeLyn was the community affairs coordinator at Planned Parenthood of Central and Western New York. Through her campaign work, KaeLyn has led or co-led work on a wide range of issues including reproductive rights, voting rights, police reform, immigrant rights, transgender rights, marriage equality, gender equity, and more.

KaeLyn is a professional speaker on intersectionality, activism and organizing, and LGBTQ issues. She presents workshops in high schools, public libraries, bookstores, and college campuses to groups as small as four and as large as 4,000. From 2011-2015, she traveled to colleges and universities across the United States as a sexuality educator with Sex Discussed Here, co-presenting funny, smart, honest lectures and programs about sexual health and responsible intimacy, safer sex, LGBTQI+ issues and much more. (Yes, it was really fun!) She teaches women and gender studies courses about LGBTQ+ cultures and histories at local colleges in the greater Rochester area.

In 2012, KaeLyn was co-editor of the inaugural edition of the ImageOutWrite Literary Journal, a collection of writing by and about LGBTQ authors. She penned a monthly queer women’s health column in the Empty Closet from 2007-2010. In 2014, she co-authored an article on feminist praxis in student leadership programs published in Feminist Community Engagement: Achieving Praxis (Palgrave Macmillan). Her creative work was showcased at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference as part of the 2004 Creative Writing Series. 

KaeLyn is a founding board member and the first volunteer co-trainer of Connect & Breathe, a taboo-breaking after-abortion talkline.  She served on the board of ImageOut: the Rochester LGBT Film & Video Festival for six years, during which served on various committees from strategic planning to special events and watched a gazillion LGBTQ+ films. From 2019-2020, KaeLyn was a founding member of the WOC^ART Collaborative, a multi-generational collective of Black womxn & womxn of color creators in Rochester NY. She also previously served on the state board of Planned Parenthood Advocates of New York.

KaeLyn, a daughter of two public school teachers, has a deep love for the public education system! She holds B.A. degrees in women’s studies and English from SUNY College at Oswego and a M.A. from SUNY College at Brockport with an emphasis on feminist intersectionality in the nonprofit sector. She completed a graduate certificate in nonprofit management at SUNY College at Brockport in 2009.