Barbara Popovic

Barbara Popovic served as executive director of Chicago Access Network Television, known as CAN TV, building one of the largest and most active urban public access operations in the country. Under her leadership CAN TV provided training, facilities, equipment, and channel time to Chicago residents and nonprofit organizations across a city defined by its neighborhood diversity, making the station a genuine civic platform rather than a production service. Barbara played a central role in negotiating Illinois's video franchise law, securing PEG funding and channel protections that became a national standard, and led CAN TV's Keep Us Connected campaign as a model for statewide advocacy when franchise restructuring threatened local access funding across the country.

Her engagement with the Alliance for Community Media and the Alliance for Communications Democracy extended that work into legal and legislative arenas, where she participated in efforts to protect the public interest obligations of cable systems at the national level. In 2010 she received the ACM's Dirk Koning-George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication.

Barbara's legacy is in both what CAN TV became under her leadership and what the policy landscape looked like differently because she fought for it.