Ben Charles

Ben Charles received the ACM's Jewell Ryan-White Award for Cultural Diversity in 2000, recognized alongside Sue Charles and Native Media in Tacoma, Washington, for work connected to Indigenous and Native-centered media practice within the public access field. Native Media's use of community television to support Native community storytelling, cultural representation, and local voice reflects one of the more specific and historically underrepresented applications of what public access channels make possible.

Their shared recognition placed Native Media in the national community media story as part of the effort to expand who community channels actually served and whose stories they made room for.

Ben's place in the archive is in the tradition of community media practitioners whose work insisted that open access meant something more than a channel available to anyone who showed up, requiring active inclusion of communities whose relationship to media institutions had historically been exclusion.