Randy VanDalsen

Randy VanDalsen is one of the long-haul builders of community media, a consultant, organizer, researcher, mentor, and regional leader whose work reaches back to the earliest years of the national access movement. His path began in Michigan, where he founded and directed Michigan State University's Video Workshop and worked in local origination and public access cable television in East Lansing. By the late 1970s, Randy was already part of the organizing infrastructure of the field: a founder and steering committee member of the Michigan Association for Community Cable Development, a member of the original NFLCP By-Laws Committee, and later coordinator of national and regional access conferences.

In 1985, Randy was hired as the first Executive Director of Access Sacramento. During his seven years there, Access Sacramento received 45 nominations as finalists and 23 First Place awards in national and regional competitions, including the Hometown Video Festival’s "Overall Excellence in Public Access" award in 1989 and 1991.

Randy's work has always lived close to the practical questions that make community media possible. Through The Buske Group, where he has worked with Sue Miller Buske for decades, he has helped cities, schools, access corporations, and community media centers understand local needs, evaluate services, conduct surveys and focus groups, prepare reports, and make better decisions about PEG and community media systems. That work is rarely glamorous, but it is part of how stations survive: someone has to listen carefully, gather evidence, ask the right questions, and turn community need into structures that funders, cities, boards, and operators can act on.

Randy has also served the field through national board service, regional leadership, the ACM Western Region, conference teaching, mentorship, and the steady sharing of institutional memory. In 2009, he received the ACM's Dirk Koning-George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication, honoring a career rooted in service, community voice, and public purpose. Together, Randy and Sue became part of the field's practical backbone, helping hundreds of communities build access systems carefully enough to last.