Sue Buske

Sue Miller Buske is one of the foundational figures in American community media, a policy leader, consultant, and visionary whose work helped turn the promise of PEG access into real local institutions. Her community media career began in 1973, when she was selected as one of eight people nationally for the cable internship program at the Alternate Media Center at New York University School of the Arts, where George Stoney became her mentor. Her early work included serving as Program Director at Group W Channel 10 in Dubuque, Iowa, working with the Cable Television Information Center at the Urban Institute, and becoming the first Executive Director of the Miami Valley Cable Television Council, where she coordinated PEG operations for a multi-city council of governments near Dayton, Ohio.

Sue later served for six years as Executive Director of the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers, the organization that became the Alliance for Community Media. Those were formative years for the field, when hundreds of access corporations were being created and local communities were learning how to translate franchise language, public need, and democratic ideals into working channels, facilities, boards, budgets, and services. Through The Buske Group, founded in 1987, she went on to help hundreds of cities, schools, nonprofit access corporations, and community media centers negotiate with cable companies, conduct needs assessments, plan operations, build management structures, and defend the public value of local media access.

Together, Sue and her husband Randy VanDalsen became part of the practical backbone of the field. Their work helped communities do the unglamorous but essential things that made community media last: understand local needs, protect funding, create nonprofit structures, hire leaders, evaluate services, and make the case that residents deserve more than commercial media and government messaging. As one of the early women leaders in the national access movement, Sue also helped shape a field where women’s organizing, mentoring, policy knowledge, and institution-building were central from the start.

Sue received the ACM’s Dirk Koning–George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication in 1980. In 1987, the ACM/NFLCP established the Sue Miller Buske Award for Commitment to the NFLCP/ACM, recognition that reflects her central role in shaping the field’s policy, training, and institutional backbone. The award carries her name because her larger legacy lives in the hundreds of stations and access systems that exist because she helped communities build them carefully enough to endure.