FSRN’s Board members are elected for two-year terms ending in December of the expiration year (in parentheses), with elections held annually.

Our current Board: Jonathan Lapin (2015); John Bwakali (2014); Susan da Silva, Secretary (2013); Russell Gragg, Treasurer (2014); Sang Hea Kil, President (2014); Tim Russo, Vice-President (2014).

Board members are selected by a vote among FSRN members: current board members; staff and volunteers who gave more than 40 hours of their time to FSRN in the previous year; and reporters who qualify under our bylaws. Members are elected by receiving at least two-thirds approval, by a minimum of 30% of all eligible members.

Members’ biographies:

Jonathan Lapin worked for NASA from 1986 until 2014. In the past, he trained astronauts and flight controllers, managed a group that planned training for the future space station, built and managed a cockpit simulator, and helped develop and operate the sensors that inspected the Shuttle while it was in orbit. Before retiring, he was helping prototype the human interface for an advanced space suit.  In his new life in journalism, Jonathan is open to new media paradigms, but also believes in a strong role for trained journalists.  He is humbled to be part of the FSRN board, noting that for more than a decade, FSRN has been producing accurate, erudite, independent reporting from local sources.

Susan da Silva is a past chair of the FSRN and KPFA boards. At FSRN, she served on the personnel committee, various hiring committees and ad hoc committees as needed. At KPFA, Susan was part of the first elected board and helped write the bylaws, serving on the committee that dealt with diversity issues pertaining to the bylaws. Susan grew up in Brasil and Portugal, and is retired from teaching and corporate work, where she was a programmer and manager in IT departments. Today, she facilitates Stewards of Children, a program for the prevention of child sexual abuse, and serves on the board of CMRPI (Child Molestation Research and Prevention Institute), another non-profit that protects children.

Russell Gragg is national managing editor for Accessible Media, Inc., a Canadian not-for-profit network serving audio and video programming to Canadians with disabilities. He also chairs the board of Directors of CKDU-FM in Halifax, NS, a campus-based community station and FSRN affiliate. He has also worked as a web editor for FSRN, transcribing stories for the website. He has worked in community-based print and broadcast media for more than 25 years.

Sang Hea Kil focuses her research on the nexus between immigration and crime, media and discourse, and whiteness and nationalism within an analysis of racism and border studies. Sang’s published and forthcoming works, single and co-authored, include Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies and Immigration and Crime: Race, Ethnicity, and Violence. Her work has also been published in the academic journals Social Justice and Violence against Women. She is also interested in pedagogy, social justice and coalition work within a scholar-activist perspective that stems from her political work around issues of human rights, anti-globalization, women of color and new media projects.

Tim Russo has been a Mexico and Latin America correspondent for FSRN since 2001 and is currently station manager at KGNU Community Radio for Boulder and Denver, Colorado. Deeply involved and dedicated to independent media since the early 1990s, Tim is the co-founder of COMPPA (Comunicadores y Comunidoras Populares Para la Autonomía), a Grassroots Media Coalition that has worked to launch more than 15 indigenous, Garífuna and campesino community radio stations in Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and Argentina. He has been fundamental in working toward the formation of the Autonomous Network of Garifuna Community Radios in Honduras and the MesoAmerican Network of Community, Indigenous and Garifuna Radios in MesoAmerica. Tim is well-versed in Latin American politics, Community Radio and Independent Media. Tim has been based in Mexico and Central America for nearly 20 years.