Bill Shaner, President
Bill Shaner is an independent journalist based in Worcester, Massachusetts. In his newsletter, Worcester Sucks and I Love It (launched 2020), he covers city life and politics in the spirit of the scrappy alt-weeklies of old. Recently, he co-founded The Worcester Community Media Foundation, a non-profit organization which seeks to provide the sort of institutional support for independent and alternative local journalism that alt weeklies once delivered. In recognizing the need for novel approaches, the WCMF launched in tandem with Rewind Video (@rewindvideostore), a small storefront rental shop which doubles as the foundation’s headquarters.
Cara Berg Powers, Treasurer
Cara has been working for over 15 years in education, arts and culture to help people reimagine and reshape the world, most recently as Executive Director of Transformative Culture Project, where she served for 12 years. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the Education department at her alma mater, Clark University. Cara has also taught courses in education, sociology and media at Worcester State University, UMASS Boston and Wheelock College, as well as guest lecturing at a number of colleges and universities. She has produced content for MTV and NBC, and has presented at national conferences on issues of media, culture and equity.
Cara has provided training for non-profit leaders like Oxfam America and Facing History and Ourselves. Her work has been published by Harvard University in partnership with Lady Gaga’s Born this Way Foundation, as well as through several feminist publications. She was featured in Gloria Feldt’s No Excuses: Nine Ways Women Can Change How We Think about Power and gave the keynote for the inaugural symposium for the UpTake’s groundbreaking Conflict Sensitive Journalism fellowship.
Andy Jimison, Clerk
The owner of Materia, a neighborhood arcade and video game store on June Street next to Rewind, Andy Jimison moved to Worcester, MA from Brooklyn, NY in 2020. For the last decade he has worked in Marketing for companies in New York City and as a freelance graphic designer and artist. He received an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2018, and immediately following graduation, co-founded a non-profit arts organization to promote emerging artists, an initiative that also involved co-hosting a monthly podcast about art in Brooklyn.
Before moving to New York, Andy lived and worked in Tulsa, OK where he organized and led after-school art programs in low-income school districts. Prior to that, he served at his high school alma mater as an assistant marching band director while interning at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa.
Vanessa Calixto
Vanessa Calixto uses her talent and time to ensure that artists from Worcester’s communities of color have space to perform and display their work, as space becomes scarcer.
Calixto founded El Salón in 2019 at The Bridge community center, and it was one of several ousted from the space when it was pegged for a housing development in 2021. Under Calixto’s leadership, El Salón won the first residency at the Worcester PopUp in the Jean McDonough Arts Center in 2021.
Chris Robarge
Chris Robarge comes to the board with decades of experience in activist and movement organizing work. From 2012 to 2019 he served as Central MA Field Coordinator with the ACLU of MA. Since 2020, he’s worked at the Massachusetts Bail Fund, freeing people who cannot afford cash bail. He’s also worked in many campaign and movement spaces, on projects ranging from LGBTQIA+ rights, the free speech and autonomy of poor people, labor/worker rights (including establishing the first rank-and-file staff union at an ACLU affiliate), antifascism and antiracism, substance users’ rights and drug/user decriminalization, reproductive rights, police brutality and misconduct, and prison/carceral abolition.
He lives in Worcester with his wife, Erin and his dog, Dave.