Sheila was a passionate believer in democratic participation:

Others shared similar concerns. One was Sheila Ryan, a reporter for the Washington Free Press who began writing pieces for LNS in early 1968 after serving a harrowing six-month jail sentence for having sat in at the White House. Although hardly a cookie-cutter conformist, by the wild standards set by Bloom and Mungo, Ryan may have seemed culturally conservative. She had attended Catholic University, where she’d only rarely smoked marijuana (“because we didn’t have that much time to”), and she always knew that eventually she wanted to become a wife and a mother. Meanwhile, having steeped herself in the civil rights movement, Ryan was impressed with that struggle’s emphasis on democratic participation and consensus building. Her idea of a good leader, she said, was one “who would facilitate the democratic process and really allow people to come together and refine their ideas, and help the best ideas… emerge.” By contrast, she perceived an altogether different approach at LNS, whereby people clustered sycophantically around Bloom. Too often, the group’s accomplishments could be traced to a single individual’s inspiration, rather than the whole group’s collective effort.

— From Smoking Typewriters, John McMillian, Oxford University Press, 2011, page 147-148

While Sheila was in jail in the fall of 1967, Liberation News Service was started in Washington D.C., and ended up sharing an office with the Washington Free Press:

Sheila Ryan[‘s] first encounter with LNS came as part of the Washington Free Press that shared space with LNS at 3 Thomas Circle as early as December 1967.

— From Living the Movement: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the New Left, 1967-1981, Dissertation by Blake Slonecker

Following her release from jail in January 1968, Sheila wrote for both the Washington Free Press and LNS before moving to New York:

In early 1968, Sheila Ryan walked free from the Washington Women’s House of Detention, where she had been jailed for six months for her role in a White House sit-in to protest federal indifference to the civil rights crisis in Selma. The dislocation of her prison term had been jarring, yet her release provided an opportunity for her to make a clean break of affairs and to pursue a new direction in life. A longtime staffer at the Washington Free Press, Ryan at first returned to the participatory environment where she had come of age as an underground newsperson before her arrest. But she also began to write stories for Liberation News Service (LNS), and she quickly became enthralled by the prospect of speaking to a national audience. So when LNS packed up its equipment to leave Washington in July 1968, Ryan joined the organization in its move to New York.

— From A New Dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the Long Sixties, by Blake Slonecker, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Here’s another version of that story:

In February, 1968, Sheila traveled to Cuba as part of an SDS delegation.

The trip was described in an FBI summary:

— From the 1976 FBI report on the Weather Underground.