Sesame Workshop

Beginning with the groundbreaking broadcast of Sesame Street nearly five decades ago, Sesame Workshop has established a wealth of experience in developing and delivering high-quality educational media that supports the critical needs of children and families across the world. Sesame Workshop's initiatives and resources are designed to model inclusivity and mutual understanding for all children, regardless of ethnicity, race, or ability, with the Sesame Street Muppets serving as ambassadors for understanding and acceptance. Sesame Workshop's goal is to provide relevant educational content that addresses the needs of children all over the world. \r\nSesame Street was founded in 1969 to give disadvantaged children the same opportunities as middle-class children. Today the show is popular with children and families from all walks of life, but our commitment remains the same: to address the educational needs of children through our potent combination of media and Muppets. We do this through our shows, as well as through numerous educational outreach programs that make a direct impact in particularly vulnerable communities. To reach children in different parts of the world, we might create a new local program from Sesame's essential ingredients: Muppets, media, and our research process. That means creating Muppets to address pressing local concerns - like Khokha, a lively role model for girls' education in Egypt. Or Kami, an HIV-positive Muppet who's thriving in South Africa. She provides a life affirming antidote to the stigma that accompanies HIV/AIDS. Wherever the need takes us, we aim for local relevance and sustainable impact. Our local focus is also work here at home. Super Grover 2.0 was especially created to spark children's interest in science and math - areas in which U.S. students are falling behind. We started on TV nearly 50 years ago, but our approach to media is ever-evolving. The power of Muppets translates to technologies old and new, whether it's community viewings in rural villages or streaming video on cell phones. We are always breaking new ground to reach digital natives on their home turf, working in collaboration with the pioneering research and innovation lab, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.

Through educational outreach, Sesame Street is able to go beyond the power of television and directly impact particularly vulnerable communities. Tailored to these communities' specific needs, our outreach programs bring lessons about ABCs and 123s, health, and emotional wellbeing into the homes and hands of families and preschoolers. Our multimedia materials, full of Muppets, laughter, and learning, reach children across the country—in English as well as Spanish—with the skills and support they need. Generous support from like-minded partners — foundations, corporations, individuals, governments, and others — has been critical to our mission for more than nearly five decades and continues to make new projects possible. At home and globally, we build collaborative partnerships with those who share our mission. By matching vital educational needs to our partners' goals, we create real impact together. \r\nAs our partners will agree, our impact together is tremendous. We share a commitment to improving children's lives, the strong belief in the power of media and research, and a willingness to experiment on the cutting-edge of emerging technologies.\r\nWe rely on our funders' support to bring the Sesame Workshop mission to life. Their collective commitment enables us to harness the educational power of media to benefit children around the world. We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of our current sponsors and partners, without whom our work to educate and inspire children would not be possible.

Sesame Workshop's time-tested approach to developing children's educational media ties together curriculum, research, and accountability for achieving results. To ensure that each initiative is designed to deliver on its full potential, we convene advisory meetings early on and solicit the recommendations of experts in relevant fields. We conduct formative research with children, parents, and caregivers representative of our target audiences to inform development of project components, and commission summative assessments to evaluate impact. Following the launch of our initiatives, the Workshop supports the resources we have developed with a comprehensive public relations strategy to drive awareness and use. \r\nThe Workshop has developed a model that has been replicated globally, including the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, resulting in programming designed to help children understand HIV/AIDS (as with Kami, the world's first HIV-positive Muppet) and to promote girls' empowerment (as with Zari, a six-year-old Afghan Muppet). \r\nThrough its work from Nigeria to Egypt, Jordan to Bangladesh, Sesame Workshop has leveraged low-cost technologies to provide high-quality multimedia experiences for children in low-resource settings. The Workshop's model has been proven in over 1,000 research studies to be an extremely cost-effective way to improve early childhood learning and social development.

Sesame Workshop makes a measurable difference in people's lives. We do so by impacting children and parents all across the globe in four main categories. As of 2010, the program has won more Emmy Awards than any other show in TV history. We were also the first Non-Profit to reach 1 Billion Views on YouTube. Listed below are some of Sesame Workshop's many accomplishments and research findings. \r\nLiteracy & Numeracy: \r\n• Over 90% of parents see a positive change in their children's interest in counting, sorting, and matching after participating in the Math Is Everywhere program.\r\n• 97% say that the Math is Everywhere program increases the time their children spends on math-related activities. \r\n• Bangladeshi 4-year olds who watch the local version of Sesame Street have literacy scores that are 67% higher than those who don't watch.\r\nEmotional Wellbeing: \r\n• 82% of parents feel Our Families Stand Together kit helps their family cope better with tough economic times. \r\n• 2 out of 3 parents feel more comfortable helping their child deal with stress after using out You Can Ask outreach materials.\r\n• 71% of caregivers say our Military Families outreach materials help their child cope with an injured family member. \r\nHealth & Wellness: \r\n• 98% of childcare providers report that children improve their food choices while participating in the Healthy Habits for Life program.\r\n• 62% of caregivers using Food for Thought materials rate them a 10, the highest possible mark. \r\nRespect & Understanding \r\n• After watching a Sesame Street episode about social exclusion, American children are significantly more likely to use language to stop situations in which others are being excluded. \r\n• After watching the local version of Sesame Street. Palestinian children have 18% higher scores on “Cooperation" measures than those who don't watch\r\n\r\nWhat's next? \r\nWe look forward to continuing our existing progress and tackling even bigger issues that address some of the world's most vulnerable children. Right now, one of our primary focuses is on the child refugee crisis. The scale of today's child refugee crisis is staggering - 65 million refugees, half of whom are children and 12 million of whom are under eight. Together, Sesame Street and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) are creating a transformative early childhood development program designed to reflect the unique experiences of displaced families in the Syrian response region. We're honored to be among eight semi-finalists for the MacArthur Foundation's 100&Change grant. The global competition will award $100 million to a single proposal promising “real and measurable progress" toward solving one critical problem of our time. With initial funding from the Bernard van Leer Foundation and Open Society Foundations, we've already launched a pilot program in Jordan—this grant would allow us to replicate our efforts on a grand scale—and bring life-changing education to a generation that hangs in the balance.