Sesame Workshop

Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett formed the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in 1966 to produce Sesame Street. The Workshop was formally incorporated in 1970. In 2000, the CTW changed its name to Sesame Workshop to better represent its activities beyond television. By 2005, income from the organization’s international co-productions of the series was USD 96 million.

About Sesame Workshop in brief

Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett formed the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in 1966 to produce Sesame Street. The Workshop was formally incorporated in 1970. In 2000, the CTW changed its name to Sesame Workshop to better represent its activities beyond television. By 2005, income from the organization’s international co-productions of the series was USD 96 million. In 2014, H. Melvin Ming replaced Gary Knell as CEO; he was succeeded by Jeffrey D. Dunn in 2014. The Sesame street Muppets accounted for USD 15–17 million per year in licensing and merchandising fees in 2008, according to the group’s 2008 annual report. The group has produced several educational children’s programs, including its first and best-known, SesameStreet. It has also produced educational television programs for preschools. The organization has been involved in the development of several other educational television shows, including Sesame City and The Little Engine That Could. It is based in New York City and has offices in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. It was founded by Cooney, Morrisett, and Lewis Freedman in 1966. Cooney was named as the Workshop’s first executive director, which was termed \”one of the most important television developments of the decade. Cooney won an Emmy for a documentary about poverty in America. In the late 1960s, 97% of all American households owned a television set, and preschool children watched an average of 27 hours of television per week. Children from low-income families, however, had fewer resources than children from higher- income families to prepare them for school.

Research had shown that children fromLow-income, minority backgrounds tested “substantially lower’ than middle-class children in school-related skills, and that they continued to have educational deficits throughout school. The CTW began to think about its survival beyond the development and first season of the show, since their funding sources were composed of organizations and institutions that tended to start projects, not sustain them. The early 1980s were a challenging period for the Workshop; difficulty finding audiences for their other productions and a series of bad investments harmed the organization until licensing agreements stabilized its revenues by 1985. In 1990, Cooney resigned as CEO in 1990; David Britt wasnamed as her replacement. In 2011, GaryKnell became CEO, and H.Melvin Ming replaced Knell in 2011. In 2012, the group was awarded a $1.5 million grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to develop interactive media and new technologies for children and young adults. In 2013, the organization was awarded $1 million in grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In 2015, the Workshop was given a $500,000 grant from Carnegie Corporation to develop an educational television program for preschoolers in Canada and the U.S. The program, called Sesame Tots, was the first of its kind.

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Sesame Street international co-productions Andrew Carnegie Sesame Street research History of Sesame Street