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Hi, I'm Pam Green, because I know you've forgotten since the introduction.
And the second thing I wanted to say is that my entire speech, my
entire presentation, will consist of one word and it is "ditto." There
was a time when I always thought that you should be the last speaker
because you could kind of steal from what everybody said and create
your speech as they were talking. Today that is not going to work,
because everybody said what I wanted to say, particularly Jane, who
had the slides with the kids, because we work with kids. I can't show
you slides that are as nice as hers, and then here you come and talk
about "partners" which was the big word on my piece. So I'm going
to be repeating what you heard, and maybe I can just say it just a
little bit different. And then Debra said how her hometown is New
Orleans, and I'm from Gulfport, Mississippi. So we're like 45 minutes
away from each other, our growing up, so we're saying the same thing.
O.K.
Now, just having put all that in context, I will move forward. I am
with the Children's Television Workshop. I'm sure that most of you
know that we have been responsible for the creation of Sesame Street
since 1968. But most of you may not know that we have also been at
the forefront of outreach in public television since 1968. So for
more than 30 years, we have created ancillary materials to extend
the value of television after you've turned it off. And that phrase
I stole from Brett Rogers, but don't tell him that I did that.
The whole reason for having outreach originally was to show people
what Sesame Street was all about. For those of you who are
too young to know, Sesame Street was really, in a sense, the
first children's educational television program, and it started out
on public television back in the days when there was something that
looked like this and was called an antenna. And our job was to go
into the communities and not only tell people about Sesame Street,
how to use it, but also how to attach that round thing to the back
of their televisions. So we have been really involved in community
outreach on a very local, one-to-one basis. We went into the communities
to set up what we considered community television watching, if you
will. For those urban communities where television may not have been
available widely, we would go into community centers and work with
the community organizers to get parents and their children into the
centers to watch the television and show them what they were getting
from Sesame Street and to show them as parents how they could
use television as an educational tool. Fortunately, Sesame Street
became, let's say, modestly successful and we did not need to do that
kind of outreach, so we began to set up programs in other venues.
We were in prisons to help prisoners when their children came to visit.
What could they do with their children as opposed to just sitting
around? Why not talk about Sesame Street? Why not read a book?
And our job was to help them do that. We were on Indian reservations.
We probably worked in all kinds of community organizations to talk
about television as an educational tool. How you as an adult can be
intimate with children, what you can do to help your child on a daily
basis learn more about everything, actually. Well, maybe not everything.
But then we began to concentrate on topics which were not necessarily
directly related to the show. We began to do things like fire safety.
What to do in case of a fire. Some of you may remember the phrase
"Stop, drop and roll." We also understand that our materials need
to evolve. So we've gone from "Stop, drop and roll" to "Get low and
go" and are now working on another iteration of our fire safety tips
to make sure that children get out of the house completely. Many kids
will stop, drop and roll and stay in the house. That's not really
a good idea. So we are trying to help parents to understand that it's
a cute phrase, but let's just get out of there.
We then went on to work with natural hazards. What do you do in case
of a hurricane? What do you do in case of earthquakes? And our whole
idea has been to try to reach children and families wherever they
are. So as women began to work more out of the house, we began to
put together a program that trained child-care providers on how to
use television as an educational tool, a program we call "Sesame Street
Prep". We trained child-care providers using our partners, the public
television stations. We would go to those public television stations
and help them create what you just got through talking about—community
collaborations. How to bring in your governmental agencies. How to
bring in your libraries. How to bring in your health clinics. How
to bring in your child-care providers. How to bring in those organizations
that are working with parents and children, and help them figure out
what they can do with media, what they can specifically with television,
and what they can do specifically with children's television.
We always have worked with partners. We can not do our work alone.
The Muppets are great, but they're not real. Maybe you didn't know
that, but you can't just kind of send them out there. They don't move
by themselves. So we always have to have organizations that are either
helping us, funding us—because unbeknownst to many of you—we
are a nonprofit organization. We are a 501C3, much like many of you.
Even though we have things that get sold, we are a nonprofit organization.
So we need funding sources to help us do what we consider to be public-service
campaigns. So we also want partners who are also distributors, people
who can help us get the information out to the community, to the people
we want to service. And, most importantly, we need partners who are
experts on the topics we want to get information out about. We consider
ourselves experts on how to create something that is educational and
entertaining, but we don't have all the experts in-house about the
topics we want to get across. So we partner with people like the Prudential
Foundation, with Pfizer, with FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Association),
with our public television services, the American Library Association,
the American Lung Association, the Academy of Pediatricians, the National
Association for Education for Young Children, and anybody else who
feels that we can help them get their messages across in an entertaining
way. You've heard that a lot today, that you can't get a point across
if it's not entertaining. They're not going to do what you say just
because you said it was good. And they're not going to just read it
and they're not going to come to you just because you said it's good.
You have to make sure it's exciting and appealing to them. As we work
with public television stations, we also provide them with guidelines
for how to put together the collaborations that I mentioned before.
And we think that that is an important piece of every one of our initiatives.
So in the packages—and I brought a few of the things that we
do—we always include a facilitator's guide. A piece of information
that will help the adult help the children or the parents who are
involved in the initiatives that we're trying to get across.
Today we focus on larger, public-service campaigns around important
topics that we've done some research on, and then found that they're
either trends or that they're critical to the health and welfare of
children between the ages of birth and 12. And we've tried to focus
our energy in five areas: literacy, health and safety, what we're
calling the digital family, special needs, and music and arts. And
as my boss says, "What other topics would there be, Pam?" I don't
know, but these just seem like nice ones.
We have created a program on lead-poisoning prevention. Many of you
might know that this is a big problem, primarily in our urban areas.
So we have produced a campaign or an initiative to help adults know
what they can do to help prevent lead poisoning. What are some very
everyday-you used the word, Myles—teachable moments—that
was ours, but you used it—teachable moments around the issue
of lead poisoning prevention. What happens on a day-to-day basis that
you can help get across. And I have to say that that is an essential
piece of all of our campaigns. What can you do on a day-to-day basis?
What's in your house? What are the kinds of situations that you can
use with children to help get across a very important message?
We also have an initiative on asthma, coping with asthma. Helping
child-care providers cope with the asthmatic child in their care.
So there's an action plan which we help the child-care provider teach
the children. It is a fully—and for the first time a fully —bilingual
project of ours. The videos and the materials are both in English
and in Spanish. And as many of you know, the highest concentration
of asthma in this country is in the African-American and Latino communities.
And so that was one of the reasons we chose to do it.
We have also a project "Sesame Street Goes to the Doctor," which is
to help adults help a child with that first visit to the doctor. None
of you are afraid to go the doctor anymore, but there are children
who are not happy when that comes up. And our job is to help facilitate
that process. We are in the process of what we just launched in February—another
project around literacy—building literacy capacity in children
between the ages of birth and 3. And it was the first time that we've
done a fully adult-focused campaign. And it was also bilingual.
So all of our projects are geared to provide information on essential
topics. They are geared to be appealing to adults and to the children
that we want to service. They are all researched. They are about delivering
messages in entertaining and appealing ways. They require us to have
partners at all levels, and we bring our partners in at the beginning.
We bring together experts at the beginning. And it's about reaching
children and families wherever they are. So we want our materials
to be widely distributed and to be absolutely user-friendly and easy
to use. We are trying very much to get away from having to do one-on-one
training. That's very expensive, as many of you might know. And so
we're trying to have our campaigns be sort of tool kits that can be
....
Panelist: on reserve battery power.
Pam: I am running on reserve battery power. I started on reserve
battery power. And as you can see, it's winding down. So pretty soon
I'll just kind of fall right over. Let me just kind of move past technology,
which is something I just don't quite deal with very well. I wanted
to just point out, because I think I was also supposed to say that
there are challenges to what we do. (There, of course, are none and
this is all very easy and we just get it done, just like that.) But
I think one of the most important things for us has been identifying
the right partner. If you don't have the right partner, and right
can have any number of definitions, depending on what you're doing,
your project is not going to go forward in a very smooth way. If you
have not brought the partner in at the right time, which for us is
in the beginning, you're not going to have a very smooth campaign.
So for me, that's a challenge. Obviously, funding is a challenge.
Distribution is a challenge. And promotion of your campaign or your
project is a challenge. These are all surmountable challenges, but
you need to be aware of them as issues right from the beginning. And
as Debra said also, communication among your partners—many of
us have projects that have multiple partners. It's almost insane,
but you can actually get beyond that if there's constant communication,
full communication, if there's transparency, as they like to say in
our project in South Africa. So what we want to make sure is that
we have the right partners and that our materials are developmentally
appropriate for whomever is going to be receiving them, that they
are at appropriate literacy levels for the adults, and that they use
as best they can whatever technology has to offer. Many of the recipients
of our materials, or many of our target audiences, do not have access
to the Web, do not have access to computers. So we are still doing
print. We are also doing audio and we do video.
I think that tells you more than you want to know about what we do.
Thank you.
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