How Much Good Can $100 Million Do? Sesame Street and IRC Put a Big Bet to the Test

How much can a $100 million grant solve a massive problem? That was the guiding question behind the 2018 grant competition led by the MacArthur Foundation. Five years later, the grant maker is assessing its big bet, called 100&Change, and claiming it has paid off.

Usually when foundations start a big, new program, they direct grants to dozens of nonprofits working on a similar issue, whether it is climate policy, homelessness, or criminal justice. But with 100&Change, the MacArthur Foundation decided to hold a competition and plow the entire grant into a single winning project in an attempt to supercharge a nonprofit solution.

Its first $100 million award went to a six-year collaboration between the International Rescue Committee and Sesame Workshop to help refugee children in the Middle East. The IRC, founded in 1933, helps people affected by crises in more than 40 countries; Sesame Workshop began as the Children’s Television Workshop in the late 1960s and now broadcasts shows in 150 countries. MacArthur awarded another $100 million grant in 2021 to Community Solutions to reduce homelessness in 75 U.S. towns and cities and plans to run another competition next year.

Looking at some of the early results of the IRC-Sesame Workshop project, John Palfrey, MacArthur’s president, is convinced that taking chances with such a large commitment was worth it.

“If philanthropy doesn’t act as society’s risk capital, we’re making a terrible mistake,” he says.

(The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)

The effort to help refugee children in the Middle East was a gamble, Palfrey and others say. While traditional humanitarian assistance programs tend to go toward providing medications and basic necessities, MacArthur decided to back a nonprofit partnership that addressed something many consider to be touchy-feely — how preschoolers can recognize and regulate their emotions.

That’s where Basma, Jad, Cookie Monster, and Grover come in.

The nonprofits worked up an early-childhood development curriculum based on Sesame Street with additional Arabic-speaking Muppet characters like Basma and Jad to appeal to children in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The show, called Ahlan Simsim, Arabic for “Welcome, Sesame,” has been viewed by 27 million children throughout the region, including 2 million children in the targeted countries who have used materials based on the show in their school lessons and in lessons with their caregivers, according to Sesame Workshop.

Ahlan Simsim was designed for the nearly 3 million Syrian children whose families were displaced by the ongoing civil war and for their new classmates to help them become more welcome hosts. The audience is a potential lost generation of refugees. They might fall behind in their education and not have a chance to develop emotional responses to traumas like the death of family members or leaving home to live in a resettlement camp, or lesser entanglements, like when a classmate doesn’t want to share a toy.

So instead of focusing solely on early reading and number skills, the shows use the Sesame puppets to teach children to identify and deal with their emotions. Each season presents a different theme, such as resilience in the face of Covid, developing a positive sense of self, and acting with kindness toward others.

This approach has been a success because it goes beyond rebroadcasting a dubbed version of Sesame Street in the region, says Hirokazu Yoshikawa, co-director of the New York University Global TIES for Children program, which conducted several studies on the show. The real innovation of the Sesame Street-IRC project, Yoshikawa says, has been using mobile apps and extensive person-to-person counseling with children’s caregivers to ensure emotional growth was a family activity. Many parents of refugee children did not think their kids would have access to preschool in their new countries, Yoshikawa says,

“Having the preschool teacher actually talk with caregivers three times a week to guide them through the activities and to troubleshoot was an extraordinary opportunity,” Yoshikawa says. “They took it really seriously.”

The use of mobile devices in early childhood education is particularly promising, Yoshikawa and others say, because it suggests the approach could be replicated in other refugee crises, where aid workers have difficulty gaining access to families on the move.

Ryan Heffernan, Sesame Workshop

Ahlan Simsim’s success in the Middle East has prompted Sesame Workshop to roll out similar programming in March in another war-torn country, Ukraine, in conjunction with a Ukrainian educational television company. And its Spanish WhatsApp version, Sésamo, was launched in 2021 to help Venezuelan refugee children in host countries Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. The nonprofit plans to develop videos that can be easily dubbed into various languages and sent as emergency kits to aid workers and educators in areas where disasters or armed conflict create new refugees.

But it is far from a sure thing that the programming, and the beneficial outcomes it promises, will be as effective everywhere. The countries introduced to Ahlan Simsim are “relatively middle class” using the standards of humanitarian crises, says David Miliband, IRC’s president. In the four Arabic-speaking countries where Ahlan Simsim is airing, participating classrooms were wired to air shows or a high percentage of families had the technology to play show. That’s not the case in less digitally enabled countries like the Central African Republic or South Sudan that are experiencing refugee crises, Miliband said.

And despite documented gains some children made in being able to identify and respond appropriately to their emotions when exposed to Basma, Jad, and the gang, it’s unknown how those positive results will translate when the generation of children ages. Follow-up research might determine the long-term impacts of the show, Miliband says, but the nonprofits currently do not have funding for a longitudinal study.

Still, Miliband is confident that children taught how to recognize and regulate difficult emotions can carry those lessons for the rest of their lives.

“I hope these kids do remember that this was their first teacher, one which gave them relief during a traumatic situation,” he says.

Another $100 Million

To meet world humanitarian needs like food, shelter, and medicine would require $54.8 billion a year, according to recent projections by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Governments and philanthropy have committed only about $18.5 billion, and of that, education is only about 2 percent of the total.

Prioritizing the emotional health of young children as part of their education has gained acceptance in recent years, but it still hasn’t been mainstreamed, according to Kristen Gelsdorf, a professor who co-directs the University of Virginia Humanitarian Collaborative and who was not involved in assessing the 100&Change work. While the MacArthur grant was small compared with the scale of the problem — there are currently more than 108 million displaced people in the world and the number is growing — Gelsdorf said the studies of Ahlan Simsim show promising results and may make the approach an easier sell to other donors and relief agencies.

Investing in children’s well-being at an early age, she says, can make it more likely they will grow up in good physical and mental health, have access to good nutrition, be able to pursue economic opportunities, and play a positive role more generally later in life.

“Irreversible harms are done if you don’t address the needs of those young kids and their caregivers,” she says.

There are signs that Sesame Workshop and IRC’s joint approach is making headway among other donors and nonprofits. The LEGO Foundation added another $100 million to help Sesame Workshop with the Syrian refugee programming and expand it to Bangladesh in response to the Rohingya refugee crisis. Other international nonprofits, Mercy Corps and Save the Children, have joined to expand the program in Iraq, with the help of an $11 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Sherrie Westin, Sesame Workshop’s president, says the organization is in discussions with a foundation that has offered a “significant” matching grant, which could expand the show to other regions. Because Ahlan Simsim had the “luxury” of being able to measure its short-term impact and had several years to develop in-country programming, Westin believes the approach has been validated for other donors that might have been less likely to devote a lot of cash to the emotional well-being of refugee children.

“I don’t expect to get another hundred million,” she says. “But I do think we can bring in others who are interested.”

Assessing Children’s Emotions

The IRC and Sesame Workshop’s MacArthur application called for studies on the short-term impact of Ahlan Simsim by the New York University’s Global Ties for Children research center. Some of the assessments had to be recalibrated because of the Covid pandemic. The lessons were provided over five years instead of the intended four, and surveys of in-class use of Ahlan Simsim in Jordan had to be changed when the pandemic forced the schools to go remote.

NYU researchers completed several randomized, controlled trials across the region with more than 7,000 subjects. They found that students who were exposed to the programming — and whose caregivers received calls from aid workers with child-development expertise — showed progress in identifying their feelings and developing healthy responses. In an 11-week remote early-learning program in Lebanon, for example, children showed the same developmental progress as those attending regular school over the course of a year, and a significant number of caregivers reported spanking their children less.

After seeing the Sesame characters, including Jad — who is not specifically a refugee but is “new to the neighborhood” dealing with strong emotions — children who were surveyed indicated they were able to respond to anger or sadness in an appropriate way.

“They were able to spontaneously generate coping strategies that were targeted in the curriculum, like focusing on your breath when you are experiencing a strong emotion,” says Yoshikawa of NYU Global Ties center.

Introducing Foreign Concepts?

Nonprofits that export a popular children’s show coupled with a Western psychological approach to trauma should tread lightly in the Muslim world, some warn.

Emotions like anger and jealousy are universal, says Abeer Ramadan-Shinnawi, a U.S.-based education consultant who specializes in Arab and Muslim students. But the way a person is expected to express anger or jealousy, she says, can vary across cultures. A Western approach that stresses the individual rather than the communal can go crosswise with a Muslim worldview, she says.

“Students may not be willing to share how they feel or what they’re going through because they’ve been raised and taught that those aren’t things we express openly with the public or with strangers, even if they are people who are trying to help them,” she says.

Dawn Chatty, a professor emerita at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, is also wary. A wiser use of the grant, she says, would have been to focus on domestic violence in the region rather than introducing foreign concepts to vulnerable children.

“Western developmental psychology is about talking about the past as a way of healing,” she says. “But that’s not how the Arab world works. It’s very likely that parents don’t want to open up to the children the trauma that they themselves experienced, the houses that they lost, the business that they lost.”

The characters and scripts were developed in consultation with regional educators, psychologists, and creative talent, says Sesame Workshop’s Westin.

The show “not only reflects children’s culture and language but also has characters and storylines they can identify with,” she says.

The NYU Global Ties center report explained that Sesame Workshop collaborated with Jordan Pioneers, an Amman-based production company, and local language advisers to craft the show’s lessons and vocabulary but said “additional steps might be helpful to better understand the “emotion vocabulary” and concepts that are most meaningful to children and families in this context.”

The IRC’s Miliband says the question of whether it is appropriate to use a Western media product to provide humanitarian relief misses the point. Government agencies across the region have incorporated the use of the show in their educational budgets, and moms and dads have given parental approval, he says.

“Our greatest asset is that our clients, the people on the ground, want the services,” he says. “That’s the ultimate proof.”

Sesame Workshop and IRC leaders hope to fine-tune their approach and continue to offer it in refugee settings around the world. Their hope is that the 100&Change experiment will validate early-childhood development as a key to any humanitarian emergency response.

Unicef, the United Nations agency dedicated to children, is taking on the approach. The bulk of the roughly $5 billion a year Unicef spends on programs goes to the provision of vaccines, food, and health care, says Benjamin Perks, the agency’s head of campaigns and advocacy.

But, he says, the agency is increasingly providing support to parents and relatives of young children through its Caring for the Caregiver campaign. The idea, he says, is to promote attachment within families — something he calls the “new vaccine.”

“If we want to prevent cycles of conflicts, we have to reduce aggression at the source. And the source of aggression is related to the emotional and social development of the human being from day one.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.