Saving Sesame Street

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Jeff Dunn

2014 ALI Fellow
Former President and CEO of HIT Entertainment

Nearing the end of his 2014 fellowship year, Jeff Dunn agreed to become the President and CEO of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational company that produces Sesame Street. Dunn was able to use what he learned at ALI to adjust from running a for-profit company to a nonprofit organization. Under Dunn’s leadership, Sesame Workshop ended eight years of operating losses; has now reached record ratings, revenues, and earnings; and has won another 27 Emmy awards. In 2017, they were awarded a Smithsonian Institute Ingenuity Award and the MacArthur Foundation’s inaugural 100&Change grant—a $100 million prize given to an organization that could tackle and fix a meaningful world problem. In 2018, they won the first-ever Clio Advertising Award for Global Impact, and the LEGO Foundation’s $100 million grant to help the Rohingya refugee children in Bangladesh. Additionally, in 2019, Dunn led the organization to be named, again, to Fast Company’s most innovative companies list, to win a George Foster Peabody Award for institutional excellence, and to win a Kennedy Center Honors Award for its lifetime contributions to American culture.

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Empowering warrior women