Lori Takeuchi: The Cooney Center Family

In my 12 years at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center—from 2008 to 2020—I developed the research chops and professional network required to do what I do now as a program director at the National Science Foundation. But what I’m most grateful to the Cooney Center for, and what I believe made me who I am today, are the people I worked with on the fourth floor of 1900 Broadway. These people were family to me. They’re still family to me.

In the summer of 2008, I was living in California when I accepted the position of Cooney Center Fellow. My soon-to-be boss Dixie Ching took it upon herself to find me an apartment in New York and hoofed it up to Manhattan Valley to check out an (illegal) sublet. Hardly anyone owned smartphones back then, so Dixie used a FlipCam (remember those?) to film a narrated walk-through of the Columbus Ave studio I would eventually lease. This act of kinship set the precedent for countless others I would experience throughout my time at the JGCC.

 

Founding Executive Director Michael Levine is largely to blame for setting the familial tone of the Center. He did, after all, talk me into naming my first Cooney Center report Families Matter (2011), a play on the 1990s sitcom that grated on my nerves. Michael also regularly reminded staff that real family comes first whenever our own parents, siblings, partners, or children needed attending to.

Beyond Michael, Lili Toutounas, and Catherine Jhee—the core FTE team for most of my time at the Center—our family was ever-evolving, given the steady stream of fellows, interns, contractors, research scientists, managers, and associates who cycled through for stints of one, two, or three years a time. This was by design. It kept the Center in touch with the latest trends in research and digital media. And it meant I had the pleasure of working with dozens of the most clever, enthusiastic, and mission-oriented young individuals^[1] passing through the JGCC on their ways toward even greater things.

To be part of the Cooney Center family, you had to have a sense of humor. Goofiness must have been some unconscious criterion in our hiring decisions because gather a group of us in any conference room (but usually Grover, Zoe, or Elmo) and we spent half the time joking around. To be part of the family, you also had to be obsessed with food and like to complain about the weather. Or maybe it was just me complaining about the weather and Lili and Catherine humoring me.

We reveled in the city we lived and worked in, doing museum field trips and NYC Fashion Week and croissant taste-offs outside of office hours. We celebrated birthdays and baby showers and farewells at nearby restaurants^[2] followed by too-sweet cupcakes from Magnolia or too-big cookies from Levain that we complained about but ate anyway. We visited the set—taking family portraits in Oscar’s alleyway—and teared up on cue during Sesame’s quarterly all-staff meetings, sitting in the creaky seats at the back of the Society for Ethical Culture’s auditorium. We survived an earthquake together. We traveled together to LA! San Francisco! Corona, Queens! We sailed the mighty Hudson and Acela-ed to DC, fighting motion sickness in tandem.

Of course, we didn’t just play. We worked long hours to make happen what no other organization was doing at the time, motivated by a shared vision of more equitable learning and life outcomes for young children and their families. This vision led to our creating the Families and Media Project in 2012, expanding the JGCC family to include partners in California, Washington, Arizona, New Jersey, and Illinois, which we affectionately referred to as the FAM Fam.^[3]

I left the JGCC in 2020 in the capable hands of Michael Preston, who’s keeping the Center as playful, fresh, and prolific as it’s ever been as it passes through its adolescent years. I wish Michael and the rest of the current crew there best wishes for the Center’s continued success. Feliz Quinceañera, Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and many happy returns.

 

 

 

 

 

Lori Takeuchi spent 12 years at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, where she led its research program and held positions including acting executive director and deputy director. Lori began her career in the children’s media industry at Thirteen/WNET and then spent over a decade designing K12 geoscience software. Lori is currently a program director at the National Science Foundation in its Division of Research on Learning (EDU/DRL), where she manages its STEM media portfolio. She holds board positions at the Oakland YMCA and the FrameWorks Institute and is Noggin’s Scholar-in-Residence.  

 

 

^[1] Aaron Morris, Alan Nong, Alexia Raynal, Allison Mishkin, Amber Levinson, Anna Ly, AnneMarie McClain, Armanda Lewis, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Briana Ellerbe, Caitlin Gonser, Carly Shuler, Carmen Gonzalez, Christina Hinton, Connie Sun, Cynthia Chiong, David Lowenstein, Elisabeth McClure, Gabrielle Santa-Donato, Gabrielle Cayton-Hodges, Glenda Revelle, Ingrid Erickson, Jason Yip, Jenny Ng, Jessica Millstone, Jinny Ree, Kiley Sobel, Kristen Kohm, Laurie Rabin, Marj Kleinman, Meagan Henry, Meryl Alper, Rocio Almanza-Guillen, Sarah Vaala, Tamara Spiewak Toub, Vikki Katz, and Zach Levine

^[2] E.g., Atlantic Grill, Bar Boulud, Boulud Sud, Épicerie Boulud, Shun Lee West, and Indie Cafe

^[3] Alexis Lauricella, Brigid Barron, Carmen Gonzalez, Elisabeth Gee, Ellen Wartella, Katie Headrick Taylor, Reed Stevens, Sinem Siyahhan, Vicky Rideout, and Vikki Katz