The growing partnership between the West Side YMCA and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center makes so much sense that it almost seems predestined. Not only do both institutions put children and families at the heart of their missions, but they’re located just steps from each other on the same block of West 63rd Street in Manhattan (renamed Sesame Street in honor of the show’s 50th anniversary in 2019). Nevertheless, it took the internet and a meeting at a local coffeeshop to develop a real partnership among the neighbors.
In early 2024, YMCA board member Tyler Deane-Krantz reached out to Catherine Jhee, the Cooney Center’s senior director of strategic communications. He had a simple question: We’re right down the street from each other. What can we do together?
Plenty, it turns out. Over the past two years, children in the YMCA’s early childhood program have previewed and shared feedback on Sesame Street content, and kids in the afterschool programs have gathered multiple times to co-design new edtech alongside researchers and tech developers as part of the Cooney Center’s Sandbox. The latter collaboration has given the Center a ready source of invaluable insights for improving children’s media and edtech tools and given the kids served by the Y a chance to have their opinions heard and valued, among other opportunities.
“We really focus on access and opportunity in everything that we do,” said Kathryn Colglazier, the YMCA’s vice president of field operations. She said the Cooney Center partnership gives the children they serve, “the opportunity to have a voice and the opportunity to be seen, and access to a world of researchers and technology developers that they may not be familiar with.”
According to Jhee, the fit between the YMCA was so perfect and their proximity so convenient, that she couldn’t believe a working partnership had taken this long to develop. “It was clear that their commitment to children’s development, equity, and community are values that are closely aligned to ours,” she said. “I knew immediately that we should be working with children and families at the Y.”
Building Strong Community Relationships
“Recruiting for co-design can be very tricky, and the Y is a dream community partnership,” said Allisyn Levy, senior manager of partnerships and planning for the Cooney Center. Levy helps coordinate the co-design sessions for edtech developers in the Sandbox initiative, which also includes expert consultations in learning sciences and workshops on universal design for learning and learner variability. Every product team is looking for co-design insights from different groups of children, such as specific age ranges, family backgrounds, struggling readers, or English Language Learners.
Levy shares these particulars with the YMCA’s director of special projects, Crystal Rivera, who reaches out to the YMCA’s programs and the communities they serve to discuss the opportunity.
“They serve such a diverse group of families,” said Levy. “And because they know their kids so well, they can identify and reach out directly to invite families to participate.”
Rivera also recommends the optimal locations (either at the Y itself, at a partner school, or at another location), timing, and other details to make the sessions as workable and productive as possible for the students, parents, and design partners.
“The connection that we’ve built with the team at the JGCC is very important,” said Rivera. “Every conversation we have is very intentional. We spend a lot of time just going back and forth on whether this is the right co-design opportunity for our families.
Meanwhile, staff from the Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop have volunteered for YMCA events like Healthy Kids Day and donated school supplies, and edtech developers have made time to speak with students about their careers, as they did with older students at one of the YMCA’s career readiness sessions.
To date, children from YMCA programs around New York City have collaborated on co-design sessions with more than half a dozen edtech developers, including LeapFrog, iCivics, Khan Academy, and ExploreK12. The co-design sessions are meant to be fun, while also driving serious design decisions in the edtech.
“Having kids who are comfortable in their own skin, want their voices to be heard and to share what their learning experiences are like is an incredible opportunity,” said Deanne Kells, director of learning experience design for ExploreK12. “By allowing the participants’ imaginations and intellectual creativity to shine, the co-design sessions offered invaluable insights into what makes children love reading and want to keep growing as readers.”
“This is a chance for kids and families to have an impact and shape technology that could be used by people all over the world, by treating the kids as equal design partners,” said Levy. “We’re always looking to offer opportunities to kids who might not otherwise have them, and the Y is an amazing partner in that regard, because that’s kind of their whole mission, too.”
More Than Good Neighbors
“Community partnerships are essential to the Y’s efforts to strengthen health and well-being for every New Yorker,” said Colglazier. Some recent examples include co-hosting career workshops and basketball clinics with the Jr. Knicks and assembled personal care kits with Bloomberg Philanthropies. “We know that we could not do what we do without the community’s support.”
Nevertheless, compared to the YMCA’s other research-connected collaborations, the relationship with the JGCC has become something more than the typical one or two-day affair. “At this point, the roots are getting deeper and deeper,” Colglazier said, “and it’s really becoming part of our basic operating protocols.”
Plus, the kids love it. According to Rivera, many of the children recruited for co-design sessions may struggle in the classroom or, at the very least, are wary of school-adjacent activities.
“But as soon as they walk in, there’s this large piece of paper on the floor, and they all sit down and just have a conversation,” she said. “The children feel heard, seen, and connected to this work.”
The sessions are fun and playful. But the adults in the room value what the children, their co-designers, have to say and suggest, and the children understand this.
“It’s a space, and this is increasingly rare, where all we want is for children to be themselves, and to be truly authentic in their reactions,” said Colglazier, “and so it’s great to be able to create that opportunity for them.”
Sometimes, that’s meant running bilingual co-design sessions when children and families needed that support to fully share their ideas and opinions. The feedback from parents has also been positive. For example, after a couple of co-design sessions with Cali (formerly Cali’s Books), which combines paper books with screen-free technology for interactive reading experiences, several parents reported that their children were more into reading than they were before.
A parent of a 4th grader who participated in recent co-design sessions at the YMCA with ExploreK12 said, “He could not stop talking about his ideas for the product, as well as new ideas the session generated about projects he wanted to start and new concepts he wanted to explore.”
Colglazier said they have started exploring these opportunities with families served by other YMCAs in the greater New York City area. “Each of our communities is different and unique,” she said, “and we would love to be able to expand this partnership to reach those families and those children so their voices can also be heard.”
