An Important Passing You Should Know About
Lloyd Morrissette died. He passed away earlier this year.
My guess is you don't know who that is. I never met him. But he played a huge role in philanthropy in two different ways. And it's worth noting his passing.
If you do know Lloyd, you most likely know him as he partnered with the Children's Television Workshop to create the famous long-running kids’ show, Sesame Street, that taught most of us our letters, to count, and how to treat others. The vision was that education should be available to all. And it should be easy to learn. That partnership and PBS brought Ernie and Bert, Oscar the Grouch, Grover, and many others to our living rooms and helped us to be ready for school and life. Both PBS and the Children’s Television Networks are non-profits that use philanthropy to change the world.
But he had another role that was far more important to philanthropy. For 30 years, Lloyd was the president of the John and Mary Markle Foundation. Obviously, a much less glamorous role but may be more impactful than even Sesame Street. The Markel Foundation has changed the way in which communications occur in the United States. It's all about promoting access to information and the idea of free speech without censorship or regulation. In some ways, his thought processes were a prelude to the Internet as we know it today.
The Markle Foundation changed the way in which communication occurred by offering grants to things no one wanted to fund. One was a group called the Action for Children's Television that provided far less violence and crass programming for children. They also provided funding to show congressional hearings, informational local television programming, and enhanced content on cable access with local cable stations across the country. Markle also funded many different associations that promoted communication to the masses, including for-profit ventures like CNN in the 1992 presidential election to better inform the public about the critical issues of the day.
We take access to information, both bad and good, for granted with the internet, streaming services, cable TV, etc. That wasn’t the case for many years. Someone needed to be the pioneer to access….enter Lloyd Morrisette.
For me, Big Bird was a special friend as a child. He was caring. He listened. He was empathetic. He communicated with me and with many others. That communication was the hallmark of a very quiet, almost hidden individual who we lost earlier this year. In a time when communication is both more rampant and more challenging, Lloyd Morrisette opened the door to communication as we know it today.
