Focus on Abilities
Wins Television Industry Awards

Focus on Abilities, a local weekly television program hosted by TIRR Senior Vice President Lex Frieden has won a prestigious 2005 Pegasus Award.  The Pegasus Awards are the video industry’s premiere competition for recognition of exemplary work produced by non-broadcast video professionals.

Created by Frieden and his colleagues at TIRR's ILRU program, Focus on Abilities has been supported by the Houston Mayor's Office on Disability and the Mayor's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities.  Produced by Houston's Municipal Channel, a local public access television station, the show is broadcast weekly to a cable audience which exceeds 3 million Time-Warner Cable subscribers and others.

Focus on Abilities uses a talk-show format to engage local, national and international guests and experts on a variety of issues and topics affecting the lives of people with disabilities in the Houston area and beyond.  The Focus show originally started in 1990 and more than 100 episodes have been produced and broadcast to date.

In 1998, the show won a first place award in the Alliance for Community Media’s annual "Hometown Video Festival," the largest and longest running video festival for local cable programming in the northern hemisphere. Judges selected Focus on Abilities as a winner in the talk show category after reviewing entries from more than 1700 stations across the country.

Focus on Abilities was also given a second place programming award in 2005 by the Texas Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (TATOA). The award was based on content, creativity, concept, and technical quality. TATOA is an organization of municipalities, individuals and organizations serving citizens in the development, regulation, and administration of cable television and other telecommunications systems.

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