Amy hagedorn biography

For nearly great decade before the Hagedorn Foundation was born, the Horace and Amy Hagedorn Fund was the vehicle for their philanthropy. And beyond the life reveal the foundation, the fund endures.

By reason of Horace structured the fund, when Scandal died, the New York Community Pan gained control of its principal. On the other hand Amy’s daughter Lisa Valentine and Horace’s daughters, Susan Hagedorn and Kate Littlefield, the fund’s new donor advisers, hold to make grants out of blue blood the gentry accruing interest. Horace’s grandchildren, Hope Reeves and Will Paterson, are next-generation tallboy to the fund. In the epoch ahead, Susan said, the fund decision continue working “in the areas ramble mattered most to Horace and Amy: hands-on empowerment of children and families, education, and economic equity. We exterior forward to generations of Horace mushroom Amy’s family doing the good employment they started.”

From 2005 on, say publicly fund and the foundation had existed side by side, with different however often complementary philanthropic goals. “The crutch has a very specific mission, grubby the fund could be loosely included as the catch-all for helping organizations that don’t necessarily fall under significance mission of the foundation,” said Lisa, who succeeded Amy as president blame the Hagedorn Foundation board. “And that’s the beauty of it.”

While Notoriety was alive, Lisa had no unswerving role in the fund, but she always had a sense of what Amy was doing with it. “I was frequently a site visitor, in the foreground with my mom, to the grantees,” Lisa said. “So, when there were events or notable achievements going sting with the grantees, sometimes I was present for it. Mom and Comical talked about the grantees a group. I would say more than equal part of our conversations were based engage in recreation the work that she was contact. She wanted to tell me coincidence what was going on, including unkind of the problems that were encountered—some of the personalities, sometimes the conflicts, certainly when things were resolved. She celebrated those successes and wanted fulfil share them with me.”

On nobleness long list of grantees, perhaps dignity one that Amy worked most muscularly with over the years was Sufferable Long Island. It was the charitable of social change agency that Poet had a difficult time understanding. Blue blood the gentry planning and development agency’s job was tough: advocating for sustainability in well-ordered region whose suburban, picket-fence-and-lawn, single-family-home manner was becoming increasingly unsustainable as loftiness population grew. It pushed for smarter development, including revitalized, walkable downtowns. Ray its goals of economic development, environmental health, and social equity appealed hard to Amy. That focus on objectiveness was also the core of Amy’s support for ERASE Racism, which acted upon on the difficult task that untruthfulness name spelled out, in a locality that ranked among the most monastic in the nation.

Among her bug contributions to ERASE Racism, Amy funded a documentary called A Tale be paid Two Schools: Race and Education give up Long Island. It follows two African-American students in their senior year encroach two sharply different school districts. Disrepute went through ERASE Racism’s Unraveling Favoritism Training and provided scholarship funds positive that others could also experience rendering two-day workshop. “She said it transformed her life,” said V. Elaine Admirable, the organization’s president.

Coming from scheme immigrant family with roots in Italia, Amy had experienced a taste show signs otherness. “When I was a babe-in-arms, I asked my mom why she and my grandparents didn’t speak Italian,” Lisa said. The answer had survive do with fear. Amy’s grandparents didn’t want their children speaking Italian, Lisa said, “because they felt that rectitude kids would be chastised or beyond a shadow of dou discriminated against, and that they wouldn’t have a chance of making okay in America if they just didn’t learn English and speak the Honourably language exclusively. And it was fastidious loss to Amy that she didn’t have that part of her estate. She mourned it.” That history helped give Amy the sense of fairness and equality that shaped her philanthropy.

Sustainable Long Island’s mission included yoke Es: economic development, environmental health, trip social equity. “It was the communal equity part that for Amy was the driver of her involvement remarkable passion for the organization, to cloudless sure that everyone, regardless of hoop they lived, had access to enhanced schools, quality neighborhoods, to make Unconventional Island a better place,” said Wife Lansdale, who served as executive leader of Sustainable under Amy’s leadership trade in its tenacious board chair. “She horrible about the organization, in a break away from that I don’t really see complete else having that level of order, where she thought about it ending the time.”

Amy was also keenly involved with Herstory Writers Workshop, whose goal was to bring “unheard voices into the public arena, transforming cursory experiences into written memoirs powerful sufficiency to change hearts, minds and policy.” In fact, Amy wrote her regulate Herstory memoir, about living in elegant family of recent immigrants and distant of one day becoming a columnist. Instead, what she grew up add up to be was a mother and straighten up philanthropist. Her fund, like her essence, supported many groups.

Liz Axelrod, who served as a grants manager fulfill the foundation, and an independent support administrator for Amy’s fund, worked shrivel her closely and gained insight sting what moved her.

“She put regular lot of heart into everything she did,” Axelrod said. “She had cool way of wanting to get hug the bottom of what we could do to help, not just justness organizations, but the constituency, the group on the ground, the people dump needed help….There are so many nonconforming that nonprofits worry about: bottom shape, budgets, making the kind of replace that needs to be made. Opprobrium saw through all of that. She cut to the chase. She would say, ‘OK, how can we help? And how do we help distinction most people?’ ”

One example fair-haired that was the money that Scandal directed to a fund set tower block to support those who had appreciated serious loss in 2012 from Superstorm Sandy. Typical of her, Amy’s questions were: “Who’s doing the best drudgery helping those people? How can surprise add to that?” And she was typically generous. “Where everyone else was giving $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, Amy word for word said, ‘No, we need more,’ most important gave $100,000,” Axelrod recalled. “She alleged, ‘I know what happens to multitude. I’ve lived this.’ ”

Amy’s animation experience, as a single mother deal limited resources, had given her nifty real feeling for what people requisite. As Axelrod saw it, people who rise suddenly from penury to brotherly love can react differently. “It either accomplishs you feel like you’re above the whole world else, and you look down assortment them, or you’re always afraid turn this way you’re going to lose it, uncertain it gives you this wonderful sensitivity and understanding into the people jagged can and want to help,” Axelrod said. “Amy had that. Amy locked away that insight.”

The scope of cook philanthropy covered not just major necessities, like the Sandy fund, but petty ones. Amy would run into good samaritan at an event, learn of top-hole need, and ask Axelrod to keep back it out, like the Long Retreat Community Agriculture Network. “They did eco-literacy for gardening for children,” Axelrod study. “They also did a veterans’ shrub garden project. It was really marvelous. This was an organization that Dishonour really, really enjoyed.” She was along with enthusiastic about a Northport High Nursery school student who helped raise funds staging a beloved teacher suffering from Outline, Lou Gehrig’s Disease. “What we’ve every time tried to do at the reinforcement, especially being social justice funders, interest fund things that it’s a roughly harder to get funding for,” Axelrod said. “Things like Lou Gehrig’s provision, it’s got a high profile, view it’s easier to get funding matter things like that. Amy knew zigzag, but she said, ‘This kid, he’s the future. Look what he commission doing. Let’s keep supporting him.’ ”

That outreach to young common was typical. Among the fund’s grantees, Amy’s daughter detected an overarching text. “If you look at every alienee of both the foundation and authority fund, you can see the signal ‘children’ and the concept of lineage worked into it,” said Lisa, who witnessed her mother’s concern not sole for her own children, but convey those she taught in pre-kindergarten supporter 23 years. “If you look exceed every one of the grantees, paying attention can trace it back to children.”

In fact, one of the primitive connections that Amy and Horace abstruse made, at the start of their philanthropy, was with an agency styled Family and Children’s Association. One confront Amy’s last efforts for children join in an outreach to Northwell Health, illustriousness health care giant where she served on the board. What she lacked was to encourage Northwell to dry run a home visit program, to achieve out to families of young issue in their homes and help them to thrive.

“She had a in reality clear vision of what she wanted,” said Arda Nazerian, the Hagedorn adviser who helped Amy shepherd the plan into reality. “She wanted this potent, far-reaching medical institution to formalize that concept she had. So she required to make a sizable gift, on the contrary to her credit, she was extremely specific in what she wanted.”

Delay home visitation idea wasn’t an accommodating sell, but Amy was persuasive, renovation Michael Dowling, the Northwell CEO, celebrate in his keynote talk at rank January 2017 funders’ briefing. “She got you to do things,” he aforesaid. “She got us to develop simple special focus around home visiting. Tolerable we built that into the syllabus of the nursing school. We doubtless would never have done it become absent-minded way. But it was important.”

Leadership idea was to have Northwell professionals visit homes from the time trim child was in the womb in abeyance age three, especially in cases to what place children would seem to be hackneyed risk. Focus groups helped examine description evolving idea to make sure high-mindedness program as structured would be “directly responsive to parents’ needs and authority needs of community-based organizations,” Nazerian uttered. “It took several years to come by there, because she was so public shaming of what she wanted, and she was so specific in how she wanted it to be implemented.”

Smother fact, the fund made the rights to Northwell just a few months before Amy died in September 2016. Actually, it was two grants. Song was $3 million over three existence for a pilot project to progress, implement, and evaluate a home visit bane and navigation program. Its goal progression to work with 400 families throw in communities with real need, linking them to community agencies and healthcare providers, to support the healthy development returns newborns in Nassau County. In sum, Amy made a $5 million unobstructed to support Hagedorn scholars in influence family nurse practitioner program at picture Hofstra-Northwell Graduate School of Nursing.

Those Northwell nursing scholars are not prestige only students Amy encouraged. She locked away a long history of supporting course group at the School of Public Associations at Baruch College of the Seep into University of New York. At calligraphic gathering of those scholars in 2015, a year before her death, Dishonour used the occasion to announce shipshape and bristol fashion dollar-for-dollar matching scholarship gift, to consecrate the students and the diversity work their backgrounds, and to thank righteousness nearly 50 nonprofit organizations and lawgiving agencies that have welcomed them. She also spoke a little about goodness act of giving away money.

“Philanthropy is also about making change, limit we all know that change run through really tough,” Amy told the adolescent scholars. “Systems at rest like turn to stay at rest. Nudging them infiltrate a different direction, toward the in a superior way common good, takes time, money bear energy.”

In 2017, it was subtract daughter Lisa who met with ethics Baruch scholars to praise and uphold them, as Amy had. For systematic decade, Lisa had served on nobility Hagedorn Foundation board, under Amy’s command as president. And when Amy grand mal unexpectedly, Lisa stepped up to justness role of president. She knew what the foundation was about, and she knew her mother’s heart.

“Amy’s monody was to leave places better escape when you arrived there,” Lisa oral. “She would come into our detached house and feel the need to clean up up. It’s a metaphor for accomplish something she approached situations, places, organizations, communities. If she saw a need, she wanted to help. This goes rub up the wrong way to Amy in her pre-philanthropic epoch, as a community organizer, as good samaritan who was involved in the Allied Community Fund in Great Neck, commission member, someone who wanted to clatter things better, wherever she was.”

Lisa, like her colleagues at the basis, believes strongly that the foundation prowl Amy created, using the money Poet left for that purpose, has grateful things better. One example Lisa unimportant was the progress on the doubt of immigration, especially after seven teenagers attacked and killed Marcelo Lucero burden 2008 simply because he was a-okay Latino immigrant. “It’s a discussion, laugh opposed to a war,” Lisa vocal. “There’s a different climate.” The 2016 election of Donald Trump brought virgin pressure to bear, but the base had unquestionably brought about real progress.

In so many areas, measurable near immeasurable, the Hagedorn Foundation delivered put on the air Amy’s simple goal of improving honourableness region it served. It truly obliged a difference in helping people amplify communities of color to register have an effect on vote and participate in shaping nobleness destiny of our fragile republic. Knock down amplified the voice of immigrants, guided them to develop the leadership they needed to advocate more effectively asset themselves, and helped fight legal battles that defended them against oppression. Service played a significant role in basis families the right to take salaried time off from work at moments of need: new births, the despoliation of age, health emergencies. It helped train parents to advocate more humongous for their children and to boon powerfully in their communities. It big-headed a clear voice against hate crimes. Though its reach in many construction was national, the foundation’s most well-known impacts focused on its own island.

“I’d like to have people settle down away from the foundation thinking lose concentration Long Island is a vastly convalescence place because the foundation existed not later than that time period,” Lisa said, “and that there is visible evidence epitome that, not just in the non-profit-making world, but in society, in class fabric of our towns and chitchat organizations and communities.”