Amelia Maiello Hagedorn approached philanthropy from the lens of her formative experiences – daughter of immigrant parents, single mother of four, pre-K teacher for 23 years. Her vision was a transcendent contribution to Long Island.
Her daughter, Lisa Valentine, recalls Amy's natural instincts as a teacher. "I saw her have a command of the classroom ... The kids got her and she really got the kids." To this day, Lisa is connected with alumni of the first class Amy taught – and one alumna says Amy was the reason she herself became a pre-K teacher.
After marrying Horace Hagedorn, the marketing genius behind Miracle-Gro and its eventual merger into Scotts Miracle-Gro, Amy went from working hard to feed four children to accessing a fortune worth tens of millions of dollars. But her core remained unchanged: someone who had known struggle could now use her personal knowledge and newfound wealth to help others through life's rough patches.
Amy and Horace approached the Long Island Community Foundation to set up a fund worth $40 million – the Foundation's largest. But what really made Amy's philanthropy stand out was her focus on systems change. Her calm, grounded determination moved Horace in that direction as well.
Amy and Horace were serving on the Long Island Community Foundation's Advisory Board when ERASE Racism was initiated there in 2001. Amy's ardent support of ERASE Racism over the next 16 years reflected her deep interest in and passion for systems change in order to achieve social justice and equity.
With Amy's support, ERASE Racism has successfully fought housing discrimination and promoted enforcement of fair housing laws and access to affordable housing in high opportunity communities. She was a supporter of our early efforts to investigate and address segregation and inequities in public schools. Partnering with Susan Hagedorn, Amy funded our highly acclaimed documentary, A Tale of Two Schools: Race and Education on Long Island and she then helped to lead our first attempt to use film to educate and motivate the public to care about all of the region's schools, not just one's own district.
Amy also provided scholarship funds to support ERASE Racism's two-day Unravelling Racism Training (URT) program. She often commented that she had been personally transformed by the training and, thus, felt obliged to provide additional funding for others to benefit from the insights provided by URT.
Many organizations benefited from Amy's philanthropy and devoted board service, including Northwell Health. She was a founder and a long-time president of Sustainable Long Island, to which she was especially dedicated.
Amy ultimately decided she wanted her foundation to spend down its money in a limited period of time, seeing large grants as a catalyst of systems change. Her profound and comprehensive understanding of Long Island's needs motivated her to support organizations fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, and other systemic ills. Motivated in part by her roots in an immigrant family, she made the needs of immigrants a core area of her foundation's work.
We at ERASE Racism mourn the passing of a great philanthropist and very special friend. We are privileged to honor Amy Hagedorn posthumously and to have her daughter, Lisa Valentine, accept this award.