“Your generosity has transformed my life,” wrote current School of Public Affairs graduate student Angelo Cabrera (MPA ’13) to Amy Hagedorn (’58). Cabrera, an immigrant student who is the first in his family to go to college, received support in 2011–12 through the Hagedorn Graduate Scholarship. That support allowed him and the Bronx-based nonprofit he and School of Public Affairs Professor Robert C. Smith lead, MASA-MexEd Inc., to enter an international competition for projects seeking to promote meaningful, sustainable social change for Mexicans living in Mexico and abroad.
Cabrera’s Mexican Mentorship Project was awarded a top 40 prize in the Iniciativa Mexico competition. Chosen from 57,000 proposals, Cabrera’s won 1.5 million Mexican pesos to build the organization’s capacity to promote educational attainment among Mexicans living in New York City.
Hagedorn, herself a community activist, was pleased to learn of the impact of her gift on so many. In spring 2009, she donated $1 million to the Baruch Means Business Campaign “to create scholarships to encourage kids to become engaged civically with the city and their neighborhoods.”
Scholarship recipient and scholarship donor are so similarly wired and inspired that either Cabrera or Hagedorn could have said the following:
“Giving voice to people who were not heard from before is the greatest challenge and the greatest reward” (by the way, Hagedorn said this of her gift to Baruch).
—Diane Harrigan
Update: NBC Latino News named Angelo Cabrera one of 2012’s Top Latinos with a Heart for his work with MASA-MexEd.