I met Alan Hassenfeld, former Hasbro chairman and CEO and unrivalled philanthropist, in the early 1990s, when he and H. Philip West Jr. led a coalition to bring badly needed ethical reform to Rhode Island politics. It was ultimately successful. I discovered then what a unique man he was, along with his family, which had run Hasbro since its founding in the early 1920s by refugees from a part of what is now Poland, who had been subjected to persecution and death by haters of Jews. That appreciation deepened as I got to know Alan personally and discovered a warm, funny, approachable man. He let me inside Hasbro for the reporting that resulted in my first book about him and Hasbro, Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie and the Companies That Make Them. He again opened his life to me while I was writing the sequel, Kid Number One: Alan Hassenfeld and Hasbro.
After leaving the corner office, Alan, in 2008, incorporated The Hassenfeld Family Foundation with an office in Providence and a mission to help children, women, universities, high schools, hospitals, the homeless, Special Olympics, the Marines for Tots Foundation, One Tree Planted, American Friends of the Israel Museum, Population and Development International, The Jerusalem Foundation, and many others. Alan endowed Brown University’s Hassenfeld Child Health Innovation Institute, among numerous other programs, and he received many honorary degrees, including from the University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College, Roger Williams University, Salve Regina University, Bryant College, and Brandeis University. He was a trustee at several schools, including Brown University, plus the University of Pennsylvania and Deerfield Academy, both of which he graduated from. He received humanitarian and lifetime achievement awards and was deeply involved in efforts to support Miriam Hospital, which opened in 1926 after Jewish women seeking care for the indigent sick raised $80,000 in an unprecedented door-to-door campaign. For decades, Alan and I communicated by email when we could not be together in person. In our final email exchange, just days before he passed in his sleep in London, he signed off, as he did with all of his friends and supporters: “Big hug… me.” I will miss Alan deeply, as will everyone in his orbit and beyond, but I am heartened by his memory and legacy.
Let me close with his own words, spoken in 2018 at a public forum hosted by Neil Steinberg. Asked the guiding principle behind his philanthropy, Alan said: “Any time any of us sees a child who’s not smiling, who’s going through problems — if we’re able to turn that grimace into a smile, that makes your heart just absolutely feel so good. What makes me happiest is trying to be creative in philanthropy and trying to make sure that we’re making a difference, because too often I think we give but we don’t think necessarily what the end goal is going to be. And so for me, the end goal is how do we bring sunshine where there’s darkness.”
To read Hassenfeld’s obituary and the many tributes that poured in, follow the link at gwaynemiller.com