Good on Hasbro for recognizing youth trying to make a difference, but their method of recognizing them is downright laughable for a major corporation talking up their commitment to compassion and positive change in the world, and comes of as a blatant PR effort.

A $1000 scholarship is going to do nearly nothing these days, especially for someone for whom education is already an economic difficulty. It won't even cover a year's worth of textbooks in many programs. Dropping ten grand on scholarships total is basically not even enough to put one person through a year of post-secondary schooling these days. It's better than nothing, but only marginally.

And on top of that, $500 donation to a non-profit of their choice (presumably their own charities)? That's again, effectively nothing for a company whose net profit was over $400million in north america last year alone. $5000 in charitable donations represents 0.001% of those yearly profits. They probably spent more than that just on plane fares to send reps to NYCC. Combine that with the fact that many of the children they recognized have started efforts or organizations that rely heavily on products Hasbro itself produces, including games and puzzles (Kid Caregivers, Action for Distraction), dolls (Zoe's Dolls), and sporting goods (GOALS), and Hasbro is in a position to provide much more aid, even with unsold stock that's just likely to be sent to liquidation or disposed of at a loss anyway (or they could encourage distributors down their supply chain to do the same). Maybe Hasbro's helping these organizations with a lot more aid than is mentioned here, but if they aren't, they definitely could be.

Like, I don't want to come down too hard on Hasbro for doing something demonstrably good and helpful (and Hasbro certainly does a lot of other charitable efforts worthy of applauding), but shit, for an organization their size, go big, or at least have the grace to not try and milk a small gesture for all the PR you can.