Through July 4, The Post, in conjunction with the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, is featuring US citizens explaining what the American dream means to them in 2026 — including Matt Proulx, a senior vice president at Hasbro who grew up in Rhode Island.
Everyone deserves a chance in life. Everybody. No matter what your background is, no matter what your upbringing is, you deserve a chance. Now, it’s up to you what you do and make of that chance.
I’m actually one of 13 kids. My parents adopted 11 children. We were a foster family as well, and we had over 250 foster kids come through the house … in some cases, there’s a lot of hurt and pain that I’ve seen some of these children go through. At some point in time, they’re able to break it. Sometimes it happens later, sometimes it happens earlier. And those children that … were able to move past the hurt, they’re the ones who have actually had a great deal of success.
My parents started off as a temporary respite household [for] kids that had to be taken out of their houses due to bad situations, before they found a permanent family or a semi-permanent family. Over the years, our family developed into being a therapeutic household — basically all the kids that would fail out of [other] foster families. So we always ended up with the most challenging of all the situations. When I look back at some of the stories, you see the worst that humanity has to give and can do. But at the same time, the wonderful pieces of what humanity can do as well.
A couple months before my dad passed away, my mom and dad made a decision to adopt three more children who were siblings. And if my parents didn’t adopt them, they were gonna get broken up and split into different families. And so my parents, even though we knew that my dad was gonna pass away from cancer, it was the right moral thing to do — to keep these kids together.
And they’re actually thriving. Doing incredibly well … In foster homes, it’s [always the question of] ‘Can you break the cycle?’ And if you have a chance to break [a cycle] that just impacts generation upon generation.
The American Dream? I live it every day. I literally had nothing. Came from dirt. I always say we never had two nickels to rub together, but we figured it out and the house was always full of love.
And I look what I have now. And the ability to give that back to people — that is it. It’s being to continue to advance your life and, to be quite frank, leave the world a better place than [how] you found it.
The American Dream Video Project showcases real stories that illuminate pathways to opportunity. Featured at the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream (MCAAD), this series is part of the Center’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. MCAAD is Washington, DC’s newest cultural institution, offering interactive exhibits and stories about achieving the American Dream. For more information, visit mcaad.org.
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