A quick survey of the Dodge staff revealed we’re reading a wide variety of books and articles this summer – some hot off the presses, some oldies-but-goodies. Take a look at our list below. Are there any favorites on this list?
What else should we be reading? Leave us a comment and let us know!
Hot, Flat & Crowded by Thomas Friedman
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
The Living City: How America’s cities are being revitalized by Thinking Small in a Big Way by Roberta Brandes Gratz
4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land by Daniel Wolff
Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto by Adam Werbach
The Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook: When it All Comes Together (Edited by Jeana Wirtenberg, PhD with William G. Russell and David Lipsky PhD in collaboration with The EnterpriseSustainability Action Team)
Now we want to bring you the voice of our grantees (thought and practice leaders in their own right). We collected these voices through a series of essay questions that ranged from defining creativity and sustainability to thinking about systems-thinking, connections, values, design and “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” (BHAGs).
Starting today and for the next two Mondays, we will provide you with a glimpse of how some key arts, education, environment and place-based nonprofit organizations responded to the central question of how the themes of creativity and sustainability relate to each other. As a foundation staff, we are considering these stimulating, seasoned and (at times) provocative answers as we frame a set of guidelines and philanthropic strategies that will have as powerful and positive an impact as possible.
Of the nearly 40 responses we received, we identified several orientations that described the relationship between creativity and sustainability. Today we explore with you the following orientation:
There must be a social environment that can sustain creativity. (more…)
Linda Pastan’s reading of two poems, “Because” and “An Early After Life,” contains the sweep of a lifetime in just four minutes.
“Because” was published over thirty years ago in Pastan’s collection, The Five Stages of Grief. Lines in the poem reveal it was written at least twenty years after the betrothal it describes. The speaker of the poem has already lived through much of the future the new bride “knows” is coming. How does she know?
“An Early Afterlife” appeared nearly twenty years later in a collection of the same title. Instead of looking back, the speaker of this poem looks forward into the imagined unimaginable: the time when this now long-married couple must part. Yet, does the speaker of this poem know what lies beyond the threshold any better than the young bride in “Because?”
The notion that a poem can capture a moment or thing of beauty and preserve it forever is at odds with how poems are experienced over the course of a lifetime. As time passes, long-familiar poems change. Not only do cultures redefine their meaning, but we, as individuals, discover layers in them at thirty, fifty or seventy we could not possibly have understood or even perceived in our teens or twenties.
Pastan’s reading creates a living metaphor for the dynamic nature of our relationship to poetry. The full range of the stages of life through which these poems might be encountered is alive and present in both the listeners and the poet. Someone in that audience is a newlywed; someone else a widow. Pastan herself is not only the young bride of fifty-five years ago; she is also the woman on stage who has already outlived the speaker of “An Early Afterlife” by more than a decade.
Pastan reads with such careful attention, and her language is so lucid, both poems feel immediate and new. Perhaps this is what poems that continue to matter to us really preserve: the human connection. Listening to Pastan, we have a very real sense that poems like hers are hard-earned through a lifetime of dedicated effort, and we are grateful that she persevered.
Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Charles Simic, C. D. Wright, Franz Wright and others.
Are you on Twitter? Dodge wants to connect with you. Follow us@grdodge.
Philanthropy411 published a list of 90 foundations on Twitter. Several more foundations (including us) added our names to the list, so that it’s now 99 Foundations (thanks to Socialbrite for the updated list) and growing on Twitter. You can find the list here.
But more importantly, Dodge wants to connect with its grantees and with New Jersey non-profits on Twitter. Are you there? Who else is on Twitter that we should know about? Tell us and follow us @grdodge.
The Dodge team is still on its summer quest for knowledge (inviting you to peer in as we peer out, particularly as we think about philanthropy and sustainability), and our latest conversation with Jaimie Cloud, Founder and President of the Cloud Institute took us behind the thinking – as in brain science and mental models – that influence our ability to create new ways of being (i.e., pathways to sustainability).
