Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Wendy Liscow, Program Officer

I have been attending the introductory workshops of the Dodge Foundation’s Board Leadership Series over the past several weeks, taking copious notes and itching to share tidbits of wisdom I am learning.  It would be impossible to capture everything covered in the six-hour workshops or to adequately describe the discoveries and paradigm shifts in thinking that can only come from participation.  Still, I am committed to sharing some of the basic “aha” moments.

Laura Otten, the Executive Director of the Nonprofit Center at La Salle University’s School of Business starts her Board Bootcamp workshop with a sobering statistic:  there are 43,697 nonprofit organizations in New Jersey.  At this point a hush descends over the group as they pause to take in the fact: “My organization is competing with 43,697 other nonprofits for funding, board members, clientele, and to have our message heard.”   That explains the reality nonprofits feel everyday and the constant push to find unique and effective ways to distinguish themselves amongst the crowd. The Board Leadership series is designed to help strengthen your greatest untapped asset in accomplishing this: your Board.

Laura Otten (and the Board training series) identifies a continuum of ways a Board can help differentiate the nonprofit organization it governs.  She began with the most basic thing that every single board member can do in their role as ambassador: she wants board members to go beyond the “elevator speech” and develop the “sideline speech.”  This is the speech board members need to have ready for parties, galas, and business functions or when they are on the sidelines of a soccer or football game and someone asks the inevitable question: “So what do you do?”

Ask yourself, “What percentage of your board answers that question with their employment history and then adds:  ‘AND I am a proud board member of a wonderful organization that does X, Y and Z and is important because of A, B and C.’?”   If you answered anything less than 100%, Laura contends, you are wasting a major asset.

But getting your board to talk about your organization is only half of the equation.  They also all need to be providing a consistent message.  Certainly each board member should and will have their personalized story of why they care about your organization, but at the end of the day, they all need to be telling the whole story of what makes your organization unique.

Board Presidents and Executive Directors: hear this clarion call and be sure that 100% of your board members are out in the world serving as your ambassador and have been given the proper tools to do it well.  It is a perfect use of board meeting time to work on this task, and it will not only yield a more engaged community, but a more invigorated and engaged board.

Also, consider attending one of the Dodge Foundation board leadership workshops that focus on other areas of governance:  Board Recruitment; Strategic Planning; Financial Management; Executive Director and Board relationship; Fundraising; and Succession Planning.  Then you will be the one bringing the learning back to your board  and colleagues.

Dodge has announced its new guidelines. Please visit our website for full details.

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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Last week, we heard four-time National Poetry Slam Individual Champion Patricia Smith read her poem “34” from Blood Dazzler, her book-length meditation on Hurricane Katrina. To continue our exploration of poetry as an oral/aural art, listen to Sekou Sundiata read his poem “New American Theatre.”

Sundiata is such a gifted reader, that it is easy to miss how masterfully spoken English has been crafted into the elaborate rhythms of this poem. Many of us were taught in English classes how to scan stressed and unstressed syllables to hear the meters of traditional poetic forms. But meter is only one way to create rhythm in poetry.

A recurrent alteration in any of the acoustic qualities of human speech can be used to create rhythm. Meter, rhyme, repetition, and parallel syntax are all widely used for this purpose. Sundiata goes beyond these familiar devices. He weaves every aspect of speech into the varying rhythms of his poems: the shapes of sentences, phrases, words, and syllables, the pitches of vowels and the textures of consonants.

Listen to “New American Theatre” again. Sundiata’s use of sound is so masterful he appears to compose vowel melodies. In case you suspect this is the result of his skill as an orator, listen more closely. Say a few of his lines aloud yourself. You will quickly realize the shaping of sound is as deliberate and controlled as it is in any musical composition.

Although print versions of Sundiata’s poems are hard to find, even when encountered on the printed page the rhythms of his lines come alive in the reader’s ear. Sekou Sundiata can be heard reading with musical accompaniment on longstoryshort and The Blue Oneness of Dreams.

Return to Poetry Fridays in the weeks ahead, when we will feature video clips of readings by Taslima Nasreen, Brian Turner, Kevin Young, and others.

Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

Tomorrow we’re cleaning up (composting!) the remnants of our garden, and we’ll be talking as a group about the lessons we learned from our first year of urban gardening as well as planning for what we’d like to accomplish next year.

For me personally, it was such a treat to watch the green roof grow this year, to pick fresh strawberries and cherry tomatoes at lunchtime, and to see the bees and butterflies come to our flowers. And there’s nothing so restorative during the busy work day than to eat lunch in the sunshine,  surrounded by the trees, flowers and grass—one floor up!

Here’s a look back at our green roof this first year in our new offices, starting with what it looked like before it was planted (November 2008) to the present. Pretty remarkable, don’t you think?

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Dodge has announced its new guidelines. Please visit our website for full details.

We want to connect with you! Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook (where you can see more garden and roof photos).

David Grant, President and CEO

Every morning, on my way to my e-mails or the news, I pause over the Dodge homepage. This Sunday, November 8th, I did more than pause, for there, finally, were the revised guidelines and all the accompanying materials people need to apply to Dodge for grants in 2010. We’ve been working on them for months.

It doesn’t take four or five months to write seven or eight pages and redesign some forms. But it could take forever to decide what’s in them, such is the freedom foundations have to choose among worthy ideas and efforts to support.

At this point in time, I hope we have found that sweet spot where change is so based on current practices and opportunities that it feels logical and right. These guidelines reflect what we have learned from our grantees, and I believe almost all of those organizations will find themselves in this new presentation of what Dodge supports.

At the same time, the new guidelines encourage big-picture thinking, which is different from our supporting discrete programs in different disciplines. They reflect a long-term vision of New Jersey as a creative place and, as a result, a more sustainable place. And they are built around the importance of having well-run and well-governed nonprofit organizations serving that vision both alone and, increasingly, with others.

Thus you will notice some new language about “high-potential, innovative, collaborative programs and models.” What do we mean by this? We think of the Sustainable Jersey coalition of local governments, universities, state government, businesses and nonprofits now working so effectively to give people on the local level the tools they need to make their places more sustainable. We think of the work Young Audiences of New Jersey and the Foundation for Educational Administration is doing to launch a state-wide creativity initiative. We think of the work The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education is doing to involve schools, school-systems and their communities in understanding the mind-sets necessary to create a sustainable future together.

And we believe there will be other important ideas and effective approaches that will come our way because of the new guideline language about creativity and sustainability. As we say elsewhere on this site, quoting playwright David Mamet, “We steer where we are looking.”

I hope somewhere out there my successor is looking — and liking what he or she sees.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Patricia Smith’s reading of her poem “34” reminds us that poetry comes out of an oral tradition that predates written language by tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.

We know the epics and sacred texts that built the foundation for all the literature that has followed were originally composed on the tongue. They were passed on, generation by generation, through the oral tradition.

It has been argued that the truest histories have been written by our poets, who capture the human costs of those momentous events that the official histories tend to abstract and glorify.

The Iliad chronicles one of the great disasters of its age: a war that raged for a decade and ended in the destruction of a once beautiful and flourishing city. In the centuries since, poets have striven to understand the catastrophes of their own times.

This is never more so than in those cases when vast human suffering seems the inexplicable result of our own folly. For Homer, it was the fall of Troy; for Patricia Smith, it is the fall of New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina.

In Blood Dazzler, her book-length sequence of poems from which “34” is taken, Smith assumes the personae of countless participants in and victims of the disaster. We would like to make sense out of such an event, but we also know its survivors can never fully explain why it happened. To hear Smith read one of these poems is to enter into their unending dilemma. In writing and reading these poems, Smith pulls us directly into her struggle to understand.

A biography of Patricia Smith can be found in the 2008 Festival Poet Pages.

Return to Poetry Fridays in the weeks ahead, when we will feature video clips of readings by Kevin Young, and others.

Become a fan of the Poetry Festival on Facebook and follow the Dodge Foundation on Twitter!