Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Kurtis Lamkin is a contemporary American embodiment of the ancient West African griot tradition, which blurs the boundaries between poet, singer and storyteller.

The griot, bard or troubadour has been a fixture in all cultures since before the advent of written language. It is believed that such bards passed down the legends of the Trojan War and Beowulf for generations before they were set down in the versions now familiar to us, and that Homer himself likely half-chanted half-sung large sections of the Illiad and Odyssey and accompanied himself on the lyre.

When he performs, Kurtis Lamkin often accompanies himself on the kora, a twenty-one-stringed West African harp-lute. He not only composes on and plays the kora, but he makes them by hand. This sense of the intimate bond between performer and instrument is also part of the griot tradition.

In recent decades, there has been much debate in academic circles in the United States regarding the place of politics in poetry. But in the griot/bardic tradition, there is no debate. The poet is seen as someone directly involved in the life of the community, and commentary on events that impact the community is not only accepted, but expected.

We assume our troubadours will sing us love songs, and Lamkin gives us one, but they have also been seen as the chief chroniclers of their times. In Elizabethan England, the news stories of the day were passed on through popular ballads. Like Lamkin, the griots and bards of the past always performed this function with humor and satire.

Lamkin has released a number of CDs of his work, including: My Juju (1995), El Shabazz (1998), and Queen of Carolina (2001).

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10!
For more information, visit the Poetry website.

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Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

One of the major benefits of moving to our new office space in the heart of downtown Morristown is that it offers us a chance to connect more easily with our friends and partners here, in addition to enjoying the hum of the neighborhood, which includes the shops and places to eat and the people out and about on the street. Morristown is a vibrant city with much to offer, including, now, a substantive focus on sustainability and livability for its residents and people like me who work here during the week.

At Dodge, we were pleased to hear the news that Morristown Mayor Tim Dougherty recently created a Sustainability Office for the town, pledging a more “cohesive development strategy with sustainability as its centerpiece.” Doughtery appointed Paul Miller, who led the Morristown Partnership’s Step Ahead campaign, as the town’s first-ever Sustainability Coordinator.

This newly-created position will help Morristown expand and build upon its Sustainable Jersey efforts. In November of last year, Morristown was one of 34 towns to achieve Sustainable Jersey certification in the inaugural year of the program. For those not familiar with Sustainable Jersey, it is a comprehensive sustainability program for communities which offers a full suite of resources, like technical support and tool kits for participating municipalities. New Jersey is the first state in the nation to have a program of this kind.

We are looking forward to watching Morristown’s progress in its sustainability efforts.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10!
Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
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On the heels of our Earthwatch guest blog series, Dodge has now teamed up with the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education for a new round of guest blog posts, “New Jersey Learns Mondays.” The reflections and stories from K-12 teachers and community leaders who have completed Cloud’s unique leadership training program “New Jersey Learns: Schools and Communities Learn Together for a Sustainable Future” will show that it is possible to lead the shift to a sustainable future.

From innovative instructional partnerships to curriculum design, NJ Learns is building capacity among educators, parents, community members, and, ultimately, our youth, to “live responsibly and well within the means of nature.”

If you missed them, you can read the previous NJ Learns entries with Stacey Kennealy of GreenFaith and with Winnie Fatton of Sustainable Jersey. Today, we hear from Caitlin Wargo, the Director of Sustainability and Energy Management for the Far Hills Country Day School.

Far Hills Country Day School students making natural bird feeders

By Caitlin Wargo, Director of Sustainability and Energy Management
Far Hills Country Day School

The Far Hills Country Day School team (who are Jen Berry, parent; Jen Wagar, fifth grade teacher; Ben Yu, Pre-K teaching assistant and I) almost didn’t make it to NJ Learns. A freak power outage shut down the school on the day everything was due. FHCDS parent and Energy Committee member Jen Berry had power at her house, so we went there to finalize our application, along with an apology for not including any of the attachments, which were stuck on my computer at school.

That was about a year ago, and I know I can speak for our team when I say that we have gotten so much more out of this program than we could have imagined.

I thought I might walk away from the workshop with some helpful tips for the school’s new Energy and Sustainability Initiatives. Far Hills had been recycling and composting long before I was hired, so our students already had a stewardship in their “think.” The new Energy Initiative, on the other hand, charged us with achieving energy independence in ten years, a lofty goal offering us a significant opportunity to impact our students’ mindset regarding energy. From the outset, we saw this first and foremost as an opportunity to educate, so we have involved our students in all of our plans, enabling them to be the decision makers charting the course of the initiative: from researching renewable options to speaking on behalf of the school in front of the Planning Board.

Post-workshop, I met with our Head of School, Jayne Geiger, and told her I wanted to change up my whole approach. I think the words I used were, “Put my money where my mouth is.”

The information on systems thinking and brain science presented by Jaimie Cloud made so much sense, and helped me understand what we as a school needed to do if we were to really let the kids be leaders in this initiative.

The timing couldn’t have been better for Far Hills. We had just launched a new strategic plan emphasizing 21st century and project-based learning, as well as fostering global perspectives and building community. The EfS standards dovetail seamlessly with these, setting the stage for a collaboration that will have meaning at FHCDS and our community for years to come.

Here are some great things that have come about since our team took part in the NJ Learns workshop last year:

1. We played the fish game with the entire school faculty at the start of the school year. Feedback was unanimously positive and our faculty engaged in lively discussions about preserving the “commons.”
2. We taught the Jaimie Cloud’s one-day seminar over the course of two evening sessions to a group of ten co-workers and school parents, who were so enthusiastic that we had a hard time wrapping up each session. Some of those same teachers are now planning to attend the Curriculum Design Studio at the Cloud Institute this summer.
3. Jen Wagar is using the EfS standards as her team revises the third grade curriculum.
4. Jen Berry is organizing parents to host a film series/discussion group on sustainable themes for the school and community.
5. Ben Yu is working to put in a school garden. This garden will provide endless opportunities for learning about sustainable practices on a level that can be understood by our youngest learners. He is working with a group of interested students to decide what we should grow. One of the first suggestions was “puppies,” which may take a little work!
6. After taking part in NJ Learns, I revamped my environmental club to use a project-based learning approach. Within this new framework, the students generated several ideas. They decided to fix our defunct composting system and to rehab an underused courtyard at the school with outdoor seating and to create art installations and bird feeding stations. They also want to put in a small pond – I am not bursting their bubble yet. Who knows? It just might fly. As part of their research, are interviewing several community members who have offered to lend their expertise.
7. This spring, I will be working with eighth graders who want to help me determine the school’s most effective renewable energy options as part of their research project requirement.
8. The Science Department is working with the Upper Raritan Watershed Association to revise our existing Pond Project so that it includes data on the effectiveness of our retention basins in filtering runoff from our parking lots and drives.
9. FHCDS joined Sustainable Jersey in Bernardsville and will have students participating in their community information session in March, alongside students from the local public high school.

FHCDS students hanging their bird feeders

Where do we go from here? We’ve built a strong, committed team, and as Jaimie Cloud says, “This isn’t instant orange juice.” As a result of Far Hills Country Day School’s participation in the NJ Learns program, however, I think our students will be even better prepared to take their place as the leaders of the future.

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New Jersey Learns introduces teachers and community leaders to Education for Sustainability. Education for Sustainability (EfS) is a whole system approach to schools and communities learning together for a sustainable future and includes the Cloud Institute’s EfS Core Content Standards. The program brings community-based teams to participate in one year of introductory training, implementation, coaching and assessment activities.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10!
Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
Become a fan of the Dodge Poetry Festival on Facebook

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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

When Lucille Clifton set out to be a poet she had no models to follow; the figures in the canon did not look or speak like her, did not have her stories to tell.  She realized if she was going to have a life as a poet, she would have to make it herself.  And she did.

To hear Lucille Clifton read was to know immediately you were in the presence of an authentic voice.  She once said, “I don’t write to be admired.  I write to be understood.”  And, we might add, she wrote to understand.  She questioned and explored every aspect of her own life and experience, and turned an unrelenting gaze onto the times and the nation she lived in.

Under the force of her determination to communicate whatever she saw, she compressed and pared down language to a fierce clarity.  And she did not turn away from anything her vision revealed, regardless of the sorrow, regret or fury it might bring her.  Instead, she invited us to “celebrate with me/ what i have shaped into/ a kind of life.”

For anyone lucky enough to have witnessed them, her readings at the Dodge Poetry Festival remain indelible reminders of what poetry can aspire to and inspire in us.  Everyone at the Dodge Foundation is deeply saddened by her passing.  At the end of her poem, “sorrows,” she asks, “but who can distinguish/one human voice/amid such choruses of desire?”  We can answer her easily.  We can, Lucille.  We will know your voice anywhere and everywhere we hear or read it.

A generous sampling of Lucille Clifton’s poetry can be found in Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000.  More recent collections include Mercy (2004) and Voices (2008).

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10!
For more information, visit the Poetry website.

Follow the Dodge Poetry Festival on Twitter
Become a fan of the Dodge Poetry Festival on Facebook

David Grant, President and CEO

As I move through my last six months at the Dodge Foundation, I find myself appreciating the “gems” of New Jersey life all the more.  One of them is coming up this weekend: the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture at Rutgers-Newark, affectionately referred to by its devoted followers as MTW.

For thirty years, it has been an event of note during Black History month.  Indeed, there has been nothing like it as a sustained showcase of public scholarship on African-American history and culture.  But it is even more than that.

Picture the big meeting room upstairs at The Paul Robeson Campus Center overflowing with people, on a Saturday morning.  The Mayor is there; the President of Rutgers is there; sometimes the Governor is there.  So are Newark high school students and their teachers.  There are grandmothers with great hats and people who look like they haven’t glanced up from their Blackberries in months.

It is a joyfully diverse crowd at this most diverse of universities, and they greet each other as if this were a reunion – or maybe a concert where everyone felt lucky to have a ticket.  In an age where it is hard to get anyone’s attention for more than a few minutes, they settle in for the day – because MTW takes its time for the civilities of civic engagement.

For me, MTW is a vision of how universities and their communities should ideally interact.  It is about scholarship without being stuffy.  It is about important and potentially divisive matters, but it exudes a generous and inclusive spirit.  MTW assumes we can learn from our shared history, and we can make sense of it together.  I have said in another blog entry that I think art may save us. I feel the same way about the MTW celebration of ideas and human connections over time.

At the center of MTW, standing at the podium calling the event to order and welcoming us into its world, is the embodiment of its spirit, Rutgers Distinguished Professor Dr. Clement Alexander Price.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say MTW is the embodiment of Clem’s spirit, and that of his long personal and professional friendship with MTW co-founder Giles R. Wright, from the New Jersey Historical Commission.  This is the first MTW Giles did not help plan, as he died a year ago this month

This 30^th incarnation of MTW will take place over two days, not one, beginning on Friday afternoon at 1 p.m. and ending on Saturday at 4 p.m.  The 2010 MTW Letcure itself will be given on Saturday morning by Rutgers Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, whose book The Hemingses of Monticello, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.  The theme of the two days is Laboring in the Vineyard: Scholarship and Citizenship, and fourteen former MTW Lecturers are returning to Newark to be part of the program.  See the Rutgers’ website for details.

The 2010 MTW program is dedicated to the memory of Giles Wright and John Hope Franklin.