Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

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.” Join us for this February journey – and join Cloud for the learning journey to understand the “core content, competencies and habits of mind” to educate for sustainability (applications for the next NJ Learns training are due on Feb. 19 – see the Dodge homepage for details).

Last week, we launched the series with Stacey Kennealy of GreenFaith. This week, we hear from Winnie Fatton, who currently serves as a Project Manager for Sustainable Jersey, (which we’ve talked a lot about here on the Dodge blog!).

By Winnie Fatton

When I first heard about NJ Learns, it was an exciting, untried idea that the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation was supporting. Teams of educators, administrators, parents, municipal representatives, and the general public – anyone who was committed to Educating for Sustainability (EfS) – were invited to apply for the program. I was working on “Green Jobs for NJ,” which was a pilot project to infuse EfS into the curricula of Career and Technical Schools. I brought 2 teachers to the first training session – one from the Mercer County Vocational Technical School District and one from Essex County Vocational Technical School District. I felt that it would be a great opportunity to learn from a “master” and to introduce classroom teachers to what I believe should be one of the most important educational themes in our schools.

I believe that sustainability is a theme which offers teachers from almost any discipline a way to get students involved with issues that are significant and relevant to their daily lives and to their future career choices. At career and technical schools, for example, EfS could be incorporated into the construction and HVAC trades (think green, high performance buildings), landscaping (management of stormwater run-off, recapture/reuse of wastewater, xeriscaping and other low maintenance plantings), culinary arts (school gardens, safe food/local food, composting), automotive (hydrogen fuel cells, hybrid cars), or a multitude of other career clusters. These are the jobs of the future.

But green jobs aren’t the only reason to think about sustainability; there are so many other linkages to science, math, English, history, even graphic arts. It takes some creativity, but teachers can develop lessons that relate real time/real world issues to what students are studying. Equally important, teachers can help foster the creative thinking we will need to come up with the solutions to these major challenges.

Now, in my work with the Sustainable Jersey program – a certification program for municipalities in New Jersey that want to go green, control costs and save money, and take steps to sustain their quality of life over the long term – I have the ability to work with a lot of different audiences. Sustainable Jersey offers over 64 different “actions” which municipalities can take to become more sustainable, from creating a Green Team, to doing energy audits for municipal buildings and establishing the carbon footprint of the municipality, to doing communication outreach and education. All of the actions in the program are supported by a series of tools which are available on the Sustainable Jersey website, as well as through training programs and workshops. Each action or “tool” is fully resourced and includes a description of the action: who should be involved, how much it will cost, how long it will take, as well as resources for helping municipalities to complete it.

My initial focus was on helping to develop “tools” which relate to the “education” sector – and in the second round of the program, Sustainable Jersey will be offering information about “Education for Sustainability” as well as “School Based Energy Conservation Programs.” The School Based Energy Conservation Programs focus on helping students, teachers and all school staff members to make behavioral changes, which can reduce energy consumption. Some participating schools have even reduced their energy bills by almost 20% through behavior modification alone. And the Education for Sustainability tool offers ideas and resources for teaching about sustainability, including, of course, the NJ Learns program.

Over 250 communities in NJ have signed up to become certified through the Sustainable Jersey program since its inception in February, 2009. Sustainable Jersey and NJ Learns offer opportunities for communities to share inspire and learn from one another as we all work together toward a sustainable future. By giving people an understanding of why it is important to be sustainable, as well as the tools we need to be a more sustainable society, we have begun to create a process that will foster collaboration, and ultimately, achieve success. The knowledge that there are so many great people out there working toward a sustainable future is very gratifying, and I’m thrilled to be part of it.

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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. Want to participate? 2010-2011 NJ Learns applications are due on February 19th. Apply now.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10!
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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

In her novels, essays, and poems, Linda Hogan often explores the deep connections between how the damage we do to the environment damages us, and how the natural world we wound instructs us on how to heal both it and ourselves.

A descendant of the Chickasaw Nation, she is deeply learned in the traditions of her ancestors. She is equally knowledgeable of the complex social and political history that has shaped the crises of our times. In poems like “The History of Red,” and in novels like Mean Spirit and Power, Hogan explores the interconnections between these two world-views.

What she finds in her search cannot be confused with the diluted renderings of Native American spirituality promulgated in some new-age tomes. Hogan sees a natural world (which includes human creatures) that presents a far greater challenge to our understanding. In her poems, the soldier crawling toward life in a ditch filled with blood is given as close attention as the newborn passing through the birth canal.

Hogan understands that ceremonies are not to be taken lightly, and that the making and sharing of a poem is a kind of ceremony. In these acts, she does not invite us to be victims. On the contrary, she reminds us of what her study of both nature and history has taught her: We must climb or crawl through the fire “in order to live so nothing will be left for death in the end.”

“The History of Red” and “Other, Sister, Twin” can both be found in Linda Hogan’s The Book of Medicines.

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.

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

Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

If you are a regular reader of the Dodge blog, you know that we’re constantly encouraging you to join us on Facebook and on Twitter too. And not just because we want to share Dodge Foundation & Poetry Festival information with you. We see these social media tools as a learning opportunity for us – we love to hear about the work our grantees and partners are doing across the state. Moreover, we want to share your ideas, information and success stories as broadly as possible. We welcome your comments, conversation and links on our Facebook page, and we look forward to following you and hearing from you on Twitter.

So consider this is an open invitation – particularly to all current Dodge grantees – to email us at blog@grdodge.org if your organization has a Facebook fan page and/or you are on Twitter. We want to connect with you. In the coming weeks, we will share who is using these tools so that you can connect with them too.

I’m going to get you started. Here are environment groups – recent or current Dodge grantees and all members of the New Jersey Keep It Green Coalition – who are on Facebook:

American Littoral Society
Appalachian Mountain Club
Bayshore Discovery Project
Clean Ocean Action
Conserve Wildlife Foundation
Edison Wetlands Association
Greater Newark Conservancy
Hackensack Riverkeeper
Heritage Conservancy
Hunterdon Land Trust Alliance
Isles, Inc.
Land Conservancy of New Jersey
Natural Lands Trust
New Jersey Audubon Society
New Jersey Conservation Foundation
New Jersey Future
New Jersey Highlands Coalition
Passaic River Coalition
Pinelands Preservation Alliance
Regional Plan Association
Skylands CLEAN
Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association
The Nature Conservancy
Trust for Public Land

We love the preservation success stories that Keep It Green shares on Facebook.

Becoming a fan is just a click away!

Dodge has teamed-up with the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education for a Monday blog series that is sure to help beat the February blues! 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.” Join us for this February journey – and join Cloud for the learning journey to understand the “core content, competencies and habits of mind” to educate for sustainability (applications for the next NJ Learns training are due on Feb. 19 – see the Dodge homepage for details).

Kicking off this series is Stacey Kennealy, the Director of Sustainability for GreenFaith, New Jersey’s interfaith coalition for the environment. Stacey also directs the GreenFaith Certification Program.

GreenFaith’s mission is to inspire, educate and mobilize people of diverse religious backgrounds for environmental leadership.

By Stacey Kennealy

I live, eat, and breathe sustainability. As sustainability guru at GreenFaith, it’s my daily work, and what I believe to be my life’s work. I can talk ad nauseam about environmental problems, and I know every “green” solution under the sun. And those two areas—problems and solutions—used to be the central focus of every workshop and class that I led.

After enough of these workshops, I began to sense that I was missing something. The reactions from the audience consistently suggested this—and were completely different reactions from those experienced when GreenFaith’s Executive Director, an Episcopal priest, was at the helm. With me, the audience would walk away informed, mildly satisfied and quickly forgetting what they heard; after an environmental sermon, they’d walk away deeply affected, and with energy and motivation.

This left me seriously questioning my teaching style. Was being ordained a prerequisite for changing people’s hearts and minds? Then the NJ Learns opportunity came across my desk. As I filled out the application, where I was asked to describe my perceptions of “Educating for Sustainability,” I sensed the same uneasy feeling I did after my workshops. I realized that I wasn’t quite sure what “Educating for Sustainability” meant. Did I really know how to educate for this issue that I cared so deeply about?

A New York Times article last week, “Is There an Ecological Unconscious?” discusses the idea that each of us is experiencing “solastalgia”—a subconscious homesickness as our home, earth, is being degraded—and other experts report that “nature deficit disorder” is rampant in our society, particularly among children. These ideas capture my uneasy feeling: environmental problems are just an indicator of larger, much more deeply rooted issues. No amount of “greening” advice will cure us of these maladies. Educating for Sustainability must dive as deep as these maladies run.

Artwork by Kate MacDowell; photograph by Dan Kvitka for The New York Times

This concept was my NJ Learns “aha” moment. I realized that it takes a complete reworking of our mindset to change our wildly destructive consumption habits. “The significant problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that we used when we created them”—wise words of Albert Einstein, and the driving mission of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education. NJ Learns not only awakened me to this idea, but provided me with the tools and community support to help make these powerful theories a reality.

Do I use the Cloud Institute material in my presentations now? Yes. But the training gave me so much more. It shifted my own thinking to such an extent that everything I do is reflective of the ideas we learned. Every time I craft a document, build a curriculum, give a talk, or guide a congregation or school through the greening process, I educate for sustainability and not just about problems and solutions.

The most significant result was the way in which the training influenced the design of GreenFaith’s Certification Program—the first interfaith environmental certification program for houses of worship in the country. Similar to other certification programs like Sustainable Jersey or LEED, our Program provides a process and set of requirements that houses of worship must fulfill to be designated as leaders. Many of the concepts learned in the NJ Learns training—backwards design, systems thinking, and viewing sustainability as an opportunity to tell a different, more powerful story—laid the foundation for the overall process that GreenFaith asks institutions to follow. As Jaimie Cloud (founder of the Cloud Institute says, “It’s not sustain guaranteed, but sustainable.” The GreenFaith Certification Program embodies this vision, by teaching institutions how to create the conditions for sustainability that will guide them well into the future.

The first progress reports from these institutions arrived a few months ago. We are on target for our goal: environmental stewardship is becoming a living, breathing program at these institutions, with congregations taking on sustainability as a way of life, similar to alleviating poverty. This is what Educating for Sustainability is all about; if we can shift people’s underlying thinking about environmental issues, they will walk away empowered, more easily making the choices that will help to redeem this planet.

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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. Want to participate? 2010-2011 NJ Learns applications are due on February 19th. Apply now.

* * *
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

Follow Dodge on Twitter
Become a fan of the Dodge Foundation on Facebook

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Part of what has been unique about the Dodge Poetry Festival since the first in 1986 is the feeling it engenders of being in a place made for poetry. We live in a culture and a time that makes space for countless other things. Sometimes it feels as if there are so many coming at us so quickly we can barely keep up with them. More and more it seems that what demands our attention is designed to distract us from our inner lives, the rich source of imagination, reflection, creativity and renewal.

But every other year thousands come together to make a place for poetry. They travel from all the mid-Atlantic and New England states, and from Florida and Texas, from Michigan and California, and from nearly every state between, and from Europe, the Middle-East and Asia, to create a village with poetry as a living art at its center.

A village is made up of its citizens. This year the poetry village that is the Dodge Poetry Festival is gathering in Newark’s Downtown Arts District. As always, there will be days full of an overabundance of opportunities to encounter some of our most celebrated poets in conversations, readings, craft talks and panel discussion in an array of intimate and inviting settings. On Thursday night, October 7th, we will join together in NJPAC’s beautiful Prudential Hall to celebrate the launching of the 13th Dodge Poetry Festival. Won’t you join us?