Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

By Randall Solomon
Sustainable Jersey

College Students’ Need for Experience Meets Green Teams’ Need for Staff

This fall, eighteen college students crowded shoulder to shoulder with Mayor Donnelly and members of the Green Team and Environmental Advisory Committee in the eclectic Jersey Made store in Mill Race Village in Mount Holly.

The students were given a pep talk before going door to door to talk to residents. The objective was to learn about community members’ attitudes and preferences for shopping local versus at the big box stores and elsewhere. The data collected provided the necessary information to help develop a planned Buy Local Campaign in town to promote the local stores.

Top: Students ready to go door to door in Mount Holly
Bottom: Students survey residents for Buy Local Program in Mount Holly

Just one month before, nineteen energetic students got down and dirty. They built two rain gardens in Mount Holly. The students dug a large hole and planted it with deep-rooted native plants and grasses to soak up rainwater. In this case, the garden will capture and filter water runoff from a huge parking lot, preventing it from entering the nearby creek. A rain garden can soak up to 30% more water than a traditional lawn. This will help protect the quality of water downstream by preventing runoff from getting to the creek and storm drains.

Perfect Green Swap

It was a perfect green swap. Mount Holly needed staff to get a long list of environmental projects started and the college students needed hands-on work experience.

Thanks to a grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Sustainable Jersey partnered with The College of New Jersey’s (TCNJ) Bonner Center for Civic and Community Engagement to form a team of Bonner/Sustainable Jersey scholars that help municipalities to achieve Sustainable Jersey actions. Towns were selected through a competitive application process. Bonner Fellows also help to mobilize TCNJ freshmen students engaged in Community Engaged Learning (CEL) to work with towns participating in the Sustainable Jersey program.

Students working on the Shinn Cabin Rain Garden

By helping to plan and execute green projects throughout the year, the Bonner Scholars are aiding officials from four municipalities—Mount Holly, Trenton, the City of Burlington, and Green Brook—in their goal of attaining the 150 points necessary to get Sustainable Jersey’s bronze level of certification by October of 2012.

This partnership extends the practice of student community engaged learning with service beyond typical non-profit community partners to local governments. The partnership has been beneficial all around, according to Heather Camp, senior program director at the Bonner Center. “The partnership helps us to connect to different communities throughout New Jersey in a meaningful, long-term way. What I think makes the Bonner Center a good partner for the project is that we have the opportunity to mobilize a greater number of students to help communities meet their Sustainable Jersey needs,” Camp said.

This arrangement is useful for towns. Dan Rita of the four-person Mount Holly Green Team said, “Mount Holly is really struggling right now. It has been incredibly helpful to have the students organize and get the projects off the ground.” Each project gave Mount Holly 10 points for a total of 20 points toward Sustainable Jersey certification, moving their total from 90 to 110 points.

Students complete work on the Burlington County Jail Rain Garden

The students get a lot out of the experience as well. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), new college graduates who had participated in internships did far better in the job market than their classmates who did not have that experience. The students gain experience, develop skills, make connections, strengthen their resumes, learn about environmental fields, and are able to assess their interests and abilities. In Mount Holly, Dan Rita of the Green Team makes sure that the students get a full experience.

This spring, the students plan to help Mount Holly install community gardens. The other towns participating in the partnership have some worthwhile projects in the pipeline with the students as well. Stay tuned for updates on the students work with the Green Fair in the City of Burlington, an anti-idling campaign in Green Brook, and asset mapping projects in Trenton.

For more about Sustainable Jersey®:

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All photos by Randi Rothmel

By Nina Stack
President, Council of New Jersey Grantmakers

2012 is already shaping up to be quite a year for New Jersey’s philanthropic community.

We have two national organizations coming to Newark in the next few months. At the end of this month, the Association of Black Foundation Executives will launch its 2011-2012 Connecting Leadership Fellowship program with a Leadership Summit in Newark. The Fellowship, which began in 2005-2006, is a yearlong professional development experience which aims to promote the professional mobility and visibility of mid-career Black executives in the field of philanthropy.

Another first is being planned by Grantmakers for Education. The organization will convene one of its three 2012 Urban Education Study Tours in Newark. These study tours bring funders from around the country together for an extensive, multi-day site visit. Their visit is being designed now.

What these two gatherings affirm is the recognition nationally that New Jersey’s philanthropic community is working in innovative and successful ways — pushing the envelope beyond the traditional operating patterns of foundations. We are seeing members connect more and collaborate more. New Jersey’s philanthropic leaders are taking on national leadership roles as well — serving on the boards of national affinity and infrastructure groups. These include the Schumann Fund’s Barbara Reisman with Grantmakers for Education, the Dodge Foundation‘s Laura Aden Packer with the Grantmakers in the Arts, Novartis’ Rhonda Crichlow with the Association of Corporate Contributions Professionals, and Risa Lavizzo Mourey of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation with Independent Sector.

When I sit at Council on Foundations Board meetings and share with my fellow trustees the exciting things that we are doing in New Jersey, it piques great interest because they are hearing about New Jersey’s accomplishments from their colleagues in the field – both far and wide. For instance, they have learned of the way CNJG brings our members together regularly with key legislative officials in our “Conversations With the Cabinet.” Or, they’ve heard about our other policy work, like Facing Our Future, for which we’ll be releasing updated and expanded information in the next month.

When CNJG advocated for, and ultimately created, the Newark Philanthropic Liaison position, there was only one other in the country. Five years after embedding Jeremy Johnson in Newark City Hall and Mayor Cory Booker’s administration, he’s been directly responsible for attracting more than $45 million and leveraging millions more.

These and many other CNJG programs throughout the state have placed New Jersey’s philanthropy among those providing best practices and successes that will be replicated across the country.

Nina Stack is the President of Council of New Jersey Grantmakers, the statewide association for corporate, family, independent, and community foundations. She is a regular contributor to the Dodge blog.

By Donna Drewes
Sustainable Jersey

Every town has green gurus and community experts. These are the ultra-connected people I call to find out the best trails to hike, the hours of the farmers’ market, innovative sustainable projects, the most interesting cultural resources to visit and more.

Imagine having an insider connection like this to provide you with the greatest community resources, events and even future sustainability goals in every town in your county, state and galaxy. Actually the Green Map System® has not moved beyond the planet, but just give them a little more time.

I confess that I have an aversion to maps that comes from driving for hours around the state before GPS systems arrived. I can assure you, the Green Map System does not involve the static road lines of a conventional map, but rather cool global icons and adaptable tools that you want to use.

The Green Map System has engaged communities worldwide in mapping green living, nature and cultural resources since 1995. In 2011, Green Map received funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to provide resources and technical support to a number of Sustainable Jersey municipalities that were interested in doing a Green Map.

Sustainable Jersey Green Teams

Sustainable Jersey set up an application process, and four teams representing nine municipalities were selected to participate in the program. They include: Central Jersey Team (Hillsborough, Princeton, Montgomery and Lawrence); Camden/South Jersey Team (Galloway, Haddonfield and Camden); a Montclair Team, and a Jersey City Team.

With locally-led Green Map projects in 14 New Jersey communities and in 766 other cities in 60 countries, these maps help people of all backgrounds and ages share fresh perspectives on hometown progress toward sustainability. Each project informs and connects diverse constituencies that care about local nature, cultural, social justice and green living resources. In New Jersey, the maps can even highlight the actions leading to Sustainable Jersey certification.

Seeing is Believing

But Green Maps are much easier to understand visually in printed form and on-line. Here are the communities involved along with local initiatives; find them mapped below:

Jersey City

With an interactive Green Map project underway, great progress has been made in this diverse community. Through funding and tax programs, Jersey City is encouraging green building and green purchasing standards. The Adopt a Lot Law has created community gardens and green areas from vacant lots. Educating the community on urban agricultural practices has driven the construction of two hydroponic greenhouses. It’s the first New Jersey city to execute a Buy Fresh Buy Local Program that will enable local restaurants, schools, food banks, and hospitals to buy local healthy food at wholesale prices.

Montclair

Montclair is paving a path toward a green future. The program Eat Play Live…Better has helped communities work together to improve awareness and access to healthy food and enhance infrastructure related to healthful choices. Montclair’s Mount Hebron Middle School students recently completed their first edible garden. Community gardens are encouraged throughout the town and safe routes for alternative transportation have been developed.

Central New Jersey: Includes the Townships of Hillsborough, Montgomery, Princeton and Lawrence.

These four Central Jersey towns have joined in the movement towards a greener future with cycling and local food focused Green Maps. Green Mapmaking will be used in the district’s education system as part of a new sustainability curriculum. Carpooling and bike lanes have been promoted and built. Princeton has begun holding “Green Drink” gatherings, at which a collection of community members meet on a regular basis to share ideas about eco-conscious living. The West Windsor community has opened their first farmers’ market to sponsor local and organically produced food.

Camden County & South Jersey: Camden, Haddonfield, Galloway

Camden has New Jersey’s new EcoVillage, and aims to encourage awareness among college campuses, high school students, and community members for green action. Camden County’s 36 municipalities are working together to spread sustainable information, strategies, and skills. An inventory to gather information on all greenhouse gases created from county commerce is underway. Galloway and Haddonfield are encouraging the preservation of open green space, as well as the promotion of alternative transportation options. With city and suburbs working together, a wide variety of social and eco issues are being addressed.

Each Green Team has an Open Green Map in development. Among the first to open their map to public insights, images and site suggestions are the four created by Camden, including the Native Plant Corridor, Camden Food Assessment, Mid-Atlantic Rain Gardens and the Camden City Green Map.

Through working with these Green Teams, an interesting challenge has arisen for Green Map System. As each community began developing Open Green Maps, many wanted to include pre-existing environmental health and planning data from GIS maps created by local governments. Green Map System is currently investigating data interchanges to bridge diverse information resources.

Upcoming Green Map workshops are planned for 2012, so I encourage you to participate. For updates on workshops visit the Sustainable Jersey events page and www.GreenMap.org/snj.

For more about Sustainable Jersey®:

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For more about Green Map System®

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Sustainable Jersey staff and partners are regular contributors to the Dodge blog.

By Samantha Rothman
President & Co-Founder
Grow It Green Morristown

One of the things I love about Morristown is that despite its population size (close to 20,000), it truly has a small town feel. It seems of late that whenever I’m out and about in town, I invariably run into parents of children who have been to the Urban Farm at Lafayette. It has been so heartwarming to hear their stories: how their children loved the farm, the chickens, etc. This is routinely followed with an anecdote about how the parent was then shocked to hear how much their child loved the [insert green, leafy vegetable name here].

The Urban Farm in September

I must say, there is magic to the Urban Farm that invites – dare I say tempts children – to try new foods. I’ve seen it with Logan, my own picky eater of 5 years old. If Farmer Shaun presents him with a fresh basil leaf, it is as if it had a chocolate coating! Yet, my basil at our home garden is only good enough after he’s learned to enjoy it at “the farm.” Go figure.

As the Urban Farm at Lafayette continues to expand its reach, so many more children in our community will have the opportunity to engage in healthy eating choices in a fun, child-centered environment. Our “pick a snack” program with the 140 children of the Lafayette Learning Center pre-school program has shown that when given the chance to try new, healthy choices, children not only will give it a nibble, they’ll devour their veggies before even getting a chance to give them a good rinse! (Thankfully, their teachers are on top of it—and the farm is organic). These first interactions with living, fresh vegetables set the foundation for a lifetime of making good nutritional choices.

Hundreds of school children visited the Urban Farm at Lafayette this summer. Their trips to the farm enrich their educational experience and enhance their classroom-based lessons.

Our produce from the Urban Farm is making its way on to the plates of the older children too. Working with the chef at the Morristown High School cafeteria and Chartwells, the food service provider of the Morris School District, our produce is being served up at MHS. Each week, the chef comes to the farm for a pick-up. Choosing from a wide variety of vegetables, nothing has been deemed too uncool for school. We hear the bean salad and collards have both been big hits.

During the height of summer when school is out of session, the Urban Farm at Lafayette has been making weekly donations to both the Interfaith Food Pantry and the Community Soup Kitchen. This summer over 2,000 lbs of produce were donated.

As our support for community food programs grows, we’ve learned that getting the food where it needs to go isn’t always that easy. So, we’re very excited about having been awarded a grant from the New Jersey Department of Agriculture to purchase a pick-up truck. Our new farm truck will support the delivery of our produce, but also enable us to deliver excess produce from other growers, as well as our community garden.

Often, children who attended a class at the Urban Farm at Lafayette with a school group come back on their own in summer months.

Speaking of the community garden, with over 40 families on our waiting list for space at the Early Street Community Garden, we took the leap and began working on the creation of a new community garden in Morristown. We anticipate opening the garden this May. Funding for this new project was made possible through a Franklin Parker Small Grant of $5,000 from Conservation Resources, Inc., a $5,000 award from Gran Fondo NJ and $3,500 from the Supau Family Trust.

In my mind, I can already see the gates of this new garden taking shape, with people bringing in their flats of tiny seedlings, children chasing each other with watering cans, and the first tomatoes being harvested.

While it is true that, on paper, we’re a small organization, but walking in Morristown you wouldn’t know it. People talk about the work of Grow it Green Morristown. Just this fall, we’ve been the recipient of both a Grassroots Award from the Daily Record and an Environmental Achievement award from Governor Chris Christie and the NJ Department of Environmental Protection. And while we are grateful for such recognition, the “organization” of GIGM is really just a vehicle for people in our community to come together to create change – without the people, there is no community garden, or educational farm. They would still just be lonely plots of land.

So, thank you to the people of Morristown. Thank you for being who you are and what you are. Thank you for your help, from shoving dirt, picking up trash, building new beds, and tilling new ground, to having faith in an idea that grew into an organization and supporting GIGM along the way.

Happy New Year!

Images by Carolle Huber / Grow It Green Morristown

By Allison Trimarco
Founder, Creative Capacity, LLC

We’ve all been there…we decide that it’s time for planning at our organization, so we carefully set up a retreat meeting and craft an agenda designed to help us “be strategic” in our thinking about our future. As soon as everyone has gotten their first cup of coffee, however, the process starts spinning out of control. Board member Bob decides that he wants to change the entire mission of the organization before noon, and refuses to move on until everyone agrees with him. Betty hasn’t been to a board meeting for three years, but shows up to the strategic planning retreat to talk about how they do it on the other six boards she’s on. The Board Chair and Executive Director try valiantly to get everyone talking about the key challenges the group is facing, but diverging focus and personal agendas eventually wear them down. So, they write up a summary of the retreat discussion, label it “strategic plan,” and file it in its rightful place at the bottom of a desk drawer underneath several boxes of binder clips and a bottle of white-out that no one uses anymore.

These kinds of experiences have given strategic planning a bad rap among nonprofit leaders. Too often, the process leaves board and staff members feeling tired and disappointed. Where does this feeling of time wasted come from? I think it’s from planning processes that:

• Are not grounded in the reality of the current situation that your organization is facing. These are the processes that start with false questions like, “if money were no object and you could do whatever you want, what would you do?”
• Don’t offer board, staff, volunteers, and other stakeholders the chance to collaborate in determining what’s most important to the organization and how we will work together to achieve it.
• Stir up conflicts about key issues like mission, programs, and constituents – but don’t do anything to resolve these important questions.
• Include every idea in the final plan, rather than determining the best ideas and prioritizing them. This lack of decision-making results in a plan that is too large to realistically be implemented.

If you’ve been involved in a planning process like this, chances are your strategic plan is also filed in a bottom drawer under the old white-out. And you’re relieved that it will be awhile before you have to “plan” again.

This sense that strategic planning is just a waste of time is such a missed opportunity, however – both for the organization and for its board and staff members. Done right, strategic planning is the fun part! It’s the moment when you actually get to influence the organization’s direction, what it will do for the community, and how that will happen. These are probably the things you wanted to do when you got involved with the nonprofit in the first place, but most of us spend most of our time thinking about far more mundane, everyday matters. Planning is the moment when passion for the mission and the community can be at the center of our discussion – and even if that’s not as fun as a day at the beach, it should be meaningful and enjoyable for all of us.

So, what kind of planning process will actually result in decisions you can use?

1) Before you do anything else, take the time to look at where you are.

Good strategic planning is a process – it takes time, asks hard questions, and aims to make everyone smarter about the organization and its situation. Start your analysis by giving board, staff, key volunteers, and constituents the chance to contribute their thoughts, so people know that their ideas matter. This initial roundup of people’s opinions will also identify key issues that need to be part of the planning discussion.

2) Ask hard questions.

Planning is not the moment to embrace the status quo. It’s the time when we should bring up third rail questions such as, “are all of our programs functioning well?,” or “what does the economic situation mean for us?” or even, “ how will the demographic shifts in our community affect the need for our work in the future?” The most effective planning processes tackle these questions in a deliberate, structured way designed to give you facts that you can act upon. Here are some ideas about questions to ask about your external environment and a simple method for evaluating your programs:

3) Use what you learn from evaluating your current situation to answer big questions about your mission, vision, and programs.

Our organizations don’t live in a vacuum, and we shouldn’t make key decisions about our mission, vision, and programs based on the opinions of the small number of people on our board and staff. What do we want to do? is only part of the question – we should really be thinking what do our constituents need us to do? and what can we be really, really good at? We can form more meaningful answers to these questions when we look at our current successes, feedback from our constituents and stakeholders, and the conditions in our environment that are likely to interact with our work. Really strategic planning takes all of these factors into account when defining mission and vision.

4) Choosing everything is the same as choosing nothing.

Often, so many exciting ideas are generated during brainstorming that we decide we can’t choose – we want to include all of them! But this is a surefire way to make it impossible to implement your plan. You have to make decisions about where you will focus your energy in the coming years. This is what will make your organization more strategic (and your plan more readily implemented). Not sure how to make these tough choices? There are a million decision-making techniques, but here’s a description of one of my favorites:

Once you decide on your goals, make sure you also decide on your objectives – the results that you want to achieve. Too often, we build plans that emphasize the activities that will fill up our to-do lists. But we only work on our activities in order to achieve results for our mission, constituents, and community. What are the results you really want? Knowing this will make your organization more strategic every day, even if you’re not “planning:”

5) If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

The most common complaint I hear about strategic plans is, “we did all this planning, but then we never did anything about it.” Usually, this is a symptom of a planning process that was not inclusive enough (so people don’t feel ownership over the decisions and won’t implement them), or a plan that is not grounded in reality (so we could never possibly have the money or human resources to implement it). You can make it more likely that you will actually implement your plan if you:

• Have board and staff collaborate in the process so they feel enthusiastic ownership about plan decisions.
• Force yourselves to prioritize all the good ideas that will come up, so that your plan focuses on the most important things the organization can do.
• Create a budget that outlines what it will cost to implement the plan, and how you will obtain those resources. These financial projections can inform your annual budgeting.
• Focus on implementation right out of the gate – if you don’t implement initial work in the first six months, the opportunity is lost. Make sure everyone knows what they should do, and make sure they do it!

Most importantly, remember: if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. If you want to change something about your organization, you have to change the way you approach your work. You can choose to make plan priorities essential to your work – and hopefully spend more of your time and energy focusing on the interesting, challenging, fulfilling projects that emerged during your planning process.

Thinking about starting a planning process at your organization? Here are some resources to help:

Allison Trimarco is the founder and principal of Creative Capacity, a consulting firm that collaborates with nonprofits to find creative solutions to management challenges. She is also an affiliated consultant and instructor at The Nonprofit Center at La Salle University.