Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

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!

David Grant, President and CEO

Every few years I go down to the headquarters of National Public Radio in Washington, DC to check in on one of Dodge’s longest-standing relationships.  The benefits of our grants to NPR certainly go both ways – frequently when I am far from New Jersey, I’ll say I work at “The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation,” and people will pause as if to search their memory banks, then say knowingly, “NPR!”

During my visit this past Friday, I stopped by NPR’s music department and got an update on their “50 Great Voices” project; you may have heard the promos for it in recent months.  In October, NPR announced they would launch a year-long exploration of “50 of the great voices in recorded history,” beginning this month.  But which voices?

What a great question.  It reminds me of a book I had years ago called “The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History” (originally published in 1978, and revised in 2000), which fed many interesting dinner conversations.  Who’s #1 and why?  Who’s on the list and who’s missing?  What is influence anyway, and who has the most of it over time – a politician? A scientist? A poet?  The 50 Great Voices idea invites the same questioning, weighing of artists in different genres, and championing of favorites.

If you check the NPR website now, you’ll see pictures of the 127 semi-finalists and brief audio clips of their voices.  The fifty finalists HAVE been chosen and will be announced soon.  It’s fun now, though, to scroll through the whole list and see who’s made it this far.

Yes, it’s not surprising to find Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald on the list, nor Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, or Aretha Franklin.  Caruso’s there, and so is Janis Joplin.  But so are a lot of less famous names.

I went looking for Solomon Burke.  I had heard him in concert at BB King’s Blues Club and still think it was the most amazing vocal performance I’ve ever encountered.

Yes!!  There he was.

Then I thought, “I wonder if Eva Cassidy made the list.  That would be too good to be true.”  Her rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” in my opinion, leaves all others in the dust, including the revered original version.

Yes!!  There she was.

OK, let me see if I can go three for three on personal sentimental favorites.  What about Brian Stokes Mitchell?

No!  He was robbed!  But of course that is where the fun of this project lies.  Who’s #1 on your list of great voices?  And who belongs in the Top 50 that’s not there?

When I asked my music host at NPR, Amy Schriefer, about the patterns of the voting in the US and around the world, she told me something that made this project far more than a parlor game to me.  She said there was a massive, apparently well-organized, outpouring of support from Iran for the living artist Mohammed Reza Shajarian.  Over at Morning Edition or All Things Considered, they were talking about nuclear threats and proposed boycotts of Iran.  Here on the music floor, Iranians were voting for a Great Voice.

I was reminded of the most moving “review” I ever received of my one-man show as Mark Twain, which I took around the world in 1982.  In New Delhi, after I had completed an evening performance with a long reading from Huckleberry Finn, an Indian woman approached me with tears in her eyes and said, “This is our only hope for peace in the world.”

Yes – the arts, the humanities, music, the people who bring the arts into all our lives – they may save us yet.

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Photos courtesy of the artists.
Brian Stokes Mitchell photo by Beth Kelly

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Michelle Knapik, Environment Program Director

Atlantic City was the site for last week’s New Jersey League of Municipalities annual conference and the inaugural Sustainable Jersey™ awards lunch, but it was through no stroke of luck that 34 towns achieved the first ever certification honors.   Of the 566 municipalities in the State, more than 240 municipalities enrolled in the Sustainable Jersey program during year-one and started engaging in 43 possible actions to acquire points toward their certification (100 points was the minimum for certification).  The newly certified towns are those that organized quickly to meet program challenges and head down the winning path of sustainability.   (more…)

David Grant, President and CEO

I had lunch the other day with someone who used the phrase “civic information system.” I told her I had never heard that phrase before, and she said she had made it up.

I’m not sure the phrase will ever trip off people’s tongues, but I like what it is trying to convey — that there is news and information we need in common, not to mention stories and metaphors and big ideas, if we are going to function in a reasonable way as members of communities large and small.

For a long time, newspapers have been important players in our “civic information systems,” but the conventional wisdom these days is that they are on their way out as commercial ventures. In fact, I have heard repeated predictions in recent months that we are rapidly heading towards a world without daily newspapers. Not finding The Star-Ledger or The New York Times on our doorstep would not leave us without information — far from it, as we all know. But it might leave us without information in common, as people increasingly choose among news sources that occupy clear places along an ideological spectrum, on their cable networks or radio dials, or in cyberspace.

I wonder if it is not newspapers that need to change, but their business model. Could a daily newspaper for a City or a State be set up as a nonprofit venture and thrive? Could we imagine a newspaper governed by a Board adhering to a nonpartisan civic mission, able to raise money from individuals and foundations that believe that responsible civic discourse needs common information and reasoned arguments?

All of us at Dodge would appreciate knowing your thoughts about this matter. Maybe a “civic information system” is too important an idea to be left to “what sells.”

Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

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.