A couple of books on our reading list:

Nick Bilton is the lead technology writer for the New York Times’ Bits Blog, and his book, “I Live in the Future and Here’s How It Works: Why Your World, Work and Brain are Being Creatively Disrupted” takes on the technophobes (or the “technochondriacs,” as he calls them) who worry that our kids are too text-message obsessed and that online social networking is destroying the way humans develop and sustain real community. (Sound familiar?) Bilton argues that this is the 21st century version of the fear that has taken hold throughout history as a new technology replaces an old one, while showing us that, in fact, our brain’s “thirst for stimulation drives the technological advances of each innovation.”

And, as a staff, we really enjoyed Jane McGonigal‘s TED talk “Gaming Can Make a Better World” which explores the idea of harnessing the creativity and capacity of gamers to help solve the world’s most pressing problems. Now she’s written a book, “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,” expanding on her ideas, and showing us that games can fully engage and motivate us, which makes us happier, more creative, more resilient and better able to tackle challenging problems.

Intrigued? We are too.

Read any thought-provoking books lately? We’d like to hear what’s on your list!

Are you a fan of TED talks? You might be excited by their news:

Today, TED announced the launch of TED Books. They are short works of nonfiction distributed digitally (for the Kindle and Kindle Reader apps for iPad and Android) which are meant to convey one powerful, interesting idea that’s easy enough to read in a single sitting. Essentially they are TED talks, in print format, for $2,99 each. (TED talk videos remain free of charge , available from their website.)

What do you think? A good idea or not?  Would you buy them?

And, do you have a favorite TED talk? If so, please share them in the comments section below – Dodge staff occasionally watch TED talks during our lunchtime, and we’re always looking for recommendations.

See also this interesting article in Fast Company magazine on TED and how it’s creating a “new Harvard” - we tweeted about awhile back, if you follow us on Twitter.

Image: TED

If you’re not familiar with GOOD (the magazine, the website, their events & videos), they are worth checking out. They show us how to collaborate – individuals, businesses and nonprofits – and move forward on a wide range of issues, and they are, for me, a really interesting example of building community and nurturing creativity through the internet.

They routinely give out assignments, such as “Help Us Create ‘Neighbor Day’” and “Design an Everyday Solution to an Extraordinary Problem” inviting anyone and everyone to participate. One of their most recent assignments was to design a way to give easier access to healthy, fresh food to people who receive government assistance. The winner of the Food Stamps and Farmers’ Market assignment shows us how this is already being done in Santa Monica, CA – useful, practical information for anyone else who might be working on these same issues.

I am also a fan of GOOD’s infographics, which are always fascinating.

Lately, I’ve been reading their feature on neighborhoods: what makes for a nice neighborhood? (See also Nate Silver‘s really interesting article, “The Most Livable Neighborhoods in New York“  in New York Magazine and his methodology for ranking them).

Also, how do you make your neighborhood better? As we continue to improve and expand Sustainable Jersey, these questions about improving our neighborhoods and communities are essential.

GOOD offers a lot of advice that may seem basic, but sometimes we need to be reminded to be good regulars at our local businesses, to throw an occasional block party, and to  get to know our neighbors. You can find their neighborhood issue here, which they will be updating until they’ve posted all of their articles. Given our work around healthy regional food systems, the article “Agriculture is the New Golf” is especially interesting.

You can also find GOOD on Facebook and on Twitter, where they ask a daily question (e.g., “Who or what inspires you?”), and it’s interesting to read people’s responses.

Do you like the neighborhood you live in? What would make it better – and what can you do to make it better?

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Tickets for the 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival go on sale through the NJPAC box office on Friday, April 23 at 10 am.

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!

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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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.”

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.

One of the amazing things about Twitter is the instantaneous access to a wide variety of resources, including all kinds of articles we at Dodge think are useful and interesting, not just to us,  but also to our grantees. Often, we tweet about them on Twitter, but in case you’re not a Twitter user yet, here are a few recent social media links we think are worth reading:

Mashable: The Social Media Guide is a go-to resource for social media article and how-tos. Yesterday they posted an interesting article about collaborative blogging. Their list of really informative How-To guides is here.

The Connections blog by Steve MacLaughlin has a great article on social media strategy: Creating a Social Networking Strategy (Part 0). And a useful follow-up: Social Media is a Big Waste of Time. He also has an Online Guide for Nonprofits that you might find useful.

The Case Foundation tells us that nonprofits are taking the lead in using social media – far outpacing universities and businesses. They also link to a great Social Media Strategy Handbook written by Wendy Harman for the Red Cross.

We mentioned last week that Dodge is on Twitter now; you can find us @grdodge. We’re discovering that Twitter is the perfect tool for communicating all of the useful pieces of information that come to us in our field visits, as well as through invitations and emails we receive from our grantees and peers, and through articles and books we’re reading – most of which we’re often not able to get up on our website quickly enough. Twitter, moreso than our website and blog, is the tool that helps us redistribute this information in a very timely way.

Are you on Twitter? Are you struggling with how to best use social media? How can Dodge help you sort through and learn what you need to know about social media? We’d love to know.

If you live in New York or New Jersey, tune to your local PBS station to see Greetings from Asbury Park, a documentary that explores how eminent domain abuse has affected the family and small resort town of Asbury Park.

The film follows 91-year-old Angie Hampilos, a Greek immigrant and the great aunt of filmmaker Christina Eliopoulos, as she learns that her seaside bungalow—her home of over 50 years—will be taken by eminent domain to make way for luxury condominiums.

The award-winning film will be aired on NJN from July 6  to July 12 and on WLIW from July 11 to July 15.

For a trailer of the movie, and more information, please visit the Greetings from Asbury Park website.

[email_link]

Tune in to NJN’s “backstories” tomorrow, November 21st at 8:30 pm or next Wednesday, November 25 at 11:30 pm when State of the Arts producer Christopher Benincasa meets with two recent Dodge Visual Artist fellows, Fausto Sevila, an art teacher at Arts High School in Newark, and Kelly Clark, an art teacher at Middlesex High School.

If you are a K-12 New Jersey public school art teacher or supervisor, you can apply for the 2009 Dodge Foundation Artist/Educator Fellowships here. Applications are due by January 30, 2009.

Artwork: Fausto Sevila, Two politicians and a vibrating beetle. 2005-07. Digital photography, acrylic, rusted razor blade, and yellow string. 40×18″. Collection of the Artist.