Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

By Molly de Aguiar
Director of Communications

If there’s one thing nonprofits hear repeatedly about the importance of social media, it’s the potential to use these tools for fundraising in new and exciting ways. And while none of them will magically deliver large sums of money to your organization, we think Kickstarter is revolutionizing fundraising, and that if you don’t already know about them, you should.

Kickstarter is crowd-sourced fundraising – it’s a website where anyone with an idea can ask for donations for their project. If someone likes your idea, he can donate a little or he can donate a lot. And there is no shortage of creative, fun, practical, exciting and incredibly smart projects to back. In fact, in 2011, Kickstarter reached some astonishing milestones. Since launching the website in April 2009, 17,000 projects have been successfully funded with $130 million in pledges and 1.25 million backers. Pretty compelling numbers for non-profits who have been looking for ways to fund their most creative ideas.

One of the keys to Kickstarter’s success is its clever all-or-nothing model: projects must be fully funded before any money exchanges hands, which helps minimize the risk to donors. This model also helps you, the creator, test your idea in the marketplace without risk: if you don’t get fully funded, you don’t have to spend the money or effort to follow through, which frees you to refine your idea or try something new.

Dodge recently partnered with Kickstarter to curate our favorite projects. While we don’t actually fund these projects, we choose ones that reflect the kinds of grants we make here in New Jersey in the Arts, Education, Environment and Media. As Kickstarter continues to grow, we hope to see our grantees launch campaigns of their own, which we can feature on our page. In fact, we hope to see as many New Jersey-focused projects as possible – all toward a better New Jersey.

Coming soon: Kickstarter will be offering a workshop for Dodge grantees with tips for launching a successful Kickstarter campaign. Details to come!

Visit the Dodge Foundation’s curated Kickstarter page

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 Nina Stack
President, Council of New Jersey Grantmakers

According to the Council on Foundations, in 2008 there was nearly $18 billion in philanthropic assets in the state of New Jersey. We don’t have a clear sense of where those assets are today with the stock market’s rollercoaster recovery of late. Whether up or down, the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers’ (CNJG) mission remains the same: to strengthen and promote effective philanthropy. As the state’s forum for learning, sharing ideas, and advancing the field, CNJG worked throughout 2011 to inspire our members to be responsive, proactive and effective funders.

CNJG offered grantmakers over 50 roundtable and panel discussions, workshops, teleconferences and webinars in 2011. We hosted 140 New Jersey non-profit and foundation leaders at our annual conference where we explored the powerful role philanthropic networks play in advancing issues and causes. During our popular Conversations with the Cabinet sessions, CNJG members discussed opportunities to partner with state government on mutual issues of concern with Human Services Commissioner Jennifer Velez, Community Affairs Commissioner Lori Grifa and Acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf. And, last week, our 2011 Annual Meeting featured Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, a Camden doctor in the national spotlight for his work to reduce healthcare costs by “hot spotting” or “super serving” chronic healthcare system users. The Nicholson Foundation‘s Charles Venti and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation‘s Gretchen Hartling offered their insight into seeding this type of work and rewards of working with such an innovative champion.

In addition to our programming and services for grantmakers, work progressed significantly on several CNJG leadership initiatives this past year. For example, the Board Bank, which I’ve written about on this blog before, is just about ready to launch with our partners, the American Conference on Diversity, at the helm. Facing Our Future, the groundbreaking initiative that has objectively examined New Jersey’s long-term fiscal problems, is heading into a second phase of its work. I’ve outlined the findings of our first report as part of Facing Our Future in this column before but in the next few months we’ll be releasing an update to the findings, along with some options or best practices that are underway in New Jersey and elsewhere that could prove promising to help address the fiscal crisis we face.

And we saw the continued advancement of a truly successful partnership with the Council’s Newark Philanthropic Liaison Jeremy Johnson, now in place for 5 years. Among the notable achievements: the rollout of Living Cities $15 million blended investment in the “Strong, Healthy Communities Initiative,” submission of a multi-partner application to the White House-endorsed “Promise Neighborhood” program for the Fairmount section of the city and a commitment by the Mayor’s office for a six-community neighborhood revitalization project. The Newark Funders Group grew to over 25 members and it’s Education Subcommittee created the Newark Public Schools Innovative Investment Fund – a pooled fund to support the school district’s strategic plan priority of building “a system of great schools that serve students, their families and the community.”

We also saw the membership of the Council grow with 16 new members. These foundations and corporate grantmakers recognize the importance and value of engaging with their philanthropic colleagues to leverage their impact and staying abreast of the latest trends and best practices. On behalf of the CNJG Board and staff, we thank the Dodge Foundation for allowing us to share our story through their blog. Dodge Foundation’s noble commitment to our region has spurred social sector growth and education, and it has nourished New Jersey’s soul through their generous support of the arts. For that and so much more, we are grateful.

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 Nina Stack
President, Council of New Jersey Grantmakers

Against the backdrop of a prolonged and dramatic budget crisis, a statewide team of former senior level government officials and others is seeking to engage leaders and local residents in needed discussion about the long-view of New Jersey’s financial solutions at all levels of government.

Beginning in 2010, the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers (CNJG) started working with this non-partisan, volunteer group because we recognized philanthropy might be able to provide a neutral and “safe space” necessary to examine the complex and critical problem our state faces. Earlier this year, we issued a report that provided an independent, objective analysis of how various government entities in New Jersey raise and spend money. In Facing Our Future, the leadership group concluded that the scale of fiscal problems facing New Jersey today dwarfs any problems faced in the past. Although our current fiscal crisis built incrementally over many years, fully unwinding those decisions to restore fiscal health is neither practical nor realistic.

What Facing Our Future does is foster a much-needed civic conversation; it looks at all revenue sources and all public spending across state, municipalities, school districts and counties. More telling, the report shows how entangled the fiscal situations are at different levels of government. Over 40 percent of the state budget consists of state aid payments to municipalities, counties and school districts. Reductions in state aid coupled with property tax constraints shift the budget cuts to another venue. The result? A problem solved at one level moves the fiscal stress to another.

The report also raises the surprisingly simple – yet real – questions before us now. Do we look ahead at the fiscal trajectory and make purposeful decisions that will lay a new firm foundation, or do we just whack away incrementally at our public services in response to continued fiscal pressures, until we are surprised one day at how degraded our services have become? Will we be confronted with the elimination of some service we valued, and wonder if we had been more engaged would we have had more control over the choices being made?

Admittedly, tough budget choices were made this year. However, they haven’t solved the problem and a lot more are needed. In fact, the problem can’t be solved at any single level of government. We need a wholly different conversation about what we want in public services, how much we are willing to pay for them, and how much we are willing to accept changes in those services to preserve their value.

Usually, fiscal stress causes individuals – including citizens and elected leaders – to protect their priorities. The Facing Our Future leadership group is using public outreach to encourage civic discussion by a broad spectrum of New Jersey’s citizens. Through this outreach, we are also informing the public about the scope, nature and extent of our shared fiscal future, and sparking open-minded conversations about what’s next and what are our options.

In the coming weeks, there are two symposia designed to engage critical stakeholders in a series of focused public discussions about the report’s findings and to generate discussion that will help identify and prioritize options for addressing our state’s current fiscal crisis. On November 17th, The Walter Rand Institute at Rutgers-Camden will host a Facing Our Future symposia. In conjunction with PlanSmart NJ, a second Facing Our Future event will take place on December 9th at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

The initial Facing Our Future report stopped short of prescriptions. Our intent was to lay out the issues and get people informed. There is no silver bullet for maintaining desired services in our state’s fiscal scenario. As the report makes clear, the entire public enterprise must be examined, as tweaking parts of the equation will not be sufficient remedy.

You can view the full “Facing Our Future” report at www.facingourfuture.org. To date, support for Facing Our Future has been provided by the Fund for New Jersey, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Nicholson Foundation, PSEG Foundation, the William Penn Foundation and a private donor.

Related coverage of Facing Our Future.

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 Nina Stack, President
Council of New Jersey Grantmakers

Diverse perspectives improve effectiveness.

A bold statement perhaps, but a belief that is being embraced more and more in the corporate world, and we hope, in nonprofits as well. Why have for-profits moved to making sure their Boards are diverse? Because they recognize that successful companies today need to have a management that is more globally oriented and culturally diverse. Because having that produces better decisions and stronger organizations.

This holds true for nonprofits as well, and it is why my organization, the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers, is partnering with New Jersey’s American Conference on Diversity to explore creating The Board Bank, a board matching service for diverse leaders in the state who want to connect with nonprofits and foundations. We thank the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for recently sending out a survey to its grantees that will help us gauge their interest in this idea. If you’d like to take the survey follow this link. All responses will be kept confidential and will be enormously helpful as we work to create this new resource designed to ensure that New Jersey’s diverse voices are well represented.

The idea of finding a way to help foundations and nonprofits identify diverse trustees has been on the docket of the Council for some time. In recent years, there has been a good deal of discussion about board diversity in the philanthropic community. As CNJG considered how it might help our members identify potential trustees, it seemed natural to enlist the American Conference on Diversity as a partner. With some planning grant support from the Albin Family Foundation, the Community Foundation of New Jersey, the Eastman Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we began earlier this year researching similar programs throughout the country, considering criteria for inclusion, and formulating a business model for long term success. An advisory council made up of highly-regarded diverse professionals from all over the state has been providing frank and invaluable input into the development and execution of The Board Bank.

We expect that through The Board Bank, institutions within the State’s social sector will have access to diverse business and community leaders looking to actively participate in the governance and leadership of organizations while serving as trustees. Individuals who wish to expand their community and philanthropic involvement will be matched with organizations seeking to ensure that their Board reflects the significant and rapidly growing diversity in New Jersey.

There are two very important outcomes we see for this program, and both are critical to improving the quality and relevance of services rendered by NJ’s social sector:

• The Board Bank will inevitably boost the amount of knowledge and expertise available to foundation and non-profit Boards.
• It will be a unique and valuable resource for companies looking to become more connected and engaged in the communities in which they conduct business.

The American Conference on Diversity expects to launch The Board Bank in 2012. Look for more information then on how your nonprofit can become a “Member” or how your business or leading institution can become a “Partner.”

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.