Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Michelle Knapik, Environment Program Director

It is easy to scan headlines, press releases and the like to see what people are against, but how often do we read statements of and perhaps even blueprints about what people are for? Yesterday’s teen temperatures made it easy to stay indoors and curl up with my laptop for some less than light reading on what needs to happen if “human and natural communities” are going to find a harmonious path to a sustainable future. If you are ready to dive into 19 “What we are for” visions of a sustainable future, then the new book The Coming Transformation: Values to Sustain Human and Natural Communities is for you. (more…)

Today’s post comes to us from Sidney Hargro of the Community Foundation of South Jersey

Sidney Hargro, Community Foundation of South Jersey

Four years in the making, the Community Foundation of South Jersey (CFSJ) is now poised to inspire philanthropy from South Jersey for South Jersey that effectively addresses today’s challenges while building a community endowment that will address the emerging issues of tomorrow. To all of those who had a hand in the formation of CFSJ, take a deep breath…and a bow! You did it!

The passionate and committed early efforts of the coordinating committee members, led by Chair Jack Tarditi, Vice Chair Mindy Holman, Nina Stack of the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers, and others has been rewarded with a $600,000 operating and grantmaking grant from the Ford Foundation and a $50,000 operating grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for which we are extremely grateful. With this seed investment, CFSJ will create a brand of philanthropy that is fueled by a framework of listening, leveraging, and learning.

Listening

Every great endeavor must begin with listening, and listening will take on a variety forms at CFSJ. The first act of listening has already begun in the form of listening to those who had a hand in creating the foundation to capture their “hopes and dreams” for the region. This will be followed by a regional tour to engage leaders from the nonprofit sector, business, government, higher ed and others in conversations about the diverse communities that constitute South Jersey. We want tohear their ideas about how CFSJ can help them make a difference. Why? Because we believe innovative ideas and solutions to the greatest challenges in South Jersey lie within the people of South Jersey. This tour will also help us identify community ambassadors throughout the region to serve as the foundation’s eyes and ears.

Leveraging

Lucy Bernholz, Founder and President of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc. and visiting scholar at the Stanford University Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society,  simply defines philanthropic leverage as “the use of dollars in pot A to access dollars from Pot B”. For CFSJ, we will expand this notion by using existing human and financial capital to access additional human and financial capital, all for the purpose of seeding a movement that will continuously improve the quality of life in South Jersey. In other words, we will not only play the role of philanthropic advisor to individuals, families, and businesses – conveniently connecting them to the causes they care about – but we will also cultivate relationships between donors, regional and national funders, and others that have similar social change agendas.

Learning

One of the best definitions that I have heard for the term “learning organization” is:

“Organizations with an ingrained philosophy for anticipating, reacting and responding to change, complexity and uncertainty.”  —Yogesh Malhotra, PhD

Using this definition, it would appear that community foundations are ideally positioned to be a community’s foremost learning organizations, especially with the economic realities that some say is the “new normal”. To that end, CFSJ is committed to monitoring and evaluating incremental improvements on the road to making a difference in the region.

Listening, leveraging, and learning is not a linear process. It is a continual, artistic symphony of elements that simultaneously works to make CFSJ a relevant philanthropic organization. For more information on the the work of the foundation, please visit our website at www.communityfoundationsj.org.

David Grant, President and CEO

I have been reading Michael Sandel’s book Justice, which stems from his popular course of the same name at Harvard.  In between chapters over the weekend, I have been reading proposals from nonprofit organizations seeking funding from Dodge in the new year.

In both cases, the predominant question on my mind has been Sandel’s subtitle: What’s The Right Thing To Do?

The book, by the way, would be a great holiday present for anyone you know who appreciates having his or her assumptions challenged.  Just when you think you know what “the right thing to do” is, Sandel asks you to look at it another way.

He begins with some fascinating questions of judgment and, inevitably, politics, using real life situations.  Should there be laws against price gouging in the wake of natural disasters?  Should Purple Hearts be awarded for psychological injuries?  Should the CEO’s and top executives of banks bailed out with taxpayer money get bonuses?

And he uses hypothetical situations.  If you were the engineer on a runaway train, with five people working on the track in front of you, and you could turn onto a side track where one person was working, would you?  Most people say yes.  If you were watching the runaway train from a bridge and could push one person onto the tracks to save the five people working further down them, would you?  Most people say no.  In each case, there is a choice: either one person will die or five people will die. Yet we make different judgments.  It is not just about numbers and outcomes.

Sandel’s theme is that there are three main ways to think about justice: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue.

I began to cast the proposals to Dodge in these terms and realize our social investments of limited resources require us to reflect on these matters.  How shall we compare a local arts group with a local soup kitchen, for example? Do we support the educational organization that brings freedom of choice and opportunity to a small number of underserved students in a dramatic, transformational way?  Or do we back efforts to incrementally improve an educational system that affects thousands of students?

Sandel unpacks that last idea: the utilitarian idea of “the greatest good for the greatest number” – both its strengths and its weaknesses. That chapter helps me understand why at some gatherings of foundations, there are strong pleas for the whole field to drop everything except a focus on mitigating climate change.

At Dodge, we use the themes Creativity and Sustainability as if they were virtues.  But I imagine Sandel countering: “Do you value the creativity it takes to create a new weapon?  Is everything worth sustaining?”

Clearly not.  I appreciate how Sandel frames the process of responsible moral judgment as “a dialectic between our judgments about particular situations and the principals we affirm on reflection.”  It reminds me again of the importance of “Quadrant II” time in organizations – that precious time we set aside and protect for important matters that are not urgent.  It is our time to reflect on lessons learned from action and guiding principles for future decisions.

It is both disconcerting and liberating to understand anew through reading Justice that the right thing to do is not always clear to a single individual, let alone a group, no matter how much thoughtful attention you pay to a given situation or choice.  But as he writes, “Thinking about justice seems inescapably to engage us in thinking about the best way to live,” and for us at Dodge, that takes us to the heart of our mission of fostering a more livable world.

We will never, in Sandel’s words, “resolve (our) disagreements once and for all.”  But these discussions “can give shape to the arguments we have, and bring moral clarity to the alternatives we confront.”

Another cycle of grantmaking is underway.

Michelle Knapik, Environment Program Director

I’m not sure I’d pose this question quite this way in too many settings, but I’m at a gathering of funders who are working at the intersections of sustainable agriculture, food systems, smart growth and sustainable communities, so throwing around the KYF acronym is acceptable, but my hope is that the issue of whether you Know Your Farmer and Know Your Food (USDA’s outreach campaign ) is one that more and more foundations will help communities address. Currently, we are a nation comprised of predominantly KYF challenged people. When introducing the topic of food systems, the moderator of our first panel discussion, Gail Imig, Program Director at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation said “we’ve lost our way.” In fact, based on the cultural currency of industrial agriculture and commodity markets, funders and others have felt compelled to reintroduce the words “food” and “natural resources” because of the tenuous association.

I have to say that exploring the benefits and opportunities of re-regionalizing our food systems, including urban-rural linkages and the frontiers of urban farming, is no straight line assessment. It is about land use and preservation (No Farms, No Food), food production, “control of choice” in disinvested urban neighborhoods, food access, food justice, human health, green jobs, eco system services, climate change, community revitalization, local economies, and, dare I say, the future of our relationship to the land.

Finding our way to KYF-KYF seems to hinge on “the local integration of food systems” (a slight, but important distinction from pure local food production, which was highlighted by Dr. Mike Hamm, C.S. Mott Professor of Sustainable Agriculture at Michigan State University).  Here’s a quick rundown on what local integration entails: farm to fork concepts (I learned that the “direct to consumer” food pathway has grown 100% in the last decade and is projected to be a $7 billion enterprise by 2012); farm to institution initiatives, including farm to school efforts (Dodge supports Fair Food Philly’s farm to institute program in the Greater Philadelphia region); fresh food financing initiatives (the Obama Administration is interested in seeing The Reinvestment Fund’s FFFI go national in scale); healthy corner store efforts; Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), or, for the urban at heart, City Supported Agriculture; Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaigns; and the expansion of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) outreach efforts.  Carol Kramer LeBlanc, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Director of Sustainable Development, framed many of these strategies as “key ingredients to creating regional food systems and urban farms” (for policy geeks, just knowing that this position exists at USDA is the equivalent of comfort food).

The group of funders ended up talking about public policy strategies that touch on both supply and demand for regional foods. We heard about creative solutions and systems thinking in urban centers across the country (Detroit, Cleveland, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Newark, etc.), including the regional food system study from the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (that Dodge supports) and the rise of Food Policy Councils that help communities distill various food interests and perspectives. What we face now, however, are the challenges of accelerating and scaling-up projects and programs for small and medium farms and food enterprises.

Kathryn Colasanti, an Academic Specialist at Michigan State University, helped us think about scale at several levels: 1) the household level (people building skills and saving on food costs); 2) the neighborhood/community level (skill building/entrepreneurial opportunities, plus opportunities to serve youth, formerly incarcerated, and/or other underserved or marginalized groups); and 3) the city level (reduction of blight and the cost of vacant lot maintenance, increased property values, and opportunities for downstream enterprises).

There are still a number of gaps to be filled in on this “going to scale” conversation, as well as a need for “improved economic research on the impact of regional food production,” but I was encouraged to hear about program innovations that point in this direction. Here are some highlights and links: the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network’s D-Town Farm (a 2 acre model urban farm with organic vegetable plots, two bee hives, a hoop house for year round food production, a composting operation, and market arrangements with urban growers in Detroit); the Detroit Garden Resource Program Collaborative (an aggregator of services such as seedling and transplant support, soil testing, tilling services, tool sharing, niche urban ag workshops, etc.); urban farmer collectives; growing season extension technologies; value-added enterprises; food distribution and storage solutions; and local policy initiatives like Cleveland’s “garden zoning” and ordinances that address livestock in the urban core.

As these food system pieces come together, regions will increase their “food production potential,” and we might even see the rise of “Agri Food Districts” in some older industrial cities (depending upon the assemblage of large numbers of vacant lots). But before we once again “lose our way” in the seduction of yield per urban acre or food bucks per urban acre, let’s remember that this exploration started with the notion of reconnecting people with farmers and food. To that end, I point you to the work of the Community Food Security Coalition and their recently published Whole Measures for Community Food Systems. I think this work will help many of us “find our way” to important people, land and food connections. Hey, if the DIY (do it yourself) minded folks spurred a home renovation revolution and market, I bet a KYF generation can spur a regional foods revolution and help build strong local economies. Are you a KYFer?

David Grant, President and CEO

Every morning, on my way to my e-mails or the news, I pause over the Dodge homepage. This Sunday, November 8th, I did more than pause, for there, finally, were the revised guidelines and all the accompanying materials people need to apply to Dodge for grants in 2010. We’ve been working on them for months.

It doesn’t take four or five months to write seven or eight pages and redesign some forms. But it could take forever to decide what’s in them, such is the freedom foundations have to choose among worthy ideas and efforts to support.

At this point in time, I hope we have found that sweet spot where change is so based on current practices and opportunities that it feels logical and right. These guidelines reflect what we have learned from our grantees, and I believe almost all of those organizations will find themselves in this new presentation of what Dodge supports.

At the same time, the new guidelines encourage big-picture thinking, which is different from our supporting discrete programs in different disciplines. They reflect a long-term vision of New Jersey as a creative place and, as a result, a more sustainable place. And they are built around the importance of having well-run and well-governed nonprofit organizations serving that vision both alone and, increasingly, with others.

Thus you will notice some new language about “high-potential, innovative, collaborative programs and models.” What do we mean by this? We think of the Sustainable Jersey coalition of local governments, universities, state government, businesses and nonprofits now working so effectively to give people on the local level the tools they need to make their places more sustainable. We think of the work Young Audiences of New Jersey and the Foundation for Educational Administration is doing to launch a state-wide creativity initiative. We think of the work The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education is doing to involve schools, school-systems and their communities in understanding the mind-sets necessary to create a sustainable future together.

And we believe there will be other important ideas and effective approaches that will come our way because of the new guideline language about creativity and sustainability. As we say elsewhere on this site, quoting playwright David Mamet, “We steer where we are looking.”

I hope somewhere out there my successor is looking — and liking what he or she sees.