Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Michelle Knapik, Environment Program Director

Last week I was part of the Sustainable Agriculture and Food System Funders Conference (note, I didn’t say I that I attended – there is an urgency to this issue that calls for much more than attendance).  What struck me most was the convergence of thought leaders, practitioners and organizers from traditionally separate sectors. These presenters were not simply at the same conference, they were co-leading sessions, learning from each other, and identifying the knowledge gaps. Funders were invited to taste a fusion of community food, finance and design (as in planners, builders, and engineers), and to cultivate the models and policies to support this mashing of flavors at a larger scale. There was also a sense about this being the moment in time for the philanthropic sector to step-up and build local and regional food economies and communities (remember, we just fused these). The question is whether the sector will choose to do so (here’s a great article on how local and national philanthropy is gearing up to “effect big change” in this arena).

The conference learning went from head to field to stomach. While in the field, we met neighborhood food producers, local food pioneers, sustainable ag farmers, community development leaders, emergency food providers, policy leaders, and healthy food entrepreneurs.  We also saw that food production is happening on private walls and roofs, institutional lands, faith based lands, municipal lands, and if land is not granted, then by way of guerrilla gardening. Food is being sold, shared and gleaned, and there are linkages to food cupboards, neighbors and markets (sometimes a hybrid of all three).

Since the title of the conference was “Shaking it Up, Making it Last,” I’m about to honor the shaking it up portion by combining notes from the tour I led with my colleague Andy Johnson from the William Penn Foundation with reflections from the conference sessions. But let me start with what was for me the most critical take-away. It came from Jeremy Nowak, President and CEO of The Reinvestment Fund . He said that in this space of regional foods, we must start somewhere, we cannot wait for the perfect comprehensive plan. He underscored that development is iterative; that we need to pursue ideas and thinking and learn from them as they get embedded in practice. This is, in Jeremy’s words, about “craft” – and we must use craft and practice to go to scale, all the while creating a living narrative around the work. This, he says, is where hope lives.

Hope was certainly thriving in Camden, NJ on the day of our tour which was entitled, “A Union of Urban Food, Faith & Empowerment.”

Josh Chisholm of Camden Churches Organized for People (CCOP) told the story of how this was once a trash strewn lot where abandoned police trailers stood covered with graffiti and where a drug economy thrived. With the help of the Camden City Garden Club , which is the primary life support system for community gardens and farms in Camden, this ¾ acre lot now has 35 family plots and star quality community leaders. The Checos, whose son was sparked by CCGC’s “Grow Lab” program at neighboring St. Anthony’s school, and who in turn sparked the lot transformation, now organize potluck dinners wherein gardeners exchange techniques and best practices.  Mr. Checo also serves on the City’s new food security advisory council.

Speakers throughout the conference talked about the benefits of transforming vacant lots to productive lands. Here are a few benefits to consider: lower public land maintenance costs, reduced household food expenditures (this can be in excess of $1,000 year), increased property values, added jobs, increased opportunities for skills training, improved health, and improved environmental stewardship, biodiversity, and access to and use of open space. As food system analyst, Ken Meter noted, our current food and economic systems fail us on all of the following fronts – health, wealth, connection and capacity; but local food economies embrace and integrate all four. Mr. Meter, who is the President of the Crossroads Resource Center in Minneapolis sees local foods as a prime economic recovery strategy. If the $1 trillion dollar food economy were shifted to a regional food system, he asserts that true recovery could happen because the economic changes would build wealth in low income settings. How might this get kick started? Well, he noted that local and state governments spend $ 550 billion on economic development strategies that are not delivering on their promises. What if some of these funds were repurposed to support regional food system development?

At the local level, there is a community development corporation (CDC) in Camden that is combining community revitalization with community gardening. The response to Cramer Hill CDC’s support for community gardens is off the chart. When Andy and I sketched out the tour route a few weeks ago, the “lot” below was an overgrown triangle of neglect, but now it joins the ranks of some 80 community gardens in Camden that are connected to CCGC.

Our tour trolley then headed to south Camden, probably the hardest hit area of all the Camden neighborhoods, yet one in which community gardening has helped keep some blocks together for many years.

Pedro Rodriguez - Neighborhood Food Producer and Educator

Again, when Andy I did our pre-tour run, the lot in this south Camden block was devoid of any real life, now hope sprouts throughout the lot and those working on it.

There are innovative policies popping up all over the country to help accelerate the conversion of vacant and underutilized city lots. Many “fixes” focus on longer land tenure, including the concept of urban garden zones. There are also new city farm animal and bee ordinances, and there is an urban agriculture overlay district in Cleveland. Vancouver also has new urban ag design standard. I even heard a conference participant suggest “ 1% for urban ag” ( a new take on 1% for art). I learned about a number of these approaches last November at a Funders Network Conference in Cleveland, but the rate of change from then to now is staggering (see my blog post from last November).

The policy push feels necessary to effect change. Jason McLennan of the Living Building Challenge (who is also the CEO of Cascadia Region Green Building Council ) reminded us that rapid change is not only possible, but that many social revolutions occurred in short bursts. He noted that we went from cities built for walking and riding horses to auto cities in a span of 20-30 years – and that happened without a sense of urgency for change. Remember, too, that during WWII, Victory Gardens quickly ramped up, yielding 40% of all produce in the country. So with the ingredients we have for a food system revolution, imagine what our cities might look like in 2030 in terms of food production, transportation, architecture, and culture.

And I didn’t mean to gloss over the significance of having a green building expert at this conference. The Living Building Challenge is about regenerative design wherein our built infrastructure can help heal our degraded landscapes. McLennan said that we must have a blending of food & architecture – of community design – and that this is more about a re-imagining of our food system. He noted that food used to be an integrated part of community design – think pre WWII visions, or when Frank Lloyd Wright designed the broad acre city.

Do we have all the answers on regional/local food systems? No. There are lots of knowledge gaps regarding sustainable ag and urban ag. And we definitely need a deep learning session with Ann Carroll of the EPA Brownfields program. There is no doubt that we need to know HOW to operate in urban environments. Ann waves the banner of “methyl ethyl death,” but lucky for us, she is also a local food champion and advocate of the highest caliber – she just wants to make sure it happens in a way that protects our health and well being.  Working on or near contaminated lands is no walk in the park.

One of the last stops on our tour took us to the beginning of an urban farm in south Camden – just down the block from the two “lot” sized gardens.

There’s been more research on the impact of food production in Philly, so I’ll pass on these stats from Domenic Vitiello, founding president of the Philadelphia Orchard Project and a professor of city planning at the University of Pennsylvania who has done research to quantify local community garden food production (he also teaches a course on community development and food system planning). Philadelphia’s 200 food related community gardens, tended to by more than 500 people, produces more than $5 million in summer veggies. This without formal supports!  Imagine if there were maintenance and endowment programs, supportive experiential education to build consumer demand, and entrepreneurial and job skill training opportunities.

Going back to Ken Meter’s discussion – the Camden Farm could be part of Camden’s economic recovery, and it could operate as a hybrid model (part neighborhood food production and part farmers market, with perhaps a few spin-off food enterprises).  As professor Vitiello noted, this is about planting seeds and growing lives.

It also is about growing networks.  Ken Meter talked about the shift from working old supply chains to “building value networks” – clusters of small businesses that trade with each other. This would include a farmer, a local food processing operation, the distributor, a compost operation, etc.  Each serving as a multiplier in a local or regional economy. At the local level this might look like the Growers Alliance in Philly, which is about creating a green resource center to coordinate bulk purchases of seedlings, hay, and mulch for its member, as well as providing education and training. There are 17 growers in the alliance today; the forecast is for 300 in the next 3 years. At a higher level, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies provides support for sustainable business networks across the country and the globe.

So where does the patient capital to fuel this shift come from? Let’s go back to Jeremy Nowak and the work of The Reinvestment Fund. Jeremy jumped into the food arena through housing and community development and attempts to address the issue of urban food deserts. TRF’s Fresh Food Financing Initiative has now reached national acclaim, including White House interest. Jeremy notes that data collection and relationship building is how TRF built “Wholefoods in the hood.” Now he sees the power and potential of the local and regional food movement and is considering models like mushroom farms and other food production enterprises as a complement to the supermarket financing initiative. He will collect data and build relationships with growers and then develop the finance models. He thinks funders can identify the “burning bushes” of activity in their regions by creating an activity map. From there, funders can identify where success might happen, as well as the range of risks and the different kinds of funding mechanisms that are needed (blended grants, loans, etc.). This calls for more foundations to jump into the impact investment arena – or to work with intermediaries like RSF Social Finance , whose team is creating a series of small food related Program Related Investment (PRI) funds (they do the underwriting, due diligence etc.) The Community Food Enterprise Report is a good starting point for this work. Sandy Wiggins, chair of E3 Bank , put it this way, “We need to change our mindset from one of exclusively “managing risk” to one of “creating prosperity.”

Mike Devlin of CCGC talks with NJ Ag Secretary Doug Fisher

Under a tent at CCGC, the final stop on our tour, we were joined by Mark Smith, Chef / Owner of Tortilla Press who is dedicated to sourcing local foods. I’d say more, but my mouth still waters when I think about the veggie quesadillas he served us. We were also joined by Tracy Duffield of Duffield’s Farm. Duffields represents the ever important rural to urban connection in our regional food system, evidenced by the blueberry crumb cake that was quickly consumed by our tour participants. But I have to say that even though he didn’t serve up any food, NJ Secretary of Agriculture Doug Fisher stole the show when he announced that he is talking to USDA’s NJ Rural Development Office about “a 21st century version of the produce vendors and fish peddlers who used to traverse the streets of our cities.” He wants to pilot a “fresh mobile” unit (a cross between a book mobile and ice cream vendor truck) that would have “cold storage amenities that offer locally grown produce and other in season ag products.” In addition to raw and prepared foods, there would be value added products – and all Fresh Mobile units would be equipped with EBT machines and non cash ways of handling SNAP, WIC, Senior Farmer Market coupons, and related payments. Secretary Fisher’s background in retail and wholesale food distribution provides him with the working knowledge that just because food is grown and harvested in NJ, it does not necessarily reach the plate of every resident, especially in our urban centers. He is also very sensitive to the availability of cheap, unhealthy foods that are prevalent in food outlets in our cities.

Secretary Fisher’s comments regarding unhealthy diets served as a nice segue to one of the final plenary sessions, “Refocusing the National Food System.” A collaborative effort among Columbia University , MIT, and the United Health Foundation offered a perspective on the link between the food system and health. Did you know that we will spend $344 billion by 2018 to manage the health consequences of obesity? Dr. Reed Tuckson, Executive Vice President and Chief of Medical Affairs at UnitedHealth Group, thinks that the ubiquitous $1 cheeseburger and our current food system has everything to do with this issue. This study group is calling for a decentralized local healthy food hub system – they want the nation to recalibrate and think in terms of Food Sheds. How does this shift happen? A huge part of it is about food literacy – something Secretary Fisher keyed in on as well. Dr. Tuckson proclaimed that we all need to become good food citizens in order to change a system that produces more than enough food calories, yet leaves 1 billion people hungry. I suppose we could wait until oil prices reach a catastrophic tipping point (futurist John Michael Greer was on hand to talk about his vision of a post oil peak “Ecotechnic Future”), but I have a little more faith in the power of people to organize for this food revolution.

Are you a good food citizen? What are your ideas about improving food literacy, cultivating the concept of food sheds and promoting civic engagement around regional food systems?

During the conference, I met some amazing writer, blogger, foodie colleagues from Seeding Chicago. They blogged about several tours and conference sessions. The “must reads” from their site include a general post on the conference, a tour stop at Cathedral Kitchen , more on Jeremy Nowak , and a tour stop at Greens Grow.

Photo by Kevin Coughlin

To our all grantees, friends and colleagues who are experiencing this leadership transition with us, we share both a farewell message from outgoing President and CEO David Grant as well as a welcoming message from Dodge’s new President and CEO Chris Daggett. We urge you to read both, as well as to listen to Morristown Green’s podcast of the joint interview (also on our homepage) which Kevin Coughlin conducted with David and Chris. In it, David and Chris share their views on sustainability, training tomorrow’s leaders, and the role of philanthropy in a tough economic climate, among other topics. We believe their messages coupled with the podcast will give you a sense of both where we’ve been and where we’re going. Goodbye to David, and hello to Chris!

* * *

Almost twelve years ago, when I wrote my first introduction to a Dodge Foundation Annual Report, I invoked Robert Frost’s poem The Pasture. Placing the poem at the beginning of his collected works, Frost invites the reader into a world filled with images of spring and flow and rebirth – cleared springs and newborn calves tottering by their mothers – and wrote: We shan’t be gone long/You come too.

I was inviting our Annual Report readers into a world that struck me as similarly inspiring — full of the creativity of Dodge’s grantees and the Foundation’s own initiatives. Now I think I was writing to myself as well. We shan’t be gone long – indeed the twelve years have flown by, and I find myself full of gratitude at the end:

• For the people in the civic sector whom Dodge is so privileged to support. If there is ever to be “a society more humane, a world more livable,” as the Dodge mission language envisions, it will be because of the cumulative effects of their work;
• For the Dodge Board, which was not afraid to take risks. The Foundation’s response to 9/11, the launching of the New Jersey Cultural Trust, the construction of the green building at 14 Maple Avenue – all are testament to creative governance;
• For the Dodge staff, who are a mission-driven, hard-working, fun-loving group. They know that it is not only what they do but also how they do it that has defined Dodge’s place in the world. The day-to-day fellowship with them, doing work that matters, is what I will miss the most.

I wish Chris Daggett all the best as he takes on the leadership of this remarkable institution, and I thank all of the people who have been so supportive of Nancy and me and our sons Ben and Rob during our years in New Jersey.

With best regards,
David

* * *

Greetings! I come to Dodge with an overwhelming number of good wishes from people across the state, many of whom I have met over my years of involvement in the public, private and non-profit sectors, and others of whom I have never met, but who have great respect and hope for the work of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

Those good wishes are both appreciated and humbling. I fully recognize the legacy of excellence and good works of Dodge’s first two leaders, Scott McVay and David Grant, and greatly appreciate the trust placed in me by the board of directors to carry on the tradition they established.

There is much to do, particularly given the state of the economy and the pressures placed on grantees by the decline in financing by individuals, governments and foundations. But times of turmoil are also times of opportunity – and foundations can lead the way by supporting the best programs of the past, and the new ideas that will shape the future. The key is to get the right balance of the two.

I am confident that the success of my predecessors will continue – but as good as the staff and board of the foundation may be, we cannot do it alone. We need your help – or, in the words of Robert Frost quoted by David Grant in his companion letter, “You come too”. Together, and led by our grantees, we will meet the challenges of the day.

I look forward to working with you.
Chris

David Grant, President and CEO

Early on Tuesday morning last week, at the end of the Memorial Day holiday weekend, I drove across the state of Vermont to drop in on the first day of a three-day conference in Burlington on the concept “Gross National Happiness.”

My own level of happiness was not too high at first, since I went to the wrong college campus and had to ask several bemused strangers where the Happiness meeting was.  They must have thought, “What is this, some weird metaphorical pick-up line?”

Anyway, I found the right place eventually and enjoyed hearing about various efforts around the world to do on a societal scale what our Dodge assessment workshops advocate for organizations, which is to “Measure What Matters.”

The most interesting and well-established experiment along these lines is in Bhutan, where they have chosen the goal of Gross National Happiness in deliberate contrast to Gross National Product as the primary measure of a country’s wealth.  That parallel verbal construction creates an immediate understanding of what’s going on, but I agree with one of the speakers who said, “Drop the ‘Gross.’  This is about National Happiness.”  And I agree with another who said the subtitle of the conference, “Changing What We Measure from Wealth to Well-Being,” really should be “Changing the Way We Define Wealth.”

What Bhutan has done has been to create 72 indicators, in NINE areas, nine dimensions of wealth.  (Ecology, Education, Culture, Health, Living Standards, Good Governance, Psychological Well-being, Community Vitality, and Use of Time.) They strive to create public policy with these indicators in mind, and they do a national survey every two years to monitor developments in any and all of them.

I realized why I was drawn to this conversation early on when the secretary of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Commission invoked in his keynote address the two themes that appear prominently in Dodge’s current guidelines.  He said the indicators were all about his country’s collective vision of what a SUSTAINABLE future would look like for them.  And he said when their biennial surveys gave them data on these indicators, the real work is to craft CREATIVE policies and programs in response to the data and with a sense of the whole that the nine dimensions gives them.

I’ll give you an example.  One of their cultural indicators told them that only 1% of people in Bhutan meditated daily, despite the historical resonance of that practice.  Their interest in psychological well-being focused their attention on the benefits of meditation, and their interest in school climate focused them on the benefits of shared time of quiet and introspection.

The result was a national experiment, through educational policy: two minutes of meditation at the beginning of the school day and two minutes at the end.  (Note that when you are in the habit of measuring results of different practices, you can try things and see if they work.)

The experiment is only four months old, but the early responses are overwhelmingly positive.  Teachers and students say those times of day are the only ones when they can count on having time to think uninterrupted.  They love the new ritual – and they say the tone of the entire school day has subtly changed as a result of the way it begins and ends.

Lest you think this conversation is reserved for people living in, or about to move back to, mountainous kingdoms like Bhutan or Vermont, I should note that hovering over the gathering was the publication of Derek Bok’s new book The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being.

When the former President of Harvard believes that the findings of scientific research into Happiness are clear enough and significant enough that we should base public policy on them, you know the idea has moved beyond aging hippies and frustrated idealists.  Might it be heading for the mainstream?

I think that shift in the emphasis in medical research has a lesson for us in the world of philanthropy.  Until recently – maybe the last twenty years – research has been based on pathology.  We saw disease and strove to cure it.  And that will always be an important part of medical research.

But as Bok describes well in his book, there is a burgeoning new body of research into well-being, studying why some people are so much happier and healthier than others.  What we learn from it is sobering, because it goes way beyond individual behaviors to cultural assumptions – the way we think about time and work, the accumulation of stuff and the forming of relationships, the balance between libertarian and communitarian values.

Philanthropy will always focus on problems to be solved.  But shouldn’t we also constantly hold up models and visions of societal well-being, even if they call into question – especially if they call into question — cultural assumptions?  It’s a conversation uniquely suited to the flexibility, the privileges, and the responsibilities of foundations.  I have loved being part of it for almost twelve years at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

David Grant, President and CEO

As I write my next-to-last blog entry as President of the Dodge Foundation, I am drawn back to the title of my first – not just because I am thinking about this field as I prepare to leave it, but also because there was an important gathering about the future of philanthropy in New York earlier this month that has grabbed my attention.

It was a panel discussion titled “Disrupting Philanthropy: Changing the Rules,” hosted by the Council of the Americas and the Stanford Alumni Association. You can already tell from the title that there is some deliberate ambiguity going on. Are outside forces disrupting the complacent self-satisfaction of organized philanthropy? Or is organized philanthropy disrupting itself and the world (in a good way) through changing its own rules and practices?

I couldn’t go to the event, but happily the Stanford alumni group distributed some vivid notes written by Emily Robbins, which I will excerpt and comment upon here.

Ms. Robbins begins as follows:

Nothing, not even rain and rush-hour crowds, could dampen the enthusiasm of the capacity crowd that turned out Thursday evening for the “Disrupting Philanthropy” panel discussion … It hardly seemed possible that a year had passed since I’d been in the same room to hear Hewlett Foundation president Paul Brest, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors CEO Melissa Berman, and Stanford professors Debra Myerson and Rob Reich discuss the potential and pitfalls of strategic philanthropy. That night, with the U.S. economy in freefall, it was impossible to ignore the tension and anxiety in the room.

This year’s event, in contrast, was marked by a palpable sense of excitement and possibilities, on both sides of the funder/grantee divide. Indeed, at times it felt as if we had all arrived at a transformative movement together.

This mirrors a feeling I have sensed recently in meetings at Dodge and elsewhere. And it reminds me of a theory of change I subscribe to which posits that unless there is significant dissatisfaction with the status quo, it is very hard for things to change in any significant way. Perhaps that time has come. On so many levels and with so many issues—from global climate to state budgets to local news—there is a sense that the way we have been doing things is unsustainable. That DOES fuel the momentum for change, even for transformation. But what is the role of philanthropy?

At this panel, the Council on Foundations President Steve Gunderson asked, “Is the main role of philanthropy to provide funds? What if, instead, we provided leadership for social change? What if we acted more as partners and provocateurs?”

This sounds good if you are working for a foundation, or sitting at its Board table – maybe a little scary if you are asking, “Who elected those guys?” Yet it is undeniably true that the flexibility foundations have to act as what Paul Ylvisaker famously called “society’s passing gear” is under-utilized.

Ms. Robbins’ notes from Professor Robert Reich’s remarks suggest the extent of the change we may have to bring about:

Reich likened the changes roiling society to nothing less than a rewriting of the social contract, with the traditional roles of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors suddenly open to reinterpretation. He noted that philanthropy is changing much more quickly than the public-sector regulations to which it is subject and argued that as business discipline and techniques increasingly are applied to social benefit work, nonprofit practitioners need to make sure the sector doesn’t sacrifice its soul in the pursuit of greater impact and efficiency. He also urged those in attendance to remember that the vibrancy of the sector is dependent on its freedom to innovate and that foundations and nonprofits should not be afraid to embrace the “permission” they are given to do that as a result of rapid and disruptive changes in society.

Wow. There is a lot to think about here. He is saying both that the nonprofit sector needs to work in different ways with business and government and that its “soul” may be at risk in doing so. He hints at the great measurement debate – the potential (and I believe unnecessary) tension between quantitative and qualitative assessment, between short-term outcomes and long term impact, between solving problems in existing systems and creating new ones. And he lands on the question of “permission.” It is a crucial one, I think. Maybe that permission has already been given, as he suggests, but I believe our efforts would be well-spent in surfacing that assumption – or perhaps better yet, reinforcing it through the very act of collaboration with other sectors around shared values and visions.

Meanwhile, as we strategize based on the public, private and nonprofit sectors as they are now, the playing field is changing under our feet. The “Disrupting Philanthropy” meeting notes summarize the presentation of panelist Lucy Bernholz, the founder of consulting firm Blueprint Research & Design and a force behind the influential Philanthropy 2173 blog:

(She) was fired up by the idea that the traditional role of 501(c)(3) nonprofits was being challenged by the emergence of entities with a “triple bottom line” — e.g., low-profit limited liability companies, otherwise known as L3Cs, and so-called beneficial corporations, aka “B corps,” which recently were recognized as legal entities by the state of Maryland. She noted that Americans need to develop a better understanding of the laws, here and abroad, that shape and determine global philanthropic giving. And she suggested that while nonprofits’ use of social media is advancing by leaps and bounds, as evidenced most recently by the success of various mobile text campaigns for Haiti earthquake relief, we are still in the early stages of understanding the multiple possibilities for these tools in terms of how they can help us better organize and finance our social change efforts.

Two big, new ideas – the emergence of L3C’s and of social media. Think about what might be possible if the economic power and visibility of businesses were brought to bear on social missions at a large scale. And social media has already changed our daily lives – someone may even tweet this blog and set up a conversation for me I never could have found on my own. As Bernholz notes, we are just beginning to understand the possibilities. Both ideas beg for gatherings of foundations asking what these developments mean for our work, as opposed to each of us trying to make sense of them on our own.

The last panelist at this event was Diane Aviv, the President and CEO of Independent Sector. I again turn to Emily Robbins’ notes:

She asked those in attendance to imagine what the good foundations could do if they looked beyond the 5 percent they are legally mandated to pay out and found ways to harness the other 95 percent in the service of social change. And she noted that the new paradigm of interconnected global markets — for capital, labor, information — means that, now more than ever, the philanthropic sector needs leaders who favor change over the status quo and are committed to innovation and taking risks.

I can say as the outgoing President of one foundation and an ongoing Board member of another (Surdna), that her first point, the potential of Mission-Related Investing, has moved from a back-burner issue to the front in both organizations. And of course such discussions are inextricably linked to Aviv’s second point about tolerance for risk — risk within a complex and dynamic system and by organizations often perceived by the greater society as being risk averse.

It is no wonder, though, that we are drawn to doing things the way we have always done them, in foundations and elsewhere. At least we can wrap our minds around what is going on, and what we expect will happen.

This is one of the points I most appreciate in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard – that we get overwhelmed by choices, by complexity, and by ambiguity, the very world the “Disrupting Philanthropy” panel described as the one in which foundations now operate. The result is paralysis, which is not what we need.

Emily Robbins—whom I thank, whoever and wherever she is—ends her notes with a final quote from Diane Aviv: “A good chess player thinks a couple of moves ahead. The great ones think ten, twenty moves ahead.”

Let’s not fault the chess analogy because there are multiple players in the game of social change and many of them are not aware they are in the game, not to mention the fact that we may want more than a single winner in this game. Let’s just embrace the metaphor for its evocation of planning backwards strategically in the midst of complexity.

I see every decision about every Dodge grant, and every attempt at collaboration, in this light. They are part of something twenty moves ahead – a creative and sustainable New Jersey—as well as important to the current day.

And if the playing board and the rules of the game are changing, as the “Disrupting Philanthropy” panel suggests, that is probably a good thing, for this is a game with the highest of stakes, which requires our most creative and open-minded efforts. It has been a great privilege to be part of this world for a time.

Chess photo: Josep Altarriba

David Grant, President and CEO

Earlier this week, I received the Edmund W. Stiles Award for Environmental Stewardship, presented by the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association at their Annual Meeting.

Whatever I did to deserve the award pales besides the accomplishments of the man it is named after – but that’s not the point.  The point was it gave us all a chance to remember Ted together and, for a few moments, to have our own lives invigorated anew by his example.

Ted was a biologist, a Rutgers professor, and a citizen activist.  Early in my time at Dodge I had the pleasure of canoeing in the Pinelands with him, and I realized right away I was in the company of a natural teacher.  He conveyed knowledge, to be sure, but specific knowledge fades.  More important was his attitude, his way of knowing and being, which left an indelible impression on me and on thousands of others.

Ted backed up his love of the natural world with patient, persistent activism in the civic sector.  He chaired the Stony Brook Millstone Board.  His relation to the Friends of Hopewell Valley Open Space is something like that of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln combined to the United States. He played key roles in the work of the Hutchinson Memorial Forest, the Hopewell Township Environmental and Open Space Commissions, and the D&R Greenway Land Trust.

At Ted’s memorial service over three years ago, hundreds of people gathered wearing his signature plaid shirt and told stories of Ted’s love of family, the land, music, life.   I know I was not alone in thinking, “This is how I want to live my life – so people might feel something like this at my death.”

When I accepted the Ted Stiles Award, I read a paragraph from an essay by Paul Raskin in which he envisions a sustainable world.  He writes as if he were in the year 2084, and he is looking back on the “Great Transition” that took place in the 21^st century, most notably in a shift in dominant values.  One of those shifts was from “domination of nature” to “an ecological consciousness.”

Raskin describes the mindset of people in 2084:

With their highly evolved “ecological sensibility”, people today are both mystified and horrified by the feckless indifference of earlier generations to the natural world.  Where the right to dominate nature was once sacrosanct, people today hold a deep reverence for the natural world, finding in it endless wonder and enjoyment.  Love of nature is complemented by the humility that comes with a deep appreciation of humanity’s place in the web of life, and dependence on its bounty.  Sustainability is a core part of the contemporary worldview, which would deem any compromise of the integrity of our planetary home as both laughably idiotic and morally wrong.

If we have any chance of getting from where we are today to something like what Raskin describes, it will be because of organizations like Stony Brook-Millstone, and people like Ted Stiles.

I feel honored to be associated with them both.

And it strikes me you don’t have to be a nonprofit organization with an Annual Meeting to create a vehicle for remembering someone who inspires you and reminds you of your deepest values.

Who would you name an award after?