Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

David Grant, President and CEO

As I move through my last six months at the Dodge Foundation, I find myself appreciating the “gems” of New Jersey life all the more.  One of them is coming up this weekend: the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture at Rutgers-Newark, affectionately referred to by its devoted followers as MTW.

For thirty years, it has been an event of note during Black History month.  Indeed, there has been nothing like it as a sustained showcase of public scholarship on African-American history and culture.  But it is even more than that.

Picture the big meeting room upstairs at The Paul Robeson Campus Center overflowing with people, on a Saturday morning.  The Mayor is there; the President of Rutgers is there; sometimes the Governor is there.  So are Newark high school students and their teachers.  There are grandmothers with great hats and people who look like they haven’t glanced up from their Blackberries in months.

It is a joyfully diverse crowd at this most diverse of universities, and they greet each other as if this were a reunion – or maybe a concert where everyone felt lucky to have a ticket.  In an age where it is hard to get anyone’s attention for more than a few minutes, they settle in for the day – because MTW takes its time for the civilities of civic engagement.

For me, MTW is a vision of how universities and their communities should ideally interact.  It is about scholarship without being stuffy.  It is about important and potentially divisive matters, but it exudes a generous and inclusive spirit.  MTW assumes we can learn from our shared history, and we can make sense of it together.  I have said in another blog entry that I think art may save us. I feel the same way about the MTW celebration of ideas and human connections over time.

At the center of MTW, standing at the podium calling the event to order and welcoming us into its world, is the embodiment of its spirit, Rutgers Distinguished Professor Dr. Clement Alexander Price.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say MTW is the embodiment of Clem’s spirit, and that of his long personal and professional friendship with MTW co-founder Giles R. Wright, from the New Jersey Historical Commission.  This is the first MTW Giles did not help plan, as he died a year ago this month

This 30^th incarnation of MTW will take place over two days, not one, beginning on Friday afternoon at 1 p.m. and ending on Saturday at 4 p.m.  The 2010 MTW Letcure itself will be given on Saturday morning by Rutgers Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, whose book The Hemingses of Monticello, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.  The theme of the two days is Laboring in the Vineyard: Scholarship and Citizenship, and fourteen former MTW Lecturers are returning to Newark to be part of the program.  See the Rutgers’ website for details.

The 2010 MTW program is dedicated to the memory of Giles Wright and John Hope Franklin.

Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

At the beginning of this month, Wendy Liscow offered an extensive selection of thoughtful holiday gift ideas that also benefit New Jersey non-profits.

But some of you are procrastinators. We know it.

So, here are a few more last minute gift ideas, in addition to Wendy’s comprehensive list – many of them are just a phone call away. And in case you missed the news that the State of New Jersey has frozen $10 million in grant money to arts organizations across the state, a donation to any arts group, or a purchase of gift tickets/subscriptions is especially meaningful and useful to them while also making a lovely gift for anyone on your list.

Shakespeare Theatre Box Office

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey has a well-stocked gift shop with handmade items like jewelry and scarves, as well as toys, t-shirts and, of course, Shakespeare-inspired gifts. They also offer gift certificates for subscriptions, tickets and the gift shop in all denominations as well as gift passes to any performance of any production in the 2009 or 2010 season. You can call their box office at: (973) 408-5600

Shop the Pinelands Preservation Alliance online shop for many Pinelands-related items including books and history DVDs, as well as affordable art prints and photographs. (Today is the last day to shop online for holiday delivery, but you can stop by the Pinelands Visitor Center on Saturday from 11am to 4pm or Sunday from 1pm to 4pm).

Centenary Stage is offering a sweet deal: with your ticket purchase to any of their events, they’ll wrap your ticket purchases in a mug filled with chocolates. Nice! Call their box office: (908) 979-0900.

The Zimmerli Holiday Boutique is in full swing until December 23rd. The museum’s gorgeous gift shop has many things to choose from, and just $3 will give you access to the museum, too. The gift shop is free to enter and open during regular museum hours.

Thanks to Twitter, we know that the Surflight Theatre, which is the only professional theatre in Ocean County, and Appel Farm Arts and Music Center, a residential arts camp for kids 9-17 years, are offering gift certificates as perfect Christmas gifts. You can call their box offices for more information. Surflight: (609) 492-9477 and Appel Farm: (800) 394-1211.

And if none of the above seem just right, we urge you to remember your local food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters need all the support they can get. A donation to these vital organizations in someone’s honor is a truly thoughtful and meaningful gift that directly supports people in need. Here in Morristown, there are too many organizations to mention them all, but if you are local to the area, please consider supporting Homeless Solutions, Interfaith Food Pantry, Jersey Battered Women’s Services, Deirdre’s House, and the Community Soup Kitchen of Morristown.

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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.

David Grant, President and CEO

My first entry on the Dodge Blog last fall described a bike ride on the East Coast Greenway from the Rahway Train Station north into Union Township.  The route meandered through municipal parks and along uncrowded residential streets, and it was reassuring to know one could move through that crowded section of central New Jersey under one’s own power.

This beautiful Sunday afternoon, my wife Nancy and I biked from Franklin Township, just north of Princeton, south to the outskirts of Trenton and enjoyed a long stretch of the East Coast Greenway along the D&R Canal towpath.  If you haven’t had the experience of waving to boaters and appreciating the fall colors while pedaling slowly underneath I-295, you should give it a try.  You won’t be alone either, as walkers, hikers, bikers, boaters, fishermen and joggers with strollers have all discovered this historic path.

My own sense of how one can move through New Jersey close to the ground took on an added dimension on Monday, though, when Nancy and I decided to spend Columbus Day afternoon biking on the Patriot’s Path in Morris County.  We noticed a new logo – new to us, that is – deep in the woods, and we stopped to study it and read about it.

We realized we were on the relatively newly created Liberty Water Gap Trail, which connects the Delaware Water Gap in the West to the Hudson River Walkway behind the Statue of Liberty in the East.  It incorporates four existing trails: the Lenape Trail in Essex County; the Patriot’s Path in Morris County; the Sussex Branch Trail in Sussex County; and the Paulinskill Trail in Sussex and Warren Counties.  Eventually it will cover 156 miles and pass 15 sites on the National Register of Historic Places, cross over 36 rivers and streams, and connect you to 46 national, state, county and municipal parks including America’s first county park—Branch Brook Park in Newark.

Why hadn’t I heard of this trail?  When I got home, I checked the website of Rails to Trails and found out why – the coordinating Committee for the Trail is still engaged in a four-year Public Awareness Project.  So let me help.  For all of us interested in a sustainable and healthy New Jersey, for all of us who think physical connections between places foster social and cultural connections as well, for all of us who know the physical beauties of our State when you get off the highways, isn’t it nice to think we can walk from the New York/New Jersey Harbor to the Delaware Water Gap?

Laura Aden Packer, Program Director, Arts

Over the summer, we asked several of our grantees to share their thoughts on a range of issues with us – Environment Program Director Michelle Knapik wrote about some of their responses in her three part series, “Road Trip! Creativity and Sustainability” (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

One of the question we asked had to do with what they had been reading – or books that had inspired them in one way or another. We received, as we expected, an eclectic mix of reading recommendations which we wanted to share with you.

You can see the list of books here, as well as a spreadsheet of interesting websites, blogs and articles here.

We’d love to know what you’ve been reading, too:  what books have changed your life or your perspective?

Special thanks to my colleague here at Dodge, Richard Simon, for compiling the bibliography. The blurbs and book jackets are courtesy of their respective publishers.