You’ve got a project with potential, but how do you raise money for it?  Whether you’re looking to start a new project or develop an existing one, you’ll almost certainly need money to make it happen.

Sustainable Jersey has set up a competitive grant process to fund sustainability projects in New Jersey.  The grant program is quickly making New Jersey a hotbed of innovative initiatives–119 grants in 20 New Jersey counties have been distributed since the program began in 2009.  Sustainable Jersey grants are awarded to projects that cover the spectrum of our sustainability actions, so think arts, diversity and equity, and health and wellness in addition to the more commonly thought of environmental categories.

Through the 2013 Sustainable Jersey Small Grants Program, $380,000 in grant money is now available to New Jersey municipalities. Funded by Walmart, this cycle of the program will support seventy local projects that leverage resources to make communities more livable, environmentally friendly and prosperous.

The Sustainable Jersey program has established itself as the nexus of local communities, funders and agencies.  Numerous public and private funders like Walmart, have linked their funding programs to Sustainable Jersey.  The program has leveraged over $200,000,000 to incentivize and support local implementation.  With this contribution, Walmart will exceed the $1,000,000 mark, having provided funding for the grant program each year since 2009.

This first cycle of the 2013 Sustainable Jersey Small Grants Program will award local governments with one $50,000 grant, four $20,000 grants, fifteen $10,000 grants for projects and fifty $2,000 capacity building grants. Applications are due on August 4, 2013. Proposals will be reviewed and scored by an independent selection committee.  Sustainable Jersey anticipates a second cycle of the Small Grants program in late September 2013.  The application package for the second 2013 funding cycle of the Sustainable Jersey Small Grants Program funded by the PSEG Foundation will be released on September 30, 2013.

Projects funded in past years include electric vehicle charging stations, an organic curbside waste program, wind turbines, an energy efficiency education program for low-income residents, school food composting centers and community gardens. Here are three examples of past grant projects:

Edible Gardens in Highland Park School District
In 2009, Highland Park created three Edible Gardens after winning a $10,000 Sustainable Jersey Small Grant funded by Walmart.  The school-based gardens incorporated green job training, local and global food issues, accessible garden beds and composting and nutritional education into the classrooms.  The school cafeterias serve the produce grown in the gardens as part of school lunches, donate it to Elijah’s Promise and distribute it at a “free mini-farm market” to patrons of the Highland Park food pantry.

Hundreds of students are involved with the gardens in one way or another through classroom experiments, activities or after school groups.  The project successfully encourages the participation of students from all age groups, who care for the garden, spend their time there reading or making artwork, and raise awareness of health, food, and energy issues throughout the community.

What is the impact?  Well, the schools and community at large are reducing their carbon footprint, providing a greater availability of unprocessed and nutritious foods and strengthening community ties through building and harvesting the garden.

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations in Montclair Township
In 2010, Montclair Township was awarded a $25,000 Sustainable Jersey Small Grant funded by Walmart.  Montclair installed four charging stations for electric vehicles – one pair in the downtown business district, and one pair uptown – as part of their move away from petroleum, and towards alternative, clean energy.  Montclair was the first New Jersey town to install public charging stations, accommodating the growing use of electric vehicles.

The networked stations recharge battery-powered cars, including pluggable hybrids, and are available both to the public and to the municipal fleet.  One of the most significant steps in encouraging electric vehicle usage is establishing a charging infrastructure, and the Sustainable Jersey grant made this possible for Montclair.

“Drivers concerned about a low charge level in their car – perhaps headed home after work – can now be confident about coming to Montclair for a meeting or a dinner date,” said Environmental Coordinator Gray Russell.  “They can simply pull into one of our shopping area parking lots, plug their electric car into the charge point, and go to their meeting, dinner or movie (or all three).  Coming back, they’ll find their car charged up – and their “Smart Card” account automatically debited for the electricity use – without even having to fumble for change.”

Super Composter in the School District of the Chathams
Thanks to $25,000 in grant money from the Sustainable Jersey Small Grants program funded by Walmart, the Chatham Township Environmental Commission purchased a Rocket Composter for the Chatham School District, making it the first school in New Jersey to use the system.

The Rocket Composter was installed at the high school and now, food waste from three of the district’s six schools is being turned into rich, organic compost for use on school gardens. The composter—which produces compost from food waste in just 14 days—eliminates the costs of paying a vendor to haul away the food waste for composing offsite and paying to have the final product brought back as fertilizer.

In 2011, 3,478 pounds of food waste became compost.  Children are involved and it has saved the school district money because it now uses the homegrown compost on the grounds and avoids having to purchase it.

Chatham High School Principal Darren Groh described the Rocket as a “nice addition to the School District of the Chathams and a constant reminder to the students and staff about the importance of recycling.”

Visit the Sustainable Jersey Small Grants Program page for more information on the grants that are now available.

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“….mystery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” exclaims the shipwrecked Trinculo, while seeking shelter from the storm, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the same might be said by dozens of nonprofit leaders across New Jersey who are working on our state’s rebuilding and recovery efforts.  These nonprofits are sharing their wide knowledge base and best ideas with each other and are designing cross-sector, multi-disciplined approaches to New Jersey’s recovery.  This is creativity in action and the collaborations which are taking root will surely yield an innovative bloom.  We are witnessing environmentalists, artists, and journalists brainstorming together.  We are in discussions regarding the development of wide-scale communication systems, scientific and environmental mitigation efforts, and arts’ programming that provides critical psychological healing for traumatized adults and children, among many other ideas.

Photo Credit: The Tempest www.doubleconvex.com

In the coming weeks and months we’ll be hearing news about these bold collaborations and this burgeoning statewide, multi-disciplined effort has never before occurred on such a grand scale and with such high stakes.  For all of us at Creative New Jersey, we are looking forward to working with our colleagues at Sustainable Jersey, The Citizens Campaign, Young Audiences of NJ, Monmouth Arts, WHYY, the PENN Center for Civic Engagement, in addition to dozens of other nonprofits, community organizations, and our important Long Term Recovery Group members.  We are also engaged with our state’s philanthropic leaders who are active in New Jersey’s recovery, along with members of the Governor’s Office of Recovery and Rebuilding, and FEMA’s community planning specialists.  Followers of our blog know that our work is all about cross-sector collaboration and while this is a basic tenet of our operations, we are pushing the boundaries of our own experiences and networks in order to design community engagement programs that can truly be of service to residents and business owners affected by Sandy.  Our work in communities creates a landscape for creativity, innovation and multi-disciplined collaboration to flourish.  We believe in the power of leveraging the best of what each of us has to offer and we are committed to fostering opportunities to achieve sustainable collective impact.  Indeed, we promote the coupling of strange bedfellows!

Elizabeth Murphy is the part-time Director of Creative New Jersey.  She also currently consults with the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers providing coordination of the Post-Sandy Philanthropic Response in NJ.

Creative New Jersey is dedicated to fostering creativity, innovation, and sustainability by empowering cross-sector partnerships in commerce, education, philanthropy, government, and culture in order to ensure dynamic communities and a thriving economy.

Creative New Jersey’s leaders and partners are regular contributors to the Dodge blog.

Each year at the Common Gathering, the culminating event of our Spring & Fountain program, we provide attendees with the Giving Voice packet, made especially for that year. The packet is full of poems which lend themselves to being read aloud and, basically, we hope that there will be something for everyone to enjoy.

And now, we hope that you will enjoy them, too!

1. Snail by Federico García Lorca, trans. William Jay Smith
2. American Milk by Ruth Stone
3. Learning to play frisbee by Gabeba Baderoon
4. Lyrical by Joseph Millar
5. The World inside This One by Jean Valentine (epigraph by Eluard)
6. Talking in Bed by Philip Larkin
7. Power Outage by Xi Chuan, trans. Lucas Klein
8. Equinox by Kyle Dargan
9. Stealing The Scream by Monica Youn
10. hunger by Jesús Papoleto Meléndez
11. Letter From My Brain To My Heart by Rachel McKibbens
12. Love Poem by Gregory Orr
13. What I Learned from The Incredible Hulk by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
14. Life is Beautiful by Dorianne Laux
15. The Trouble with Frogs by Virgil Suarez
16. Switchblade by Michael Ryan
17. House Training by Aafa Michael Weaver
18. from Gas by Charles Bukowski
19. My Heart by Frank O’Hara
20. I’ll See It When I Believe It by Kyle Dargan
21. Platonic Optimism by Broc Rossell
22. The Swallow by Alberto Blanco trans. W.S. Merwin
23. The Perfect Moment by Tony Hoagland
24. A Few Words on the Soul by Wislawa Szymborska, trans. Stanislaw Baranczak
25. Elusive by Denise Levertov
26. We Have Chocolate Pudding by Mike Topp
27. In Praise of Ice Cream Vending Machines at a Greyhound Bus Station by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
28. How I Learned Bliss by Oliver de la Paz
29. The Good Life by Tracy K. Smith

If you’d like a copy of our Giving Voice packet for educational purposes, write to us at festival@grdodge.org

I had that feeling a few weeks ago at the wrap-up of the Dodge Board Leadership series, though the “poetry” came from an unlikely source: a scholarly work on leadership and organizational change.

The room was full of Executive Directors and Board Chairs of nonprofit organizations.  They and several of their staff and Board colleagues had committed themselves, beginning last October, to a series of meetings designed to help them lead their organizations effectively in very challenging times.  Now we were at the end, looking for ways to translate ideas and theories and notions of “best practice” into action back at home.

I offered a phrase from University of Toronto professor Michael Fullan.  In his book, The Six Secrets of Change, he advocates for purposeful peer interaction and learning in relations to results.

Here was language as compressed as an Emily Dickinson poem.  Purposeful peer interaction and learning in relation to results. It struck me as the nine-word answer to the question of how to put into effect all the lessons learned from the entire series of workshops:

• purposeful reminds us that everything is grounded in mission, and that time spent clarifying why our organizations exist comes back later to save us time and spare us confusion.
• peer interaction can’t happen unless organizational structures, habits, schedules, and physical space allow it to happen; all these are the results of our choices.
• learning in relation to results can’t happen unless we have figured out what results matter to us.  Suddenly in our final workshop we were back where the workshops began, with a focus on formative assessment practices designed to improve the work, not judge it.

The Board Leadership series as a whole had presented visions of results to strive for: in assessment practices; in Board policies and practices of all kinds; in strategic planning and financial management; in the relationship between Board Chair and Executive Director; in fund-raising.  What Fullan’s phrase did was put those results where they belong – not as vague hopes but as specific goals, not as things to talk and think about when we pause from our work, but as the concepts that should animate our daily work.  As Fullen further comments, “Successful organizations see working and learning to work better as one in the same.”

Fullan’s words may not be as immortal as “Out, out brief candle…” or “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” but organizations that follow his advice are likely to be around a long time.  With the touchstone of clear purpose, with the practice of protecting time for peer interaction, and with the focus of that interaction on results that matter, those organizations are more likely to perform – and adapt – in ways that advance their missions and build a better New Jersey.  That is the ultimate gift that the Dodge Board Leadership series, so ably led by Wendy Liscow and Elaine Rastocky, offers.

Each week, a Dodge Poet answers some questions about themselves and provides a selected poem of their own work. We hope that this will be a way for you to get to know the Dodge Poets a little better, and you can get an idea of why we love working with them so much.

We are first featuring leaders of our Spring & Fountain sessions.

Without further ado, today’s Dodge Poet is Laura Boss.

Photo Credit: Lauren Rutten

What are you reading?
I am rereading Ruth Stone’s Second Hand Coat–a book that I not only love but also one that resonates  more deeply for me with each reading.

When did you first discover poetry? What poets made you want to write poetry?
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of poetry.  My first poems were read to me by my mother and were in children’s books and often combined nursery rhymes with ”appropriate ” poems by Kipling and Frost.  In high school, I fell in love with Wordsworth and could be called a Wordsworth groupie.

I heard Robert Frost read when I was a freshman at Douglass College my freshman year.   It was a life changing experience.  My roommate and I ran to see  him because he was so old, we thought it would be our last chance to hear  him. But that reading deeply affected my deep connection to poetry in a way that surprised me.  I was hooked. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing.  I remember I wrote my first poem when I was six and my friend Phyllis’ mother died.  Loss (whether through  death or love) always seemed to be a catalyst for my writing–and I think that was true as a child , student, and at all stages of my life –and still remains true for me, even today.   The poets  when I was in  college and graduate school who  made me want to write poetry are too many to name.  But I especially  loved the work of  Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg , Stanley Kunitz.

What is your favorite place to read?
I like to get into bed and read.  This may be because I have a tiny  apartment with  only two rooms which doesn’t leave me much choice  though I like to glance  up from my book sometimes and see what seems like the unending view of the New York skyline above the Hudson River that I find a source of serenity and inspiration.

Tell us about any personal habits, rituals, ceremonies and superstitions that are part of your writing.
I am not a superstitious person and don’t have any rituals that are part of my writing.  I don’t like to admit it but I have written some of  my favorite poems during poetry readings when I felt inspired or sometimes bored by the words of the reader and just started to then lose myself in my own writing.  I can’t do that anymore because I  mentioned it and now if I’m writing at a reading, those near me in the audience don’t think I’m taking notes but instead being rude by writing poetry during a reading.  Of course, there’s always the back row in a large auditorium.

Tell us about your favorite experience reading for an audience.
More than twenty years ago  I was lucky enough to be the sole representative of the United States at the XXVI Annual International Struga Poetry Readings in Europe.  I remember getting up to read and seeing almost 4,000 people in the audience:  But what I especially liked (once the butterflies in my stomach had fluttered away) was that the audience was not just poets as so often happens in our country but couples out on  dates, husbands and wives with children in tow, professors, and blue collar workers all expressing a love of going out for an evening of poetry.  I saw that again on a smaller scale when I read in Dublin and also  in 2011  in Wales where even the taxi driver recited poetry to me   For me when reading ,it’s exhilarating to have poetry such an integral part of a country.

What is the funniest/strangest response you’ve ever gotten to telling someone you are a poet?
I was working under a NEA grant that the Poetry Center in Paterson had received for me along with Joe Weil to be part of a special poetry project in School 24.  When I first entered a classroom and was introduced as a  poet, one of the students asked me if I had come in a limousine.

Walking down the long hallway
of my now dead lover’s apartment
as I have for twenty-three years
I realize this is the last time
I will probably ever be here again
I want to memorize all that I have lived
with for so many years but somehow
things blur like a Matisse tapestry of
patterns and layers
And I walk past the mug filled with yellow pencils
that have been resharpened and resharpened
past the empty box a VCR or an electric fan came in–
past the Paris Review posters
and the poster of Jane Fonda from her sex symbol stage
past the painted book case with glass doors
past the files filled with French translations
past the portable oxygen tank
And I smell the mixture of cigarette smoke, your sweat
on your ancient Harris tweed jacket hanging on a hook
I try to pack all the years I took for granted in my mind
knowing there’s nothing more to do for you
knowing there’s nothing more to say

-Laura Boss
from Flashlight (Guernica Editions)

Think about the last time you got lost in a painting, a book, or a performance—be it theater, dance or music.  Those moments are characterized by what some might call a “zen” state of mind, or what may be defined as “a state of focus that incorporates a total togetherness of body and mind.” Your heartbeat slows down from a frenetic pace, your mind clears, or perhaps the reverse occurs and you are energized, maybe even motivated and repurposed.  In any case, you are transformed.  The arts, in all its forms, can do that to you!

In New Jersey, there are two projects, now working collaboratively, that bring transformative cultural experiences of mind and body to all audiences and strengthen the link between the arts and healing and wellness.  The Cultural Access Network works to connect people to the arts regardless of physical ability, and the Alliance for Arts & Health NJ connects artists, arts professionals, and those who provide health and wellness services.  Both projects strive to assure that those incomparable transformative cultural experiences are accessible to all in a variety of settings.

The Cultural Access Network Project, (CANP) cosponsored by the NJ Theatre Alliance and the NJ State Council on the Arts, and in existence since 1992, provides a wide range of services and programs to assist theatres and cultural organizations in making their programs and facilities accessible to seniors and people with disabilities. CANP offers sensitivity training for arts professionals that helps maximize artistic experiences for ALL audiences and hosts an annual awards ceremony that recognizes model programs and services for people with disabilities.  The CANP provides assistance with audio description for visually impaired persons, sign interpretation and open captioning for people with hearing disabilities, and referrals for architects and human resources needed to comply with the Americans for Disabilities (ADA) Act.

Each week, a Dodge Poet answers some questions about themselves and provides a selected poem of their own work. We hope that this will be a way for you to get to know the Dodge Poets a little better, and you can get an idea of why we love working with them so much.

We are first featuring leaders of our Spring & Fountain sessions.

Without further ado, today’s Dodge Poet is Kenneth Hart.

Photo Credit: Karen Mancinelli

What are you reading?
Two excellent poetry books– one new, one I’ve read many times:

1. The Needle, by Jennifer Grotz (2011)
2. The Widening Spell of the Leaves, by Larry Levis (1991)

With all the other demands and distractions in life, how do you make time for poetry?
Once a year I go away to an artist’s residency for two weeks, and write, revise, and read mornings and nights (afternoons, when my energy dips, I do other things, like go for a run and take a nap). I get more writing done at a 2-week residency than two months when not at a residency. During the rest of the year, my writing time ebbs and flows. Sometimes I’ll get up an hour earlier and write every day before work.

What are your favorite writing tools? Paper or computer? Are there special brands, papers, pens, etc. that are important to you?
I always write with a pen (I prefer Uni-ball micro) in my notebooks. Often I fill pages and don’t look at them for months. Anything goes in there: a “first draft” to what might become a poem, quotes, an image, a single sentence I overheard, a dream. Then I go back an read through it, looking for things that sound like they might have potential for becoming an actual poem. When I find something, I type it out (tinkering with it as I type), then I print it out. I read it aloud, scribble on it, cross things out, etc, over several days. Then I type a new version out, scribble on it, etc, go through the same process. At some point, when I think it’s pretty good, or I’m stuck, I may show it to a writer friend or two, who will offer edits, and I’ll see the piece in a new light. After several weeks, or months (or years!), I’ll have typed out many revisions, and finally settle on one to send out for publication. The process may sound arduous, but it’s very fun and rewarding to me. I think someone once called it “the rapture of revision.”

Tell us about any personal habits, rituals, ceremonies, superstitions that are part of your writing practice.
Mornings are usually the best writing times for me, but occasionally late at night. I like to put drafts up on a wall, so I can look at them from time to time, walk up and scribble on them when I stop to read as I’m cooking, walking by, or doing something un-writerly. I also like to write in diners, where there are things going on around me, people chatting, and where the demands of home are left back at home.

What is your favorite place to read?
In a chair.
Indoors, outdoors, away from home, on a train, in my living room, doesn’t matter.
As long as I’m comfortable, and no one bothers me.

Some things are easier than they look
and some things are harder than they look.
Riding a bike, for example, is easier than it looks,
unless you are 5 and your feet don’t reach the pedals.
Playing guitar is harder than it looks, as is milking a cow.
Fall down when you are skiing,
forget someone’s phone number, be used by others as a bad example—
failing is easier than it looks.
Certainly some things are just as easy as they look: pouring milk into a glass.
And things you may not think are as easy as they look
turn out to be just as easy as they look:
deciphering why the bedsprings are squeaking
in the hotel room next to yours;
assuming the governor is lying about his affair.
(Assuming is as easy as it looks).
Once you get the hang of things they may become easier than they look,
though soon enough things get wise to how they look,
and they do things to make them harder than they look:
The entrance to sorrow is easier than it looks;
the exit is harder than it looks.
Reverse that for joy.
Telling a worker to turn off his jackhammer
when you are trying to read is easier than it looks,
though getting him to stop, that’s going to be harder than it looks.
That’s when you may decide it isn’t worth keeping up
with how easy something looks, or it may cause you to work harder
to make a thing as easy as it looks.
Living a life where things are harder then they look,
easier than they look, and equal to how they look
is easier than it looks.
You do it every day.
You just were not aware of it.
But awareness, you don’t need me to tell you,
is harder than it looks.

-Kenneth Hart

When I started Baristanet, one of the first hyperlocal news sites in the country, in 2004, I didn’t realize I was starting a new industry.

I barely understood that I was starting a new business. I didn’t have a business plan. And while I’d sketched out page designs with places for ads, and had vague hopes about what they might be worth, there was no science behind it — and it took months before anybody handed me a check.

The editorial vision came easily. But the business side lurched along by trial and error. As for a prevailing business philosophy, I’d say our operating credo could best be summed up by Charlemagne’s line from the musical Pippin: “It’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.” And lucky we were — especially in finding a passionate and talented sales rep willing to work for commission.

Over the years, hundreds of indie online publishers have cropped up, many drawing on Baristanet for inspiration. Most, like us, have lurched along by trial and error. But many have been less lucky. All over the country, there are editors running hyperlocal sites like Sisyphus, picking up the stone and pushing it up the hill each day. They never find a salesperson and thus never get enough revenue to pay a staff — or take a vacation.

This is a problem. Entrepreneurial news sites are an important development in the news ecosystem. They represent a career opportunity for seasoned journalists downsized by mainstream media, and a boon for communities that desperately need a digital town square. But all too often, the people running them are burning themselves out.

Two years ago, I was lucky enough to be included in something called Super Camp, a project of the Patterson Foundation and the Knight Digital Media Center to provide an intensive three-day business training for 12 hyperlocal publishers. The following year, the project was expanded and renamed CJET — Community Journalism Entrepreneur Training. And this May, nineteen publishers in New Jersey were lucky to be included in the first CJET training ever given for publishers bound by a common geography. The NJ News Commons hosted the event, which was funded by the Patterson and Dodge foundations.

For three days — including two of the most beautiful spring days of the season — the participants sat inside a windowless room, where they heard presentations on sales, hiring, sell-through rates, CPM’s — and other terms that they generally don’t teach in journalism school. Or at least that didn’t used to be taught in journalism schools. They were lectured on the value of learning to use spreadsheets, and told that they would have to craft a 100-day plan and present it on the last day. At one point, Rusty Coats, who organized the curriculum, filled a white board with a formula that looked like it was pulled from “Good Will Hunting.” Nobody ran shrieking from the room.

In the afternoons, participants broke into small groups and in the evenings, almost everybody stayed in a nearby Holiday Inn. People made sacrifices. The mother of a newborn used my office to pump breast milk; another participant spent his 50th birthday with us. One fellow stayed up to 4:30 a.m. on Saturday morning working to hone his 100-day plan.

It was in the small group sessions, which most of the groups took outside, where the real magic happened. Not only did every participant get to explain their business situation to their peers and their coach, and begin the work on their plans, they became part of a process, like group therapy, which allowed them to impart their own wisdom. In doing so, they discovered that they are not alone, even if it often feels that way.

“For me, CJET wasn’t so much about an ‘aha’ moment as about a realization that the biz side is as vital as the content side, and needs just as much attention,’” Kevin Coughlin, publisher of Morristown Green, told me in a note afterwards. “And it was nice meeting kindred spirits who are struggling with similar issues. I suspect some fruitful partnerships may result.”

Janine Torsiello of Morris Beats, said her “aha” moment was realizing that bringing readers and advertisers together was not a betrayal of the values of journalism, but another service she can offer.

One of the most gratifying things for me, as a host of the event, was seeing the 19 publishers — who kept checking their email and their websites the first day of the training — were finally able to close their laptops and listen to their peers’ 100-day plans on the last day.

As with many experiences where you pack people in tight quarters for several days, and keep them away from their families, many of the most important connections were forged over coffee, or in the hallway, or — in our case — in the Ruby Lounge at the Totowa Holiday Inn. This was where people told stories about their divorces and their children and their publishing nemeses. And where people exchanged business cards and ideas, and in one case created a new business partnership.

And the conversation goes on, in a Facebook group created for participants and in a reunion planned for early fall, when we see what the 100-day plans have wrought.

Debbie Galant is director of the NJ News Commons, a project of the School of the Communication and Media at Montclair State University. It resides within the Center for Cooperative Media and is funded, in part, by contributions of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. She founded Baristanet in 2004.

photo by Laura DeSantis-Olsson Photography

As the spring draws to a close, we want to thank the teachers and faculty who are instrumental in making our High School programs a success. These teachers do a great deal of legwork so that their students have the opportunity to connect with poets and poetry.  This extra responsibility includes fundraising, scheduling, providing hospitality, securing audiovisual equipment, inviting local media, and much more.  We are so grateful for their efforts and for their enduring commitment to poetry.

We also want to thank the Dodge Poets who are the cornerstone of our High School programs.  Their talent, energy, openness and intelligence inspire students to read and listen more deeply, and to discover their own connection to poetry.

This spring, our poets met with almost 4,000 students.  The photos in this blog share a few moments we captured.  We could not have done it without the following individuals:

Central Regional High School, Bayville

Kim Lytle, English Teacher

Dr. Mueller, English Department Chair

Dodge Poet:  Robert Carnevale

Cinnaminson High School, Cinnaminson

Amy O’Hearn, English Teacher

Dodge Poets: Cynthia Arrieu-King, Crystal Bacon & John McDermott

Communications High School, Belmar NJ

Jaime Vander Velde, English Teacher

Dodge Poet: BJ Ward

Cumberland Regional High School, Bridgeton

Bob Evans, English Teacher

Dodge Poets: Stephanie Cawley, Maria Gillan, Mark Hilringhouse, Charles Johnson; Special Guest: Kevin Carey

East Brunswick High School, East Brunswick

Megan Manetta, English Department Chair

Laura Strachan, English Teacher

Dodge Poets: Grisel Acosta, Stephanie Cawley, Cat Doty, Charles Johnson, John McDermott, Christine Salvatore, Vincent Toro, Joe Weil

Egg Harbor Township High School

Lily Moss, English Teacher

Christine Salvatore, English Teacher

Dodge Poets: Cat Doty, Lois Harrod, Peter Murphy, JC Todd

Hoboken Charter School, Hoboken

Mira Septimus, Art Teacher

Ona Gritz, Librarian: Hoboken Public Library

Dodge Poet: Madeline Tiger

North Star Academy, College Preparatory High School, Newark

Steven Chiger, Howitt Fellow for School Leadership

Michael Mann, Head of School

Dodge Poets: Michael Cirelli, Maria Gillan, Charles Johnson, Khalil Murrell, Bridget Talone

Seneca High School, Tabernacle

John Bowden, English Department Supervisor

Beth Strittmatter, English Teacher

Dodge Poets:  Charles Johnson, Vasiliki Katsarou, Gretna Wilkinson; Featured Poet: Taylor Mali

Southern Regional High School, Manahawkin

Darlene Parks, Teacher/Supervisor of English, Art, Business, Family & Consumer Sciences

Jean Piscopo, English Teacher

Dodge Poet:  Crystal Bacon

Spotswood High School, Spotswood

Maureen McVeigh-Berzok, Supervisor of World Languages

Dodge Poet: John McDermott

St. Benedict’s High School, Newark

David Wolf, English Department Chair

Art Teacher, Pamela Wye-Hunsinger

Dodge Poets: Kyle Dargan, Monica Hand

Trenton High School West

Bill O’Neal, English Teacher

Dodge Poet: Michael Cirelli

Voorhees High School, Glen Gardner

Terry Leyland, English Teacher

Richard Broan, English Supervisor

Dodge Poets: Michael Cirelli, Maria Gillan, Charles Johnson, BJ Ward, Gretna Wilkinson

Students at East Brunswick High School

Dodge Poet Cat Doty

Students at East Brunswick High School

Dodge Poet Christine Salvatore

A student at East Brunswick High School

Dodge Poet Vincent Toro

Students at East Brunswick High School

Dodge Poet Charles Johnson

Students at East Brunswick High School

All photos by Laura DeSantis-Olsson Photography.

Last Friday, I had the honor of escorting my 9-year-old daughter and 75 of her closest 3rd-grade peers on a field trip in historic Philadelphia. It was a beautiful day, so I was looking forward to the adventure. But, to be honest, those of us who live in Philly get a little tired of these tours of the founding of our nation. We hear the same information over and over every time we have an out-of-town guest who wants to see the sites.

When we arrived at the Betsy Ross House (for the umpteenth time), I could tell this would not be an ordinary walk through history. What made it unique? Our guides introduced themselves as “Storytellers.”

Now all tour guides are essentially storytellers, but these folks were different. Storytelling was the primary way they told us the tedious and potentially boring details of history. They highlighted characters, they acted out scenes and they created visual points of reference by engaging the audience in the ongoing and energetic “Human Timeline!”

It worked. We all had a great time; it broke up the monotony of walking the same city blocks several times; and everybody (kids and adults) seemed to remember some unusual detail. I know I learned something new, and I’ve been touring these places for almost 20 years. Even better, it spurred MORE storytelling on the way back to school and around the dinner table that night.

This was a fitting way for me to end two weeks of “Storytelling” workshops and webinars – part of our Public Image Works series currently being offered to 25 grantee groups of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

Our series is designed to help good groups get the attention their important missions demand. Public Image Works combines organizing principles with the best marketing practices around – and Storytelling is a new part of our series co-presented by Charlie Bowe.

Communications from non-profits can often be too practical, too complex and not nearly interesting enough to call people to action. This Storytelling module was added to help grantees tap into the passion and magic that is behind their work and share it with the people who need to hear their stories the most. Here are some highlights:

WHY STORYTELLING? IT ENGAGES OUR BRAINS.
There’s a difference between language processing and information processing. Storytelling is the best way to convey both so information gets remembered and used by our brains. Check out more at “What listening to a story does to our brains.” By Leo Widrich

WHAT MAKES A GOOD STORY? GET CREATIVE.
In public interest work we tend to leap past stories into the finer details of our issues and work. But good stories are interesting and compelling and are a great way to engage people first. Every great story carries certain elements that make them work. Consider how you might be a more creative storyteller by tapping into age-old characteristics like these:

• A Hero
• A Unique Opportunity
• A Goal
• An Antagonist
• An Inner Conflict
• “Divine” Intervention
• A Climax

(See how this speech by Cesar Chavez about Farm Workers and the Grape Boycott make wonderful use of these elements)

TELL ME A STORY
Remember how it feels when someone tells you a story? Even if it’s been told before, you connect because the story is being told to YOU. The most important breakthrough you can make in storytelling is to speak to your audience and their needs. Now, this doesn’t mean that you have a different story for every audience – that’s a common misconception that derails people when crafting stories about their work. The core elements of your story should be solid and set (Hero, Goal, Conflict, Call to Action). What you need to do instead is FRAME your story based on the audience and their needs. Start by asking a question, or tapping into a deep, universal emotion. There are a lot of different ways you can start your story to touch your audiences and I can guarantee they don’t start with “We are a 501c3 organization…”

In today’s rapid-fire communications age, it might seem like we don’t have time for good stories. But, with the issues we face and the vision we have for a better world, we can’t afford NOT to tell better stories. It’ll take more creativity and some practice, but we have all the tools we need in the people, places and narratives of our work.

When I overheard my daughter talking about the Grimke Sisters instead of Benjamin Franklin on the walk back to school, I knew those “Storytellers” had made a lasting impression on us. They told us a story that was worth remembering and repeating. That’s what storytelling can do more than almost any other form of communication. It’s exciting to think of all the stories that can be told to celebrate and promote important social issues. What’s yours?

About Social Impact Studios:
Social Impact Studios is a creative hub for important social issues. By collaborating with others who focus on the public good, we build awareness efforts that get noticed and achieve idealistic goals. We believe that thoughtful, beautiful and meaningful communication is the most beneficial way to engage and motivate people. From concept to creation, we design action plans, visuals, messaging and moving grassroots experiences together that do just that!

Photo Credit: NYTimes via Leo Widrich’s blog

Each week, a Dodge Poet answers some questions about themselves and provides a selected poem of their own work. We hope that this will be a way for you to get to know the Dodge Poets a little better, and you can get an idea of why we love working with them so much.

We are first featuring leaders of our Spring & Fountain sessions.

Without further ado, today’s Dodge Poet is Betty Lies.

Photo Credit: Karen Mancinelli

When did you first discover poetry?  What poets made you want to write poetry?
I can’t really say when I discovered poetry. My mother loved it and read it to me from the time I first remember. She also encouraged me to write as a very young child (my first “real” poem was at age 6.) Then in grade school and junior high (as middle school was called in my day) I loved the narrative poems we read: Browning, Tennyson, Longfellow, et.al. I can still quote long passages: “This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks…” ad nauseum. The Idylls of the King in tenth grade absolutely knocked me out, and the Rubaiyat, which somebody gave me as a high school graduation present, first made me realize the impact of imagery. In college, I learned about modern poetry, and Eliot was both my idol and the reason I stopped writing poetry for 30 years. I couldn’t write like him, so why write at all?

Richard Hugo said we’ve written every poem we ever loved.  He was particularly proud of having written Yeats’ “Easter, 1916.”  What great poem are you proud of having written?
The poem I am most proud of having written is Nazim Hikmet’s On Living. The spirit of that poem is what I want always to emulate. One of my greatest poetic experiences was on a trip to Turkey four years ago, when the leader of our small group asked us to say what we’d like to do if we had a chance. I said I’d like to read On Living to the group, and one night after dinner, on our small boat on the Turquoise Coast, I read the poem in English and she read it in Turkish. Wow.

With all the other demands and distractions in life, how do you make time for poetry?
I don’t always make time for poetry, and that shames me. I’m lucky to have some good poet and poetry group contacts that keep me more alert. But I’ve always felt that we can make time for what is important to us. I have friends who say “I just don’t have time to read,” and I try not to say that there is always time to read. If something has to go, it’s the housework, not the reading. Stick to the essentials!

What are your favorite writing tools?
I love pencils, long sharpened pencils. My students used to tease me that I couldn’t teach without a pencil in my hand. I much prefer pencil to pen, though I do like certain ink pens (not ballpoints, which I hate). I usually start writing poems in pencil on odd bits of paper, whatever is at hand when an idea starts, then put the bits together on computer and go from there through final copy and revision. Prose (like this) I always compose on the computer.

What is the funniest/strangest response you’ve ever gotten to telling someone you are a poet?
I guess the response that most tickles me is when people’s jaws drop, and then they stammer about how hard poetry has always been for them, but they know it’s such a great thing. It’s like when you say you’re an English teacher, and they say “oh, I’d better watch my grammar when I talk to you.” As if there’s some huge gap there.

Unpredictable, the winds that feed
those fires devouring Santa Barbara:

the anchor on the nightly news reports
erotic winds drive flames

every which way,
without warning or sense,

and I so understand:

when those erotic winds begin to blow,

you have to know it’s inescapable: it’s
unaccountable, it’s

fire, fire, fire, it’s just

one conflagration
piled up on another.

-Betty Lies

One of our goals at the Center for Disaster Philanthropy is to help fellow donors learn from each other about disaster response so we can improve the impact and effectiveness of disaster philanthropy in future disasters. As part of CDP’s new interview series on Hurricane Sandy response, recently I spoke to Chris Daggett, president of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and Hans Dekker, president of the Community Foundation of New Jersey to get their insights. Here is an edited version of the interview transcript.– Robert G. Ottenhoff

Hans: I continue to be surprised by the diversity and complexity of the needs that our communities face. Every day I hear of some impact that I had not considered. Not only are there are lots of gaps that need to be filled, they also seem to evolve rapidly. Crafting an effective response in that environment is challenging.

Chris: No real surprises. Disaster response and recovery is an emotional, frustrating, difficult and long-term process. There are many organizations involved, both public and private, all with their respective procedures and rules. Coordinating and collaborating to make the process more efficient and effective is a daunting task. The work following Sandy has been no different.

Bob: How did Superstorm Sandy affect your organizations?

Hans: We were displaced by the storm for two weeks which came with a set of administrative headaches. Concurrently, we needed to be prepared to work with donors who were ready to help immediately.  In retrospect we could have had some contingency plans in place for some of our systems.

Chris: Dodge was impacted only to the degree that staff had varying levels of damage and inconvenience. Fortunately, other than non-catastrophic property damage, staff members were spared.  Likewise, the office was in good shape – never losing power or heat. However, when we reached out to our grantees to survey their damage, we heard a wide variety of responses, with several organizations enduring significant physical damage and, more commonly, lost revenue from canceled performances and fundraising events.

Bob: Tell us a little bit about the roles each one of you and your organizations have played in responding to the storm and in supporting the philanthropic networks of your state.

Chris and Hans: The Community Foundation of New Jersey and the Dodge Foundation decided days after the storm to establish the New Jersey Recovery Fund, which Dodge seeded with a $1 million commitment, ($250,000 of which Dodge directed to its grantees for emergency relief for damages not otherwise covered by insurance or eligible for state and/or federal reimbursement funds).  Several other local and national foundations and individuals have also contributed to the Fund, which has raised approximately $5.5 million to date.

The very nature of the Recovery Fund has helped support our philanthropic network here in New Jersey by providing a vehicle for foundations to broaden their impact by pooling resources and collaborating on grantmaking. We continue to seek opportunities for cooperation and collaboration with other relief and recovery efforts here in New Jersey, including with the state and the Governor’s Hurricane Sandy New Jersey Relief Fund.

Bob: How has private philanthropy impressed you these past five and a half months?

Chris and Hans: Through individual and collective efforts, foundations in New Jersey, as well as from outside the state, have responded in thoughtful and substantive ways to assist in emergency relief as well as intermediate and long term recovery efforts.  We have appreciated our colleagues’ willingness to contribute to and participate in the NJ Recovery Fund so that we can support the long term recovery efforts we face.

Also, the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers has played a pivotal role in informing and educating the philanthropic community about state and federal efforts, ongoing recovery issues, and lessons learned from disaster officials in other states, through a series of weekly conference calls over a four- month period as well as bus tours of devastated areas along the shore.  The Council’s work has effectively helped us understand the depth and breadth of the issues and facilitated information sharing among philanthropic organizations about where grants might be strategically deployed to support recovery efforts.

Bob: What would you like to see more of from private philanthropy?

Chris and Hans: Even greater coordination and collaboration.  No matter how much money is provided by private philanthropy, it is a drop in the bucket relative to the need.  Working together improves our chances of success and our collective impact. Additionally, allowing more flexibility and placing fewer restrictions on contributions to a pooled fund.  We have discovered that the ground is constantly shifting underneath us – we learn about new issues and challenges all the time.  Having as few restrictions as possible allows us to change directions with grant dollars if the need arises.

Bob: What are the greatest unmet needs or gaps that you are seeing right now as a result of the hurricane (e.g. housing, mental health, vulnerable populations, etc.) and what role should private philanthropy play?

Chris and Hans: There are many unmet needs and gaps in response across the board.  The best role for private philanthropy is to help identify those gaps and bring resources to those individuals and communities most in need and most likely to be overlooked in the drive to restore the Jersey shore for the summer tourist season.  We also need to support efforts to ask and answer the most challenging questions, such as where and how should rebuilding occur – are there areas that should not be rebuilt given the prospects of sea level rise and other catastrophic events? Philanthropy is in a unique position to help address questions that are difficult to consider dispassionately in the context of urgency and emotion following a disaster.

Bob: If you had to write a playbook for philanthropic organizations that respond to catastrophic natural disasters, what would you be sure to include?

Hans: I am not sure our traditional ways of approaching our giving work that well in a disaster context.  Being effective requires a much more hands-on approach than we might traditionally use. I think it would be helpful for foundations to prepare those pathways before a disaster hits.

Chris: I would include a strong recommendation to work together: pool funds and allow for as much flexibility for spending those funds as possible; share information; meet and collaborate with local, state and federal officials; and engage and strengthen the nonprofit organizations that provide needed services on the front lines on a daily basis during normal times, and even more so during disasters.  They are the backbone of support for those in need.

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Chris Daggett is president and CEO of The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Previously he served as Deputy Chief of Staff to the Governor of New Jersey, Regional Administrator of USEPA, and Commissioner of NJDEP. For six years he was Managing Director at private investment firm William E. Simon and Sons. Since 1996 he has operated a brownfields development company. Before joining Dodge, he was a principal with JM Sorge, an environmental consulting and management firm.

Hans Dekker has served as president of the Community Foundation of New Jersey since 2003. During his tenure the foundation has made over $225 million in grants to charitable causes. A key element of the foundation’s mission is a leadership role on the critical issues facing New Jersey and its communities. It has recently focused on public media, the links between wealth migration and charitable giving, and public safety by supporting the Newark Violence Reduction Initiative and the Community Eye, a camera surveillance and gunshot detection system in Newark.

The Center for Disaster Philanthropy responds with stability, providing credible advice and a consistent strategic approach. They help donors best leverage their resources throughout the disaster life cycle, helping afflicted communities recover today in addition to preventing future suffering through disaster preparedness efforts.

In towns across New Jersey, Green Teams are finding creative ways to address environmental, economic and social problems.  Town managers, concerned citizens, facility managers, mayors, neighborhood activists, students and faith leaders are mobilizing people from engagement to action on our most pressing issues.

Sustainable Jersey Green Teams provide the leadership to develop plans and implement programs.  Each Green Team is made up of committed people that serve as the champions for what is possible.

The Sustainable Jersey certification actions provide the road map with best practices and the latest research on issues that help align communities to move forward. Here are five tips for leading change from Green Team participants:

1. Hang In There, Persistence Pays Off – Town of Hammonton (Atlantic County)
Dan Bachalis, Town of Hammonton Councilperson and member of the Green Committee of Hammonton is proud that Hammonton has been Sustainable Jersey certified since 2011. Dan’s environmental interests run deep; he was involved in the very first Earth Day event and was a proponent of recycling long before the laws in New Jersey went into effect. He says that participation in the Green Committee and the Sustainable Jersey program has added structure to his lifetime pursuit of working on sustainability issues.

Every step forward is a step closer to a goal and people like Dan help to make sure that community members are moving ahead. Dan said “It’s important to stay with it.  When the Hammonton Green Committee got started, it was difficult to get going as we are a conservative town and people are busy.  But every year the support has grown.  Now we get spontaneous letters to the newspaper asking what the Green Committee’s view of an issue is and our Green Fair is a town event that is automatically on the calendar.  My advice to new Green Teams is to hang in there.  The message will definitely take hold. If you use the Sustainable Jersey resources and templates, it will guide your work.”

The Town of Hammonton and Galloway Township are developing ways to collaborate on Sustainable Jersey actions.  The Green Teams are working together on two current projects: a combined-town green drinks event and a two-town film and lecture series.

2. Share Your Passion and Collaborate  -  Maplewood Township (Essex County)
The Maplewood Green Team has about 40 committed members and has been Sustainable Jersey certified since 2009.  Fred Profeta, Maplewood Township Green Team member and former Mayor said, “The Green Team has played a very important role in creating a green culture in Maplewood.   Maplewood residents are exposed to a level of education and organization around issues and actions regarding sustainability that would not be possible otherwise.”

Green Team members are often guided by a sense of moral responsibility for the good of the community.  It is this passion that can be infectious.  Kirk Sohr, a member of the Maplewood Township Green Team said, “I have come to realize that volunteers go a long way to making the world go round.  And in terms of meaningful outcomes, it is volunteers who are the actual change agents.  So why wouldn’t someone want to be a part of that?  How many people have the opportunity to effect meaningful change within their day to day work world?  Being on the Green Team allows one that possibility. Everybody is there because they want to be there.  There is no greater issue in my mind than environmental issues.  Everyone in the developed world can start to do things right now to effect the change necessary.  And given the scope and scale of what is needed, the place to start is right in one’s own community.”

In February 2013, the Maplewood Green Team set up a regular monthly meeting with the Millburn and South Orange Green Teams.  The collaboration has already been quite productive as the groups worked together on the Maplewood Green Day event, a 3-town river clean-up event, a drip-irrigation demonstration event, monthly green drinks and a movie series.  By working together, the three Green Teams can undertake more Sustainable Jersey actions, reach a larger segment of the community with outreach information and share resources and ideas for new projects.

3. Use the Power of Connections – Monroe Township (Gloucester County)
Patrick McDevitt wondered why his town was not pursuing Sustainable Jersey certification, so he approached the town council.  To his surprise, the town council was receptive and made him the chair of the Green Team with the green light to pursue certification.  Sustainable Monroe Township was formed and the group is now working on becoming certified.

Needing guidance for how to start a movement, he turned to Lori Braunstein, the Executive Director of the very successful Sustainable Cherry Hill, who also connected him to Chris Waldron, who is the Director of Sustainability for Camden County.  In addition to the 37 Camden County mayors that Chris is working with to support their Sustainable Jersey certification efforts, Chris has been a resource to Patrick.  Chris recently went to a Monroe Council meeting to help Patrick answer questions regarding the proposed Sustainable Land Use Pledge and other Sustainable Jersey actions. Rather than go it alone, Patrick benefited from the participation of a respected individual that added validity to his presentation to the Council.

Patrick appreciates the support and said he attends Sustainable Jersey and Green Team meetings in other towns to get reinvigorated and motivated by what is happening in other communities.  Patrick said, “In just a little bit of time, a lot is happening in town already.  I find myself serving as a connector to the many different groups and interests in Monroe.  Sustainability is my passion; how could I not want to participate and make this happen.”

4. Bring People Together – Sparta Township (Sussex County)
Mitch Morrison of the Sparta Green Team said, “The Sparta Green Team provides the opportunity for anyone and everyone from Sparta to participate in making great things happen.  Sustainable Jersey provides the framework for our community to work together towards a common good with great programs and events.  We believe that we all share this world – it is common ground.  We enjoy paying it forward every single day.  We think globally and act locally.  And, our actions speak louder than words.  I love being involved with the Sparta Green Team.  We help run the Sparta Farmer’s Market, the Sparta Community Gardens, the NJ Highlands Student Business Competition, the Sparta Sustainable Business Tours, the Sustainable Career Day events, the Sparta Tree Planting events, the Sparta Bag-It Days and much more.”

On April 16 the Sparta Green Team partnered with Sustainable Jersey to host the Northern New Jersey Sustainable Resource and Networking Forum that attracted over 140 people to learn about regional and state resources that can help municipalities navigate and complete Sustainable Jersey certification.  Attendees developed partnerships with other municipal officials, residents and businesses, to provide support with the Sustainable Jersey certification.  Participants also learned how to transition from bronze to silver-level certification from Cynthia Steffens, Chair of the Chatham Borough Green Team.

5. Lead by Example – City of Absecon (Atlantic County)
Marlon Hargis is a member of Sustainable Absecon that is about ten members strong.  The City of Absecon is new to the Sustainable Jersey program and is currently working on becoming Sustainable Jersey certified.  Marlon got involved with the Absecon Green Team through his work on an adopt-a-road program with the Atlantic County Utilities Authority.

Marlon said, “A lot of people are sitting on the sidelines as cheerleaders or just spectators.  By getting involved in Sustainable Absecon and participating in clean-ups, I hope to show people that they need to get out there and volunteer.  Printing educational flyers is good, but we also have to demonstrate with our own actions the change we want to see.”  Marlon just recently participated in a clean-up with students at the Pleasantville Middle School in addition to the coordinated clean-ups in Atlantic City after Hurricane Sandy.

Join Sustainable Jersey at GreenFest
Sustainable Jersey encourages towns to work together on certification actions and is developing regional hubs to promote and strengthen the work of Green Teams.  Mentors and colleagues from other towns provide new ideas and the enthusiasm and support that are vital to sustaining the work of our Green Teams.

Sustainable Jersey will be exhibiting at Greenfest this Friday, May 17 and Saturday, May 18. At 9:30 am on Saturday, we will be facilitating a roundtable discussion, “Green Teams: Opportunities and Challenges in Pursuing Sustainability.” While REGISTRATION for the discussion is not required, we encourage you to register so we can tailor the discussion to your interests and needs.

• Join your local Green Team
• Find out if your town is participating and review what your town has accomplished.
• Not in New Jersey? Interested in learning about how to create a similar program in your state? E-mail us at info@SustainableJersey.com.

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Images courtesy Sustainable Jersey

Sustainable Jersey staff and partners are regular contributors to the Dodge blog

Earlier this month, ArtPride NJ hosted their annual Arts Day conference and the morning session focused on presentations highlighting Sustainable Jersey’s new Arts & Creativity Actions.  These presentations drew an audience of not only artists and arts leaders but also individuals from local government and municipal Green Teams.

In my opinion, this is a watershed moment for the arts in New Jersey as they are now included in Sustainable Jersey’s acclaimed certification program for municipalities that want to “go green”, save money and take steps to sustain their quality of life over the long term.  The two new Arts & Creativity Actions are: 1) Establishing a Creative Team, and 2) Conducting A Creative Assets Inventory.  In the coming months, my colleagues and I on Sustainable Jersey’s Arts Task Force are developing a third action which focuses on Creative Placemaking.

A three-hour Open Space Meeting occurred during the second half of Arts Day and the central theme question for the sessions was “How can the arts in New Jersey take new and creative approaches to strengthen its position within the fabric of community life?” There was a palpable energy in the room as these discussions took place and we know this is just the beginning of deliberating on creative sustainable solutions to our important arts and culture sector.

Lastly, many of our readers are involved with another regional collaboration: Together North Jersey – a $10 million planning initiative currently underway in the 13-county region of northern NJ.  The plan’s leaders state the outcome of plan implementation will be a more sustainable future for the region that invests in existing communities where housing, jobs, educational, cultural, and recreational opportunities are made more easily accessible.

I know there are many more examples of creative partnerships at work throughout our 21 counties.  For several years, our Creative New Jersey founders and steering committee members have been championing the power of creativity coupled with cross-sector collaboration and we are thrilled to see this movement taking hold.  This is the nucleus of our mission and our work in communities creates a landscape for creativity, innovation and multi-disciplined collaboration to flourish.  We believe in the power of leveraging the best of what each of us has to offer and we are committed to fostering opportunities to achieve sustainable collective impact.  And the four years I recently spent living in Ireland taught me that there are many shades of green….so long may creativity and sustainability flourish in an array of endless hues.

Elizabeth Murphy is the part-time Director of Creative New Jersey.  She also currently consults with the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers providing coordination of the Post-Sandy Philanthropic Response in NJ.

Creative New Jersey is dedicated to fostering creativity, innovation, and sustainability by empowering cross-sector partnerships in commerce, education, philanthropy, government, and culture in order to ensure dynamic communities and a thriving economy.

Creative New Jersey’s leaders and partners are regular contributors to the Dodge blog.

Each week, a Dodge Poet answers some questions about themselves and provides a selected poem of their own work. We hope that this will be a way for you to get to know the Dodge Poets a little better, and you can get an idea of why we love working with them so much.

We are first featuring leaders of our Spring & Fountain sessions.

Without further ado, today’s Dodge Poet is Christine Salvatore.

What are you reading?
I am rereading Fred Marchant’s Tipping Point in it’s 20th Anniversary edition, as well as his newer book, Looking House. He has made me a believer that the personal can be political, and also that we are still at a loss in what to do about war.

When did you first discover poetry?
My mother read me children’s books of poetry, as well as all of the Grimm’s Fairytales, when I was young. I believe those readings were the springboard for my imagination, which led me to writing my own poems. Also my father was an occasional painter, and I felt something brewing in me when I’d watch him work. I can’t paint worth a lick, but I learned to write.

What great poem are you proud of having “written?”
Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind” has been a home for me since I was a teenager. She was the first poet I read that was female, smart, and a little wild. “Her Kind” showed me that women like her (and me, as I see it) are misunderstood but still amazing. My mother and sisters were so prim and quiet when I was growing up. I felt like a caged lion among them. Even now, when I’m feeling a little out of control, I recite the poem to myself. It gives me permission to honor who I am, in my entirety.

How do you make time for poetry?
Among my friends and family, I am infamous for working too much. I have to try very hard to make time for writing, and I find it easiest to do that by going on writing trips. I go away in the summer, when I’m not teaching, and take workshops and write everyday. I’ve been to France, Wales, and soon, Scotland in the most recent years to write. I find it very hard to write between the grading and the laundry, in stolen moments like some poets do. I need to give myself over to it and not worry about coming back for a bit.

Tell us about any personal habits, rituals, ceremonies, superstitions that are part of your writing practice.
I almost always start a writing session by reading books of poetry first. That way, it feels like I am in conversation with other poets. I read a poem and I think, I have something to say about that, too, or something like that. I need coffee to write, and, like my reading habits, a view out of a window.

What was your favorite experience reading to an audience?
How about my most terrifying experience reading for an audience? I was seventeen years old and asked to read with other teenagers at the 1992 Dodge Poetry Festival. We were on the big stage and, in an attempt to garner a bigger audience, the directors had interspersed big name poets to read in between the high schoolers. We didn’t know the reading order until we were called, and, as luck would have it, my name was called… after Lucille Clifton. I was stuck to my seat. She was so amazing, on the page and even more in person, that I decided right then and there I couldn’t read next. I stayed put. They had to call my name twice before I managed to stand up.

What was the funniest response you’ve ever gotten to telling someone you are a poet?
Oh, I’m still terrified to tell people I’m a poet. Almost as much as I’m sometimes scared to say I am a teacher in today’s climate. But the funniest moment was probably when I visited a classroom of second graders and the teacher, a friend of mine, told the students I was a poet. A little girl in the front row raised her hand and said, “What does that mean?” I still don’t know how to answer her.

These days she can’t discern
if she is moving toward something
or away. Airline itineraries
don’t help: To go north, sometimes,
she must first travel west.
And all the time she feels lost
on arrival. When one home replaces
another, does the body ever find rest?
Accustomed to being just gone,
she has forgotten the solid strain
of being present and at every gate
her greeters wait for her absence.

She likes it best in the air–
going anywhere–the checkerboard
pattern of the earth shifting
slowly beneath her. North, East,
South and West, she would smash
the compass glass if she could.
How wonderful to be just leaving,
always about to arrive.

-Christine Salvatore

Published in Mead Magazine, Volume 4, Fall 2012

In a few weeks, New Jersey’s social sector — funders and nonprofits – will have the opportunity to come together for a day of learning and perspective when the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers hosts Our Shared Road Ahead – Sandy and Beyond. This day-long conference will offer grantmakers and the charities they support the chance to hear from national colleagues about the challenges our state will face over the next 2, 4, 6 even 8 years as we recover and rebuild after Superstorm Sandy.

The day has been designed to inform and engage not just those working in directly impacted communities but those working day in and day out throughout the state to raise the quality of life and improve outcomes.  In truth, New Jersey’s entire social sector will feel the impact of this disaster for many years to come regardless of whether they were in the direct line of the storm.  This is why we have enlisted speakers and designed sessions that will provide us with a roadmap of sorts on what to expect.  Our guests will bring insights from 9/11 and Katrina, to the BP Oil Spill and the Alabama Tornedoes.  Some of the sessions include:

Peering Through the Crystal Ball: Lessons for the Next Phase
Featuring John Grady Davies (Baton Rouge Area Foundation), Edie Lutnick (The Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund), and Sherry P. Magill (Jessie Ball duPont Fund), along with Roland Anglin (Cornwall Center of Rutgers University) this session will offer perspectives as far as 7 to 10 years post-disaster, and shed light on what will be needed in the social sector trenches.

Out of the Spotlight: Helping Non-Tourist Communities
Building on the opening session John Davies will continue to share his experience and insights specific to those communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina that were out of the tourist town spotlight.

Patient Capital: Banking on Long-Term Results
Also known as “long-term capital,” patient capital has become an integral part of the toolkit for grantmakers and has been applauded on an international scale as a thriving model for advancing philanthropic investments. Using a case study, the session will address how grantmakers and nonprofits can tackle the concept of patient capital with board and staff, how it can be included in their budgets, where and when this type of support is most appropriate, and how and when grantmakers should pull out.

Working Effectively with Government
This isn’t always easy, however in post-Sandy New Jersey it is absolutely a necessity for the social sector and for government. We truly do have a shared road. Join us as we explore strategies and successful examples of where government is working with the philanthropic and nonprofit communities in a meaningful way.

Speaking Up: Getting Your Story Told
Storytelling is an integral part of the social sector’s work to foster real and lasting change. Yet, how do grantmakers and nonprofits keep the media attention alive in a state that is so media-challenged? Hear from the renowned firm Spitfire Strategies and New Jersey News Commons as they provide an overview of the current state of New Jersey’s media environment and speak about various communications strategies and tools that can have a profound impact, given our unique and challenging environment.

Beyond Money: How Philanthropy Can Leverage More
Philanthropy has many tools it can use to address the causes and issues about which it cares. Some are tried and true. Others are quite innovative and entrepreneurial. Join two foundation leaders whose organizations successfully illustrate how foundation assets – both real and unrealized– can be put to use and be a catalyst for social change, especially when considering the challenges ahead.

Funders and their nonprofit grantees are by nature collaborators together in making our world a better place.  Though our social sector is not wholly unprepared to meet the challenges we now face, we are none-the-less forced now to navigate some new and uncharted waters. The Conference promises to be an extraordinary day of shared learning and a platform for action for our entire sector.   With so much at stake, we need to ensure that we are all traveling this shared road together.

Nina Stack is President of the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers, the statewide association of more than 120 funding organizations working in New Jersey. She also serves as Chair of the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, a 34-member network serving more than 4,000 foundations, corporations and other donors across the country.

As one of the recipients of the John Pappas Recognition Awards given by the Art Educators of NJ, I had a front row seat at the Patriots Theatre of the War Memorial in Trenton. I was not only honored to be part of the ceremony, but got to enjoy the remarkable talent of students who performed throughout the event.  Shayne Austin Miller, a previous Governor’s Award recipient for Opera, spoke about how he took his love of music to various stages of his career. Shayne is currently the Director of Press and Public Relations at Paper Mill Playhouse where he recently formed the Paper Mill Playhouse Broadway Show Choir.  Their performance of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” set the celebratory tone followed by members of New Jersey’s All State Chorus and All State Opera Festival winner singing the national anthem.

The Governor’s Awards, like the rest of Arts Day (see previous posts), are characterized by partnership and this event coordinated by the NJ Arts Education Partnership would not happen without the leadership of the NJ Dept. of Education, the NJ State Council on the Arts, the NJ Dept. of State, and the ArtPride NJ Foundation.  A few members of the event’s Planning Committee and the NJAEP Steering Committee received adult leadership awards including Don Gephardt, Dean Emeritus of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Rowan University who received an award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Arts Education; Mary Reece, Director of School Leadership Programs for the Foundation for Educational Advancement, who received Young Audiences’ Outstanding Arts Advocate Award; and Kim Huyler Defibaugh, Supervisor of Fine Arts K-12 for Toms River Regional Schools, who received the National Association of Arts Education Eastern Region’s Art Educator of the Year Award from AENJ.

Eighty students and twenty arts leaders proudly received their recognition in the form of medals and gubernatorial proclamations from Assistant Secretary of State Dr. Carol Cronheim, Tracey Severns, Assistant Commissioner of Education, and Nick Paleologos, Executive Director of the NJ State Council on the Arts.  Dr. Cronheim’s remarks unfailingly recognized the priceless contribution of parents to the awards process by noting their support of students financially, emotionally, and through the commitment of time that in many ways eliminates the concept of “weekends,” as transportation demands for classes, workshops, and performances transcend seamlessly into free time from hectic weekday schedules.

Families of awardees left the Patriots Theatre glowing with pride and eager to celebrate in community with students from all over the state having witnessed extraordinary achievement in the visual and performing arts.  Sharing refreshments following the ceremony, I thought how all would look back on this day as a warm memory and milestone.  They will all fondly remember the NJ Governors Awards in Arts Education, knowing how the arts brought them distinction, no matter where their career paths and life’s journey may take them.

Images courtesy of ArtPride

Ann Marie Miller is the Executive Director of ArtPride, the premier arts advocacy organization in New Jersey, and a regular contributor to the Dodge blog.

A Day-Long Poetry Retreat for Teachers

Last Saturday, over 100 New Jersey teachers spent the day immersed in poetry at The Common Gathering.  It sounds like a luxury.  But for teachers who face enormous pressure and who are constantly “on” in the classroom, a day of retreat is a necessity.

The Common Gathering is the culminating event of our Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain program.  The day allows teachers to follow their curiosity—they can choose from a number of writing activities or discussions for their electives, led by our Dodge Poets.

Our featured poets Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar did two readings—one which focused on their own poetry, and the next on poems that matter to them.  It was thrilling to hear Dorianne Laux read new poems that have not been published in the first reading. When sharing poems that matter to her, instead of reading poems, Dorianne recited literally hundreds of lines of poetry that she has committed to memory.   We were astounded, but also reminded of how certain poems become part of us through repeated readings and memorization.

Joseph Millar’s down-to-earth approach to poetry puts everyone at ease.  When asked why he liked a certain poem, he said “I just like every damn thing about it.” It’s refreshing to hear a poet talk about poetry that way—you can simply love the poem without having to dissect it and figure it out.  He also shared the important role that two of his high school teachers played in his teenage years—they recognized his sensitivity and his creativity and nurtured it.

The warmth and spirit of the day was palpable.   We hope that these photos give you a small sense of what our teachers experienced. (all photography by Karen Mancinelli)

Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar hang out in the audience

April is National Poetry Month and it ended last night with the National Poetry Out Loud finals in Washington, DC. This year Kavita Oza of the Peddie School in Hightstown worked her way from regional and state competitions to be one of nine finalists competing in DC. The finalists come from a field of 375,000 students from more than 2,000 schools nationwide! We are so proud of Kavita from The Peddie School in Hightstown, who recited Ego by Denise Duhamel and The Sun Rising by John Donne. New Jersey’s Poetry Out Loud program is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the NJ State Council on the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Playwrights Theatre of NJ, The Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University, and the ArtPride NJ Foundation.

New Jersey Poetry Out Loud finalist Kavita in center

May brings Arts Day on Thursday the 2nd at The War Memorial in Trenton, and this year is testimony to arts partnerships. Sustainable Jersey will start off the day with training for municipalities seeking credits toward certification, and participants will learn how to connect creative assets to economic and community development planning to shape more sustainable communities.

ArtPride will announce elected trustees and officers at an annual membership meeting followed by a performance from the Paper Mill Playhouse Broadway Show Choir. Creative New Jersey will host an open space convening where participants will answer this challenging question, “How can the arts in New jersey take new and creative approaches to strengthen its position within the fabric of community life?”

Refreshment and celebration follow all the thinking at a Movers & Shakers social where ArtPride will honor 2013 Distinguished Arts Advocates. This year Susan K. Schear of Artisin, LLC will receive the award for her extraordinary efforts following Superstorm Sandy. Susan helped coordinate disaster relief efforts for New Jersey’s arts and history communities with special counseling provided to artists who suffered damage and loss due to the storm. The Distinguished Arts Advocate Award will also be presented to nationally renowned painter Mel Leipzig of Trenton. Mel is retiring from teaching at Mercer County Community College and now devoting all of his time to painting. ArtPride remembers Mel as part of NJ’s National Arts Advocacy Day delegation bringing paintings in his van to grace the walls of congressional offices!

Years ago, I created a radio documentary about my grandparents coming to America. For
months, I sat at kitchen tables holding microphones in front of elderly relatives, and asked
them to tell me their stories. Later, back in Chapel Hill, N.C., where I was in graduate school, I listened through hours of thick Russian accents and transcribed it all.

One of my favorite stories was a short one. Tante Leah — my Zadee’s sister — had just arrived at Ellis Island, and Zadee was escorting her back to Shenandoah, Pa. by train. My grandfather had settled in the anthracite coal mining region of Pennsylvania, where he could sell goods to the miners.

As Leah told it, the train passed by Paterson, and her brother pointed out the window –
imparting one of his first lessons to her.

“Silk factory,” Zadee said. And you have to fill in the thick accent here. “Silk good. Factory no good.”

Except for my father, all the people I interviewed for that documentary are gone. I don’t think my children ever heard those accents. The closest they came were the voices of Boris and Minka, who appeared in a Passover episode of Rugrats. It is very easy, in the space of a few generations, to completely forget that you came from people who spoke an entirely different language, left their parents forever, and made their way in a strange land as “greenies.”

When you think about immigration in America these days, you largely think of Texas and
California, of border fences rising out the desert, of starving and dehydrated Mexicans being smuggled into the country in the back of trucks. At least I do.

You don’t necessarily think of New Jersey. But according to statistics from the Migration Policy Institute, New Jersey ranks fifth in the country for the number of foreign-born residents and third for the percentage of foreign-born residents.

A few weeks ago, inspired by the 86-journalist collaboration by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, we put out a call to action to do a collaborative reporting project in New Jersey. Last Monday, 10 of us gathered for a brown-bag lunch in Schmitt Hall, on the campus of Montclair State University, and decided on immigration as our subject.

We agreed on what has become obvious to me after six months of compiling a daily news
curation of New Jersey: immigration is an undercovered topic in New Jersey journalism.

The members of our collaboration come from a variety of news organizations, big and small: WBGO, NJ.com, The Jersey Journal, NJTV, Glocally Newark, Survey USA. We are particularly lucky to have Sylvia Jauregui, founder and owner of Elizabeth Inside Out, who is not only bilingual and an immigrant, being originally from Ecuador, but whose beat is a city that is 59 percent of Latino heritage and 46 percent foreign born.

We went around the table, and made assignments based on our skill sets and our geography. Among other things, we will be looking at immigrant labor being used to rebuild the shore post-Sandy, new African populations in Newark, the Elizabeth Detention Center, how immigrants fare in higher education and the symbolic role of Ellis Island.

Though we are all journalists, we are in many ways making this up as we go along. How do we run a decentralized newsroom? Who edits the stories? Do we need special libel insurance?

This much we have decided: Our intention is to publish everything we create under a Creative Commons license, to make it available to all news sites in the state, and to publish it as an ongoing series — using a logo to brand our output over time.

We’re doing this — so far, at least — without any special funds. For now, everybody involved is taking on these assignments pro bono, and squeezing them into their already busy reporting lives.

I haven’t thought a lot about immigration in the 30 years since I did the radio documentary about my grandparents. I suspect that of our reporting group, except for Sylvia, few of us have. I expect that over the next year, my consciousness will be raised: That I’ll have a new appreciation of the people who clean my house, the crews that cut lawns up and down my street, the cooks and waiters at some of the ethnic restaurants I frequent. And that I will understand the laws, hurdles, indignities and opportunities that immigrants encounter in the Garden State.

If we are successful, you will too.

Debbie Galant is director of the NJ News Commons, a project of the School of the
Communication and Media at Montclair State University. It resides within the Center for
Cooperative Media and is funded, in part, by contributions of the Geraldine R. Dodge
Foundation. If you are interested in supporting or joining The Immigration Project, please contact us at njnewscommons@gmail.com.

Photos:
Founders of The Immigration Project, April 8, 2013. Photo by Steve Johnson, Montclair State University
Immigrants outside Ellis Island. National Archives.

Each week, a Dodge Poet answers some questions about themselves and provides a selected poem of their own work. We hope that this will be a way for you to get to know the Dodge Poets a little better, and you can get an idea of why we love working with them so much.

We are first featuring leaders of our Spring & Fountain sessions.

Without further ado, today’s Dodge Poet is Judith Michaels.

What are you reading?
Oliver Sacks—Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Elyse Fenton’s collection of poems—Clamor
George Saunders’s short stories–Tenth of December
Lucia Perillo’s new collection  of poems (scary cover!)—On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
Hayden Carruth ‘s autobiographical essays—Reluctantly (see also the lovely reminiscence of his visiting Adrienne Rich for lunch, in current issue of Poetry Magazine by a younger poet and Carruth-wrangler)
Terry Tempest Williams–When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice
Natasha Trethewey’s new collection of poems—Thrall (beautiful, but hearing her read them is even better)Back issues of American Poetry Review (always ongoing. . .)
Re-reading Ruth Stone’s collection of poems—Who Is the Widow’s Muse (getting some by heart)
Re-reading Beatrix Potter, one book per night; I started off with The Tale Of Squirrel Nutkin (the pictures are even better than I remembered!)

When did you first discover poetry?  What poets made you want to write poetry?
When my mother sang me a lullaby  (Lavender’s Blue, Dilly Dilly, Lavender’s Green) and read poems aloud to me, and when my father read Winnie the Pooh aloud and sang Pooh’s hums.

My parents responded favorably to the poems and songs I made them as presents, so I kept on making them. Later my fifth- grade teacher let me go into the workroom and write poems and plays (the plays were based entirely on what costumes I had at home from dance recitals and Halloweens). She also encouraged me to memorize and recite poems from “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” and Kipling’s Just So Story about Old Man Kangaroo, which has glorious rhythms you have to chant aloud.

In high school and on through college and grad school I loved Hopkins, Frost, Yeats, Roethke, and the British Romantic poets but thought I hated Whitman until I tried imitating his “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” throughout a supposedly analytical paper for a literature survey course and got caught up in the rhythms (and got a C on the paper)

Later I grew to admire Elizabeth Bishop very much, and then from years of Dodge Festivals: Galway Kinnell, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, W.S. Merwin, Li-Young Lee, Mark Doty, Ed Hirsch, Eavan Boland. Currently I’m reading a lot of Bob Hicok and Lucia Perillo.

Richard Hugo said we’ve written every poem we ever loved.  He was particularly proud of having written Yeats’ “Easter, 1916.”  What great poem are you proud of having written?
Robert Frost’s “Moon Compasses” and “Come In”

With all the other demands and distractions in life, how do you make time for poetry?
There’s a table littered with poetry books and journals, open notebooks, pencils, and a coffee mug, right next to the couch.  I try to be there every morning for at least an hour (longer, now that I’ve retired from teaching) before bringing the paper in from the driveway or going to check email or going for a walk—all things I’m tempted by when I first get up. No, it needs to be: Feed the cat, make the coffee, go straight to that table.

Sometimes just reading a few lines of someone else’s poem or some random pages in my notebook can get me writing. Sometimes  copying a good poem into my notebook will bear fruit. Or reading aloud. Sometimes going for a walk will jiggle new lines around to the point where I rush right to the computer when I get home.

Early morning, waking still on the borders of sleep and sort of sleep walking to the table before life gets too rational or full of impossibilities seems to work best for entering someone else’s poem or my own.

Tell us about any personal habits, rituals, ceremonies, superstitions that are part of your writing practice.
What I love best is not having much idea where a draft is heading but feeling a rush all through me (that could just be the coffee, of course) that makes me believe it’s a poem and it might be going somewhere. Then when I don’t know what else to do and am still in love with writing it, I go to the computer and type it up, revising as I go, realizing how unfinished it really is, but still in thrall to the excitement of yay, new poem coming. And I’d thought I’d never write again!

that when Chekhov died and his body
was shipped to Moscow, he was packed in
ice in a refrigerated car marked

“oysters.” You would have wanted
to know this—over coffee, a dark
roast, and English muffins leaking jam

from their irregular holes.
How do I know? About you or
Chekhov? Both gone. The oysters

are footnotes to a book resurrected
from another book, old news, from
the German spa to Moscow to Portland to

a flicker of light in my head that is
forty-three years of reading
you and reading with you

and the absurd script that is
death (an entire railway car
devoted to oysters?) This morning,

so much I wanted to tell you—
and then a slow shower
of leaves
………..from the paper birch

-Judith Michaels

Has your organization had a board retreat in the last 12 months?
What about in the last 3 years?
10 years?

If you’re like many nonprofit organizations, you fall into one of two common camps with regard to board retreats:

1. You don’t have them nearly as often as you should (haven’t had a retreat for 3+ years).
2. You have them annually and focus on strategic planning, but fundraising doesn’t make it onto the agenda.

(If this doesn’t apply to your organization, congratulations! You’re on your way to raising major gifts.)

Planning a Board Retreat

If you said “yes” to 1 or 2 above, then it’s time to plan a board retreat this year with major gifts in mind.

Spring and fall are perfect times for board retreats, so it’s important to begin planning now.

Action Item of the Week — 2 hours or less
Set a date, location and agenda for your next board retreat.

First, take some time to discuss with your executive director, board chair, and development committee chair, the need to plan a board retreat for the near future.

Then go ahead and pick a date and select a location, preferably not your regular board room. Ask board members if their company can lend you a board room for the day. It’s better to get away from your normal setting.

Lastly, begin to flesh out your board retreat agenda.

What Does an Amazing Board Retreat Agenda Look Like?

Most board retreats are half or full day retreats, and have a significantly different agenda than a regular board meeting. Discuss the goals and outcomes for your retreat (what you want your board members to walk away with) in advance of creating the agenda.

I recommend some version of the following agenda for your retreat:

1. Ice Breaker or team-building exercise
2. Mission Moment – An activity to tug at the heartstrings of your board members and remind them why they continue to serve (ideally a client discussing how their life has changed, or a testimonial in the form of a letter, a video, etc.)
3. Fundraising – Board retreats can be a once-a-year, unique opportunity for training, role play, and taking the fear out of fundraising
4. Strategic planning
5. Strategic discussion about a key issue your organization is facing

There should be little or no “regular” board business at this meeting.

Should You Hire an Outside Facilitator?

To use or not to use an outside facilitator: that is the question.

I must admit, I’m biased. A big part of my work is facilitating board retreats, and it’s also one of my favorite activities.

There are a lot of benefits to hiring an outside facilitator, but if your organization can’t afford it, you still have options.

Benefits of an outside facilitator:

• Brings an outside, fresh perspective
• Acts as a neutral facilitator
• Offers years of invaluable expertise in fundraising and strategic planning

If you can’t afford to hire an outside facilitator, I highly recommend swapping with another organization (you facilitate their board retreat and let their director facilitate yours). This is an inexpensive solution to cover two of the three bullets above.

Finally, always provide food and drink. Everyone will be in better spirits on a full stomach!

Recap: Set a Date, Location and Agenda for Your Next Board Retreat

You’ve got your next action item for the Major Gifts Challenge. Work with those at your organization to get your next board retreat on your calendar.

Board retreats provide an indispensable opportunity to improve your organization. An organization that’s constantly evolving and bettering itself is in a much better position to solicit (and receive) major gifts than one that isn’t. It’s also a great time to speak with board members about how they can get help with major gifts, including identification of new donors, cultivation, solicitation and stewardship!

This post is part of Amy’s Major Gifts Challenge. Read the entire series to learn how to solicit major gifts by spending just a few hours each month.

Amy Eisenstein, MPA, CFRE specializes in fundraising consulting for local and national nonprofits. She’s raised millions of dollars through event planning, grant writing, capital campaigns, and major gift solicitations. Her “no-nonsense” approach to fundraising yields big results for her clients and followers.

Each week, a Dodge Poet answers some questions about themselves and provides a selected poem of their own work. We hope that this will be a way for you to get to know the Dodge Poets a little better, and you can get an idea of why we love working with them so much.

We are first featuring leaders of our Spring & Fountain sessions.

Without further ado, today’s Dodge Poet is John McDermott.

Photo Credit: Lauren Rutten

What are you reading?
Right now pieces of lots of stuff.  I start more than I finish and leave half-read books everywhere. And I keep going back  to chunks of favorites like the Education of Henry Adams, Pound, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Durrell, and Sunflower Splendor, a collection of Chinese Poetry, and now I’m listening to Henry VI in my car. And they are different every time.

When did you first discover poetry?  What poets made you want to write poetry?
In high school, I loved a Jerry Jeff Walker song about bumming around with “Stoney,” who “had a grey pillowcase with some books by Durrell,” and that led me to pick up one of Durrell’s Alexandria novels off a table of used books. I got hooked on his language and then on the poems of Cavafy, who Durrell loved.  That’s all it took.

Richard Hugo said we’ve written every poem we ever loved.  He was particularly proud of having written Yeats’ “Easter, 1916.”  What great poem are you proud of having written?
I’d give a lot to have written Yeat’s Aengus or the start of Pound’s Cantos “And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea.”

What is your favorite place to read?
I like anywhere I can squeeze some minutes, maybe in my car if I get to work or an appointment early.  And while I travel or do cooking and chores I listen to books on CD, anything from Kurtis Lamkin to junky detectives to Jared Diamond or a history of Judas.

With all the other demands and distractions in life, how do you make time for poetry?
I focus on how much I don’t want to do what I should, and run away into my notebooks.

Tell us about any personal habits, rituals, ceremonies, superstitions that are part of your writing practice. What are your favorite writing tools?  Paper or computer?  Are there special brands, papers, pens, etc. that are important to you?
Most of my poems come (eventually) from notes I make in junky spiral notebooks from Pathmark when I’m in a mood that “Well, I’ll never come up with a real poem, so I’ll fill some pages.”

I’m a revisiter.  I revisit old notes and old poems, and I revisit favorite places, like a couple of the gardens in Suzhou. They are a pretty good metaphor for writing.  Every time I move ten feet, it is like looking at a different scene, and so many poems have been on the same themes, just from a slightly different place. Each time I go back to a book or a garden, I see more, hear more.

Tell us about your favorite experience reading for an audience.
Any time I can grab people and put them into the poem.  I like when people who get dragged to a reading and don’t expect enjoy anything find that the poems do lots of things they never expected and that the sound carries them to a place where the words do much more than anyone could expect from the same words they hear every day.

Near midnight
the dark shapes outside my window
are not so different
from the dark shapes outside yours
or yours, or yours.
City shapes
backyard shapes
empty field or forest shapes.
They are dark. They are shapes.

If you have a window near your bed,
the light flowing down from a sunny sky
a cloudy sky
an April misted sky
a snow bright sky
or a sky full of cold wet sleet
is not so different
from the light that fills
or tries to fill my room
when I wake.

And the loneliness when I think of Mom
or Dad or Pat or Jack is probably
a lot like the ache you feel
for those who are gone,
and the fear I have of losing
those I still hold
may echo with you,
for you have lost
too many of those you loved
and love.

Still, the taste of good bread,
the old friend touch of a favorite shirt,
the tired knees after a long day of work,
the joy of a chair beneath me,
maybe a special chair, maybe not,
the taste of coffee or tea,
of cold water in the sun,
a smile from the one I love,
these are good.

-John McDermott

With Earth Day right around the corner, Sustainable Jersey is pleased to release our first overview video. Give us 3 minutes and we’ll give you a snapshot of the Sustainable Jersey program.

The video includes comments by former Governors, Christine Todd Whitman, and James Florio, who both lend their support to the non-partisan Sustainable Jersey effort.  William Dressel, the Executive Director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities and Gray Russell, the Environmental Coordinator for Montclair Township, also provide insights on the impact of the program.  After only 4 years, we have nearly 400 participating municipalities in the state of New Jersey representing nearly 75% of the population.

Sustainable Jersey brings local governments into direct collaboration with their communities to work on our most important sustainability issues.  Today the needs are great, and we call on all citizens of good conscience to support, and get involved in, legitimate efforts to plan for a sustainable future. We encourage you to make use of the opportunity that initiatives like Sustainable Jersey provide to help shape the future of our beloved State.  Please embed this video, tweet it, post it and share with others!

• Join your local Green Team
• Find out if your town is participating and review what your town has accomplished.
• Become a Sponsor
• Not in New Jersey? Interested in learning about how to create a similar program in your state? E-mail us at info@SustainableJersey.com.

For more about Sustainable Jersey®:

Website | Facebook | Twitter

Much has been written and said about the devastating impacts which Superstorm Sandy had on communities and families throughout the coastal areas of New Jersey. The after effects of that fierce hurricane are still being felt by displaced families and shore communities which are struggling to recover some sense of normalcy. Fortunately and appropriately, many billions of dollars have been made available by Congress and the President to help these people to rebuild their homes and their lives.

But Hurricane Sandy had similar devastating effects on the natural as well as the human world. An example of this was the near-total destruction of a handful of Delaware Bayshore beaches that happen to serve as the host for an amazing annual natural phenomena: the spring horseshoe crab spawning and shorebird migration.

Each May, thousands upon thousands of horseshoe crabs (which aren’t really crabs at all, but an ancient species more akin to spiders that was around when dinosaurs roamed the planet) lumber in from deeper waters off the Continental Shelf to spawn on just a handful of beaches along Delaware Bay. After mating, female crabs lay millions of eggs in shallow nests on sandy beaches. And each year, several species of migratory shorebirds which make an incredible roundtrip journey from wintering grounds near the southern tip of South America to breeding grounds in the high Arctic stop on these same beaches to gorge on these horseshoe crab eggs and refuel for the remainder of their flight. Thus, the very survival of these amazing birds, which weigh mere ounces, is tied to the availability of this unique food source found only on these beaches in order for these species to survive.

Life is tough enough under the best of circumstances for red knots (a candidate species for the federal endangered species list), ruddy turnstones, semi-palmated sandpipers and a number of other migratory shorebird species. Coastal development, disturbance by other species like humans and dogs, and over-harvesting of horseshoe crabs for use as bait by eel and conch fishermen have all helped to push these species to the brink of extinction.

And Superstorm Sandy did not help. While rising sea levels from our changing climate and normal storms already causes these beaches to migrate inland, Sandy accelerated this process big time and essentially washed the sand either out to sea or so far inland that there almost no sandy beach habitat remains available for nesting by horseshoe crabs. To make matters worse, the erosion of the beaches exposed a thick layer of muck chock full of old pilings, jagged pieces of concrete, and other rubble placed by humans in an attempt to hold back the Bay. As a result, there is virtually no place where horseshoe crabs can lay their eggs. And no horseshoe crab eggs means the refueling station for migratory shorebirds is basically closed, which threatens the very survival of these species.

But a number of stalwart organizations and individuals have launched an unprecedented rescue effort which is currently underway to come to the aid of these species. This amazing public/private partnership includes local public works agencies, state and federal wildlife agencies, multiple non-profit conservation organizations, academic institutions and concerned individuals, who have all joined forces to restore several miles of these beaches in time for the return of the horseshoe crabs and shorebirds this spring.

This effort is funded by a major federal grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and another major grant from the NJ Recovery Fund (created by a consortium of private foundations and administered by the Community Foundation of NJ), as well as smaller grants from the NJ Natural Lands Trust and the NJ Corporate Wetlands Partnership. With this funding, the partners are removing the rubble from critical beaches and trucking in sand to recreate the beaches needed by both crabs and birds. The program also includes hiring of seasonal docents to help manage traffic and provide educational outreach to visitors to these beaches; the creation of an artificial oyster reef to help protect the restored beaches and create jobs for local Baymen; a documentary of the entire effort; and an innovative social outreach program to help us humans species to better understand the economic value of preserving these species.

This kind of creative conservation is both impressive and sorely needed. So kudos to the folks who are making this happen, including the American Littoral Society; the Conserve Wildlife Foundation; the New Jersey Natural Lands Trust; the NJ Division of Fish & Wildlife; the NJ Endangered and Non-Game Species Program; the US Fish & Wildlife Service; Middle Township; Richard Stockton College; the NJ Audubon Society; Greener NJ Productions; Delaware Riverkeeper; and the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences.

So take a ride this May to see and enjoy the incredible natural phenomena that these groups are preserving. And, while you are at, stop in a local restaurant or store to help out the local business and show that protecting wildlife and the local economy are definitely consistent.

To watch videos of the restoration effort, click here.

Photos provided by Michael Catania

Each week, a Dodge Poet answers some questions about themselves and provides a selected poem of their own work. We hope that this will be a way for you to get to know the Dodge Poets a little better, and you can get an idea of why we love working with them so much.

We are first featuring leaders of our Spring & Fountain sessions.

Without further ado, today’s Dodge Poet is J.C. Todd.

Photo Credit: Lauren Rutten

What are you reading?
Mary Morris, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. Penguin, 1988.

Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin. MacMillan, 2011. (An account drawn from the diary of a journalist living in Berlin during the Russian occupation near the end of World War II, a clear-eyed look at brutality, resourcefulness and strange bedfellows)

Jean Valentine, A Door in the Mountain. Wesleyan UP, 2004.

Anything I can find on the internet about the American Woodcock whose aerial mating display I hope to see and hear this month.

When did you first discover poetry?  What poets made you want to write poetry?
If the anecdotes of my Aunt Karen are true, I discovered poetry before I remember discovering poetry, reciting “The Owl and the Pussycat,” when I was about 2. Wish I had that memory for whole poems now. But my engagement with poetry has been more of a migration than a discovery: I just keep moving, looking for food. What I do remember from childhood is listening to my mother read sonnets and songs by Shakespeare and Herrick. Later, I read Thomas Gray and other graveyard poets, but it wasn’t until discovering a collection of Sandburg in the town library that I got serious about fooling around with writing poems myself, lurching from Sandburg into Whitman, Amy Lowell, Hopkins, Donne, Homer as translated by Richmond Lattimore (courtesy of my high school Latin teacher, Miss Harvey), and then the Imagists—Aldington and H. D. and through them, Pound. Not the order it’s taught in now, but H. D. Imagiste threw open the door of possibility for me. I didn’t read contemporary poetry until the late 1970’s— Rich, James Wright, Forché, early Olds. Since then, constant foraging.

Richard Hugo said we’ve written every poem we ever loved.  He was particularly proud of having written Yeats’ “Easter, 1916.”  What great poem are you proud of having written?
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Music When Soft Voices Die.” I‘m not sure it’s a great poem, but I have a soft spot for it. There are two book-length poems I am not foolhardy enough to say I am proud of writing. One is Pablo Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu which planted its seed in me when, like many poetas turistas, I read it aloud in mangled Spanish at the highest point of the Machu Picchu ruins. Another is H.D. ‘s Triology, which over-wrote for me both the romance of war and the Romantics’ dalliance with ruins as palimpsest for the sorrow-beauty of the past. In clear-eyed, clear-eared poems, that are elegant and spare, H. D.  reveals the “right relationship” between destruction and creativity, despair and merciful grace.

What is your favorite place to read?
In front of a book.
(Editor’s Note: Ok, you win on that one, J.C.!)

What are your favorite writing tools?  Paper or computer?  Are there special brands, papers, pens, etc. that are important to you?
Mechanical pencils with 0.5 lead and a padded finger grip; yellow legal pads or narrow moleskin notebooks without lines (underline for emphasis)! I used to write only in hardcover marbled school notebooks, preferring the Roaring Spring brand for the chutzpah of its name. They fit in a fanny pack I used wear on day hikes and provided a dry seat when the ground was damp. But I’ve since switched to the small moleskins that fit in a shirt pocket. Especially with the slightly pebbled grain of the moleskin’s paper, the pencil lead creates a slight friction or drag that slows the mind slightly. And writing by hand is drawing, making marks. The rhythm of the mark-making correlates to the rhythm of the voice of the mind.

The computer, however, has gradually become an important part of my writing process.  Initially, I began working on computer to prepare manuscripts because of the ease of correcting persistent typos and misspellings. But I’ve come to understand the greater value of percussion to revision. Any keyboard is a percussive instrument. Transcribing a poem from marks to characters admits to possibilities that the drawing hand cannot imagine. So now, I usually begin in pencil with a few and sometimes many versions with cross-outs and changes, but later move the draft to the computer, drumming it out, then printing it. Revisions in pencil on the print version, then the poem copied out by hand. Back to the keyboard. You get the idea. When I get stuck, I shift from drawing to drumming, drumming to drawing.

Tell us about your favorite experience reading for an audience.
At every reading, I want that reading to be my favorite. Instead of a favorite, I’ll tell of two notable ones.

Reading to an audience of one, my daughter as she sat in her car seat, swinging her legs, trying mightly to kick off her shoes. The poem a sung lyric, invented on the spot with the refrain, “New shoes, they take away the blues.”

Reading to an audience estimated to be between 7 and 10 thousand at the first anniversary commemoration of the meltdown of the Three Mile Island (TMI) Nuclear Facility, 10 miles downriver from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where I lived. A call went out for local poets. I’d written a poem protesting the facility, “Tupperware Salt Shakers and Inflatible Dolls,” so I volunteered. I had no idea of the international coverage of the event or the size of the audience assembling for the four hours I waited backstage for my cue. I was just one of the locals who filled the time between the impressive anti-nuclear advocate, Dr. Helen Caldicott, and singers Linda Ronstadt and Pete Seeger. I read the title and the crowd went wild. The first line and wild again. I could see I’d better give them space at the end of each line or they’d never hear a word of it. They were coming down from Dr. Caldicott and Linda and warming up for Pete. When I came off-stage, Pete said, “That’s a good one,” and signed the poem. A reporter from the New York Times was waiting to verify my name and the title. He wanted permission to quote a line, but he didn’t use it. The next day I heard that a 10 second clip had appeared on the evening news in Tokyo. I still wonder how they translated Tupperware.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1892
oil on canvas

Flowers spiking and fanning
like hyperbolic crests and tails

alert as stuffed birds
two hats, permanently startled

If only a wilting sea rose
were tucked into their artifice

to counter their stilted argument
with seagrass combing sky

So much motion unrests the eye
from the matter of silk-flowered hats

of spindle-back chairs and a single
umbrella poked like a pylon

into a dune that shifts shape and location
too slowly to paint

One girl gazes out to where
horizon would settle if it were still

The other, a bud of clover
buttoned into her collar

is filling in the seascape
with the face of her friend

J. C. Todd

Back in November, I wrote for this blog about the work the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers had begun to help the philanthropic community understand what the needs would be for our residents and communities in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. It has been an eye-opening, heart-breaking, and profoundly rewarding process in the months since.

Educational Relief & Recovery Conference Call Series: Beginning one week after Sandy struck New Jersey, and continuing through March 25, 2013, CNJG presented these calls providing an opportunity for dozens of grantmakers – both in-state and national – to hear from a wide range of experts including: national leaders in the field of disaster philanthropy, FEMA and HUD officials, renowned psychologists working in the field of disaster trauma and PTSD, local housing and mental health nonprofit leaders, city and state planners, and a host of other stakeholders.

We learned about the stages of disaster planning, about best practices and strategies to ensure rebuilding and recovery continues after FEMA, the Red Cross and other relief agencies depart.  We heard from people like John Davies, of the Baton Rouge Community Foundation, who was on the forefront of the philanthropic response after Katrina and whose organization grew into one of the largest community foundations in the country.  We also heard from Christopher Ilstrup in Vermont, whose group sprang into action after Irene, and Jera Stribling, with Alabama Giving, who was on the front lines of helping coordinate philanthropy when 62 tornadoes struck her state in one terrible day in 2011. The calls were all recorded and the audio files are available for anyone to download and hear.  These provide an exceptional resource for those wanting to understand what the state is facing and what processes, partners, and considerations are at work to help those directly impacted.

Coastal Communities Site Visit Tour: On February 26, CNJG took a bus of 50 foundation leaders on a rare opportunity to tour several disaster-affected communities in Monmouth and Ocean Counties.  The funders were able to hear from those on-the-ground working on relief, recovery and rebuilding. The specific sites included communities in Northern Ocean County and Southern Monmouth County. Throughout the day, twelve guest speakers representing all areas of the effort, including individuals from FEMA, local and state government, Long Term Recovery Group leaders, city and state planners, environmental professionals, social services personnel, and faith-based leaders, among others spoke to a group of  philanthropic leaders.

One of the Council’s members on the bus, Doug Schoenberger of Verizon New Jersey, shared some of his observations from the site visit on our weekly call.  He spoke of the magnitude of change that people are facing – “when the ground beneath has changed it means everything is different.” For a funder working in this community it means taking a discerning look at one’s strategies and working with grantees to see how to best achieve your mutual goals.  Doug also spoke of the “anyway factor”…the conditions that were already an issue in these communities BEFORE the hurricane: the lack of available rental housing – anyway; the fact that 13% of residents in Ocean County have mental health issues – anyway; how domestic violence is a huge concern – anyway; low and moderate income families were still really struggling from the economic downturn – anyway. And now sadly all these have been compounded 100-fold.

Philanthropy has a vitally important, long term role to play in our state’s recovery. As we heard early on and bears repeating over and over again – this is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires thoughtful, well-considered investments that can leverage resources, and fill some of the small, nuanced gaps that aren’t covered by the major funding from FEMA, the Federal Government and the State.

At the Council, though our weekly calls have ended, we are convening another site visit for funders, this time in Hudson and Bergen Counties. And, our annual Spring Conference for the Social Sector on June 10^th will focus on Our Shared Road Ahead: Sandy & Beyond. The conference is open to the public and we encourage nonprofit leaders from across the state to attend.

Photos courtesy of CNJG.

Nina Stack is President of the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers, the statewide association of more than 120 funding organizations working in New Jersey. She also serves as Chair of the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, a 34-member network serving more than 4,000 foundations, corporations and other donors across the country.

New Jersey Arts Day will unite creative minds to cook up new and exciting ways to sustain the arts in communities throughout New Jersey.  Offerings extend throughout the day at The War Memorial in Trenton, but the menu is diverse enough to accommodate busy schedules—and entice appetites hungry to imagine a New Jersey where the arts are no longer considered “discretional.”  Starting with a Sustainable Jersey training session, municipal leaders will focus on how to measure cultural assets and build “creative teams” to earn points toward Sustainable Jersey certification. This puts arts and culture front and center for New Jersey municipalities that want to go green, save money and take steps to sustain their quality of life over the long term.

ArtPride NJ will hold its annual membership meeting and announce election of trustees during a working lunch with “dessert” entertainment from Paper Mill Playhouse’s newly formed Broadway Show Choir.  With the guidance of Creative New Jersey, a call to collaboration is next, where those convened will consider this big question, “How can the arts in New Jersey take new and creative approaches to strengthen its position within the fabric of community life?”  Participants drive the agenda and the conversation in an open space format that has successfully assembled individuals from a variety of public and private sectors for dynamic conversations in Monmouth County, Morristown and Orange.  We welcome all to this free opportunity to share innovative ideas on how the arts can be perceived as indispensable to New Jersey’s quality of life.

A Movers & Shakers social tops off the afternoon with networking and refreshment and is followed by the 2013 Governor’s Awards in Arts Education where young artists, performers and adult educators and arts leaders are recognized for their achievements.  The Governor’s Awards are coordinated and presented by the NJ Arts Education Partnership in collaboration with the NJ Deptartment of Education, the NJ Department of State, the NJ State Council on the Arts and ArtPride NJ.  This year ArtPride will have the honor to present the David Grant Student Arts Activist Award to Kelsea Schimmel of Monroe Township High School for her volunteer work organizing performance opportunities for young musicians in her community.  The Arts Advocate Award will be presented to Brunswick Acres School art teacher Suzanne Tiedemann. Suzanne raised over $25,000 for Hurricane Sandy relief efforts through a Shells for NJ Shores project that encouraged over 50 schools throughout NJ and the nation to create shell themed art for sale.  Suzanne also won $5,000 for her school through the innovative use of social media in the third annual “Art of Education” competition, sponsored by Kris Wine and Americans for the Arts securing 16,000 of 90,000 votes entered nationally in the contest. Through Suzanne’s creative fundraising she was able to purchase 30 ipads exclusively for art room use at her elementary school.  To say her students are lucky is an understatement, and ArtPride is thrilled to honor these distinguished arts advocates at this year’s Governor’s Awards in Arts Education.

The bottom line is—don’t miss Arts Day this year. Register today! You will find food for your soul, feed your creative appetite and leave feeling satisfied knowing that the arts in New Jersey provide the tantalizing flavors that make our state a great place to live, work, visit and raise a family!

Images courtesy of ArtPride

Ann Marie Miller is the Executive Director of ArtPride, the premier arts advocacy organization in New Jersey, and a regular contributor to the Dodge blog.

By now we are sure that you are aware that April is National Poetry Month! We hope you have already encountered poetry in some shape or form in the past week, whether it be on purpose or by accident. We hope it’s creeping into your daily life somehow, and that you’ve welcomed it!

Dodge Poetry has been keeping an ear to the ground to take note of the ways listening to poetry is worked into this month. We asked around some teachers on our Facebook and Twitter pages to see how poetry was being involved in classrooms all around the country.

Many teachers as well as non-teachers said they will take part in Poem in Your Pocket day, which is an idea we love because it is simply bringing the pleasure of being read to those around you, as you read your favorite poem to them. This is just one of the great programs suggested by The Academy of American Poets for National Poetry Month, along with the Dear Poet Project, which encourages students to write letters to poets after reading one of the poet’s poems. This spirit of exploration and connection with the poet is wonderfully intimate, and select letters will receive a reply on Poet.org. Click here to see The Academy’s 30 Ways to Celebrate, a great resource.

Not a new initiative, but also one of our favorites, is Poetry 180, which was started by Billy Collins during his time as Poet Laureate of the United States. Based on the accessible poems in the accompanying collection Poetry 180 (also the second collection, 180 More) the suggestion is that every school day start off with poetry. Ideally, the poems would follow the end of daily announcements, so that the whole school would start their day with the pleasure of listening to poetry. Even just in one classroom, the exercise of starting the day with a poem read aloud is a powerful one. And do not think the poems in Poetry 180 are for students only – there is powerful, relatable stuff in the collections, for readers of any age.

Poetry Foundation has started a page through SoundCloud called Record-a-Poem, where you can record yourself reading a favorite poem aloud and listen to those recorded by others. Poetryfoundation.com is a great place to find the text of some of these favorite poems, too. One fun listen is a reading by a 1^st grade class in Oak Park, IL, in unison! We love the interaction that happens when you listen to someone’s rendition of a poem they love. Their connection brings new life to a poem you may not have connected with on your own.

Teachers are actively incorporating National Poetry Month in their classrooms in a lot of interesting ways. Some great activities that we heard:

We hope you have your ears open this month! You’re bound to hear a new favorite or an old love.

***

A big THANK YOU to all of the teachers who helped us by letting us in on what teachers are doing in their classrooms: Chris Ventimiglia, Suezette Given, Sarah Blake Schoenholtz, Shahe Mankerian, Alejandro Escude, Margaret Simon, Scott Woods, and Nancy Schneberger. We appreciate you!

As someone working in food system planning and food policy, I meet many smart people who want to work on food system issues, possibly motivated by the complexity of systemic challenges and intellectual curiosity.  In addition to being really smart, I think these people are “people persons.”  Not necessarily extroverted, social butterflies, although there are plenty of those interested in food systems; but individuals who are motivated to collaborate with other people; they have a knack for working with others.

Another thing strikes me about the food systems people I meet.  Many people are interested or are currently working in government and on policy, but they are not in politics. At least at this point in their lives, they are not envisioning running for town council, or state legislature, or the US Congress.  But why, then, are they interested in government and policy?

Who Leads a Movement?

I am reminded of a recent article on Civil Eats written by the founder of the Community Food Security Coalition, Andy Fisher. Andy thoughtfully touched upon recent changes within some national food organizations’ leadership, some missteps by the movement, and some major political battles lost, specifically, the defeat of California’s Proposition 37. His argument was that while there is lots of activity, as evidenced by the new nonprofits, well-established organizations, institutions, and professions taking critical notice of food, and numerous on-the-ground community-based projects, there is no national movement or recognized organizational leader, no policy leader, no political leader.

The equally thoughtful and considerate discourse in the Civil Eats comments section illustrated how social and political movements are changing, literally moving online.  While decision-making, for the most part, is still done via staid public meetings, lots of policy debate and policy-making is happening online.  And while I have heard the arguments that online communities can foster extremism on either side, on multiple issues, it strikes me that the food movement is exceptionally well networked and exhibits very nuanced and opposing opinions.  Some technophiles might say we are participating in a “peer network”. And the food system peer network offers great promise.  Jeff Piestrak of Cornell University has proposed and is working on creating the Northeast Food Knowledge Ecosystem – an online platform to connect food system practitioners to local, regional, state-based, and national efforts.

Local vs. National

As someone who works at a regional level, I have always found it exceptionally hard for an organization or an individual to be focused and effective on both local and national policy.  I may be wrong, though.  There are a few shining examples of organizations (and individuals at these organizations) who have their feet firmly planted on the ground in their communities, while their heads are in the clouds of national policy.  They are connected to grassroots efforts to bring the conditions of food insecurity to light, increase a community’s access to healthy food, and are becoming increasingly comfortable walking the halls of a state capital or testifying to Congress.

But there’s no political quick fix to social injustices, economic failures, health disparity, or environmental degradation.  The food system is riddled with unintended consequences, like any other policy field or issue area. So, can we learn from other fields?  There is not a singular organization that represents the environmental field, or women’s rights, or cancer research.  Why should there be one organization that is leading the national food movement?

It seems the only way to create systemic change is to work simultaneously from the bottom and the top, and with and within multiple organizations.  Movements need to have multiple opportunities for engagement, communication, demonstration projects, and sustained projects. Like a farmer with multiple distribution channels (contract sales, selling directly to consumers, and participating at an auction) or a news outlet with multiple platforms (print, online, twitter).  But how does an organization or a movement do that?  With people.

Real People Time

The more my work moves online, the more important in-person meetings have become.  An impromptu 10-minute meeting in the hallway, one-on-one meetings over coffee or lunch, one-day conferences, regularly scheduled meetings.  All of these are physical places where I know I’ll see a certain someone and hear an important update or get a personal pick-me-up.  While we are all susceptible to meeting fatigue, great stuff happens when people get together in a room.

One of my favorite in-person meetings was the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group’s conference.  After having to reschedule from an October date to an atypical February date, due to Hurricane/Super Storm Sandy, the conference proved to be resilient, and provided me with a much needed Winter pick-me-up.  In addition to brushing up on some meeting facilitation skills and learning about what other places throughout the Northeast are doing, I also realized the value of building a peer network.  And not just online, but in person, connecting with the three, or ten, or 20 people who are doing things very similar to what I am.  These are the people who I want to shoot a quick email out to get feedback on a half-baked idea… or ask a new friend in Vermont to review an online survey we’re designing for Philadelphia.  Having an online portal introduces me to those peers’ work, but doesn’t create a personal level of trust.  Investing in relationships, either online or in real life takes time.  But maybe only trust can be created in-person.

Measuring the Movement

With our society’s ever-increasing demand for “fast”, possibly created by ubiquitous technology and the 24-hour news cycle, it’s important to realize that both systemic change and an individual’s behavior change take time.  Small sustained changes lead up to big changes.

Yesterday, I spoke to a friend about farm to school programs, school food reform, what’s happening across the country and in our local school districts.  She made the observation that a school district (big or small, rich or poor) has a very hard time sustaining big splashy changes a la Jamie Oliver. She thinks there may be more promise in working with a 20-year veteran in food services who constantly watches his budget’s bottom line, supports his frontline staff, and makes little things happen.  This food services director could become the leading school food reformist without even knowing it.

And I’m often reminder that the most meaningful change may be at the individual level.  My friends at the Center for High Impact Philanthropy reminded me that we, as a society, are interested in reducing childhood obesity, not for aesthetic reasons, but for all things that childhood obesity affects, such as school attendance, personal education attainment, chronic health issues, and access to economic opportunities as adults.

And when it comes to behavioral interventions or educational programs, we may not see positive outcomes for decades – until that individual is an adult, interested and passionate about her own causes… and possibly running for political office… in 2040.

Alison Hastings is an urban planner, a food system thinker, and a people person.

University of Kansas insect ecologist, Dr. Chip Taylor, who is the founder and director of Monarch Watch, explains in this interview for Yale Environment 360 the variety of factors that are leading to a precipitous decline in the monarch butterfly population.

If you are a long time reader of the Dodge blog, you may remember that we’ve written about monarch butterflies many times, including this “Monarch Mondays” series (part 1, 2, 3, 4) from 2010. As funders of the Educational Information Resources Center and their Monarch Teacher Network, this article caught our eye, and we wanted to share it.

Read the full article: Tracking the Causes of Sharp Decline of the Monarch Butterfly

Image courtesy Dr. Chip Taylor
interview via Richard Coniff

Each week, a Dodge Poet will answer some questions about themselves and provide a selected poem of their own work. We hope that this will be a way for you to get to know the Dodge Poets a little better, and you can get an idea of why we love working with them so much.

We are first featuring leaders of our Spring & Fountain sessions.

Without further ado, today’s Dodge Poet is BJ Ward.

Photo Credit: Lauren Rutten

What are you reading?
Olives (A.E. Stallings), The Trouble Ball (Martín Espada), View with a Grain of Sand (Wislawa Szymborska), and The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah” (Alan Light).

When did you first discover poetry?  What poets made you want to write poetry?
I first discovered poetry in 10^th grade. The poets that made me want to write poetry: James Wright, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, William Carlos Williams, W.B. Yeats, and my 10^th grade English teacher, Edwin Romond—a fine poet himself.

Tell us about any personal habits, rituals, ceremonies, superstitions that are part of your writing practice.
Silence during the first draft. Windows open during revision. Springsteen’s album Darkness on the Edge of Town when putting together the order of a book.

Tell us about your favorite experience reading for an audience.
Reading at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo Village. I read with Susan Jackson, who was lovely in words and in person. The audience was so receptive to the event—enthusiastic in its applause and in conversation afterwards. A close second: reading at a Barnes & Noble in Reno, Nevada. There were two Elvis impersonators in the small but friendly audience (a convention was in town).

What is the funniest/strangest response you’ve ever gotten to telling someone you are a poet?
I was 16 years old. At a family picnic I brazenly announced I wanted to be a poet. A woman shrieked. Every man just shook his head. Birds of prey started watching me closely, the vultures drooling. My mother, however, beamed.

287 was the long road to the newspaper plant
……..my black-handed father would ride beneath
the weight of a night sky.
……..A father who works the night shift
knows that weight, how it accumulates from within
……..when his mistakes and debt
begin to press on his children and wife.
……..And so went his life—

If the stars spelled something real,
……..they might spell the equation
that my father never mastered–
……..the news just ran through his hands
and what slid there left the black residue
……..of the world’s doings, pressed knowledge
that read like misaligned tea leaves in his hardening palms,
……..and in his life line and heart line and other lines
that would normally speak a fortune,
……..the night just accumulated itself—
a little sky he would spread over us
……..when the world redelivered him in the morning.

BJ Ward

(originally published in Poetry,
from Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems, 1990 to 2013)

Photo Credit: Lauren Rutten

–Some 31 percent of respondents have reported deserting a news source because its quality has degenerated.

–Sports, weather and traffic now account for 40 percent of local TV news.

–Local TV news viewership among adults under 30 fell from 42 percent in 2006 to 28 percent in 2012.

–Mobile digital display is one of the fastest-growing ad markets, but news organizations aren’t getting much of a share. Some 72 percent of that market goes to six companies, including Facebook and Google.

–Some 63 percent of the public has little or no idea of the financial pressures facing news companies.

–At CNN, which invented the 24-hour TV news cycle, the number of produced story packages was cut in half between 2007 and 2012.

One of the saddest conclusions of the report is that, with more thinly-staffed newsrooms, news organizations — and by extension their readers, listeners and viewers — are much more likely to be duped by propagandists. In a recent case, Pew said, no less a news organization than the AP fell for a fake press release. In 1980, PR professionals outnumbered journalists 1.2 to 1. By 2008, PR folk were outnumbering news folk by more than three to one.

Efforts by political and corporate entities to get their messages into news coverage are nothing new. What is different now—adding up the data and industry developments—is that news organizations are less equipped to question what is coming to them or to uncover the stories themselves, and interest groups are better equipped and have more technological tools than ever.

This isn’t just dangerous to the news business, it’s dangerous to democracy — and it’s one of the reasons the NJ News Commons exists.

We’re not going to single-handedly reverse the trends that have decimated newsrooms and made technology companies leapfrog over news companies in the ad business. But we’re trying to bring about efficiencies in the news business (Story Exchange), improve reporting by teaching more journalists data journalism (Hack Jersey), and help small news organizations learn the business skills that will help them survive (CJET). And our Learning Lunch series is all about discussing the issues of the day.

When I came to journalism, in the Woodward and Bernstein era, there was an inviolate Chinese Wall that separated journalists from the business sides of their operations, and everyone assumed this was a good thing. Now, journalists and journalism can’t afford the luxury of that detachment. Every news person should know and understand the economics of their business.

Janet Coats of the Patterson Foundation, which is sponsoring our CJET training in May, wrote a post on Friday “Business Mentoring is One Way to Beat the Hyperlocal Cooties” — a direct response to Jeff Jarvis’s post the previous week lamenting hyperlocal business failures. In her post, she discusses the first training her organization undertook, called Super Camp, which I had the honor to participate in.

In that pilot program, we sent business mentors to work with 12 publishers, mentoring them both by phone and through visits in their markets. They focused on building strength in ad sales, in customer relationship management and in diversifying revenue streams.

What’s exciting about this third iteration of the training is that it will take place within one state — affording publishers an opportunity to mentor each other when it’s all over.

Take a second to let those three words register: “mentor each other.”

We have a slogan at the top of our website: “Strengthening the voice of New Jersey by helping news organizations work cooperatively.” We really believe, given the crisis in our industry, that it’s time to put down our petty differences and shore up our profession together. Journalists will never lose their instinct to want to scoop their competitors, and some healthy competition between members of the news ecosystem is a good thing. But the real threats to us are not from other journalists. They’re from technology companies that are smarter than we are, and our own failures to reinvent ourselves fast enough.

Debbie Galant is director of the NJ News Commons, a project of the School of the Communication and Media at Montclair State University. It resides within the Center for Cooperative Media and is funded, in part, by contributions of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

How has the rise of social media affected the board’s role in fundraising?

For a long time, conventional wisdom has told us that all board members must do two things related to fundraising: make a personal financial gift, and serve as the organization’s community ambassadors. While these two principles hold true today, the way that board members carry out their ambassadorship role is changing rapidly, influenced by the many changes in the way we communicate with one another. Is your board ready to take their ambassadorship and fundraising into the brave new world of social media, viral videos, online conversation, and the virtual web of connections that link us all?

First, let’s look at the upside: social media allows board members to share their excitement about the organization’s work with a lot more people, a lot more easily. Shared content on Facebook or Twitter may inspire someone to get more involved, even if that person has a relatively distant relationship to the board member. Since you don’t have to see someone to communicate with them, these online tools open up new opportunities to be an ambassador to a wider social circle. Board members don’t even have to leave home to do it!

But these new communication methods are also creating new, and possibly permanent, changes in the way nonprofits think about fundraising. A great new article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review called “The Permanent Disruption of Social Media” highlights recent research conducted by Julie Dixon and Denise Keyes into how online communication is affecting fundraising. Some of their more interesting findings include:

• 40% of their survey respondents reported that they first became involved with a cause when they donated money – turning our long-held belief that personal cultivation always precedes solicitation on its ear.
• The majority of people who promote causes on social media are not just casually clicking the “share” button when they forward petitions or fundraising links. Instead, they have usually been involved with the issue as a donor or a volunteer, and are using their online networks as a tool to raise awareness about causes that really matter to them.
• Peer influence continues to be a major path for getting people involved in causes – 39% of respondents said they get involved with causes that have affected someone they know, and 36% said they are interested in issues that are important to family and friends.

All the trends point in one direction – we are no longer in control of how people learn about our mission and decide to get involved. They are much more likely to come to us when a family member or friend points the way, and this makes our board’s ambassadorship role even more important.

What can we do to take advantage of this trend? Here are a few ideas:

• Recognize that someone’s value to an organization goes far beyond their ability to make a donation. Someone with modest financial resources but the ability to activate a strong network on your behalf is just as important to promoting your cause and raising funds. We need to expand our definition of “a good prospect” and ask board members to cultivate great networkers as well as great givers.
• Offer good-quality online content for easy sharing. As people’s communication increasingly moves online, board members will need information – photos, videos, articles, and interesting links that they can share with their own networks. Think of this as a modern version of the fact sheet and organizational brochure; if you don’t offer board members these kinds of tools, they are unlikely to take advantage of chances to promote your organization via social media.
• Expand your definition of engagement. For too long, we’ve viewed a financial contribution as the pinnacle of our relationship with someone. While donating will always be important, online communication makes it easier for us to ask people to be more engaged – promoting issues to their own networks, organizing online fundraising campaigns, recruiting new participants – and this kind of deeper engagement leads to a greater sense of satisfaction for the donor. The board’s ambassadorship role should expand beyond cultivating and soliciting financial gifts to activating participants in a variety of ways that support the mission.

Here’s another piece of good news: we’ve known for decades that the number one reason why people give is that they know someone involved with the organization. And this hasn’t changed. If anything, the new frontier of social media has intensified the importance of a personal connection in fundraising. And that makes our board ambassadors even more effective in securing all kinds of support for our organizations.

The article that inspired this blog post can be downloaded for free from the Stanford Social Innovation Review site.

Allison Trimarco is the founder and principal of Creative Capacity, a consulting firm that collaborates with nonprofits to find creative solutions to management challenges. She is also an affiliated consultant and instructor at The Nonprofit Center at La Salle University.

Each week, a Dodge Poet will answer some questions about themselves and provide a selected poem of their own work. We hope that this will be a way for you to get to know the Dodge Poets a little better, and you can get an idea of why we love working with them so much.

We are featuring poets who have been a part of our recent programming; in this case, Crystal was a poet in the schools for our Hurricane Sandy Poetry Initiative.

Without further ado, today’s Dodge Poet is Crystal Bacon.

Photo Credit: Lauren Rutten

What are you reading?
Mary Oliver’s One Thousand Mornings

When did you first discover poetry?  What poets made you want to write poetry?
I first discovered poetry when I was in grade school.   My Godparents gave me a copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses for my birthday.  I forgot it on the porch overnight, and the dog chewed it up pretty badly!  My mother made me take it over and show my Godmother who fortunately was on the phone and didn’t have time to hear me explain, but I had a deep sense of shame about that book for a long time.  It was a shaping experience.  Dogs like to eat poetry.  In later life, one of my dogs ate the cover if Hal Sirowitz’ Mother Said, and Mary Oliver’s dog Percy ate The Bhagavad Gita.

The poets who made me want to write when I really got interested in college were Dylan Thomas, Anne Sexton and Byron.

What is your favorite place to read?
I seem constitutionally disenclined toward favorites.  If the book or individual poem is compelling, I can read walking, standing, sitting or lying anywhere.

Tell us about any personal habits, rituals, ceremonies, superstitions that are part of your writing practice.
I feel deeply the presence of the divine when the poem comes forward.  I have to be able to fall inward into a place of receptivity to receive the poem.  Often, the opening lines of the poem come to me like faint strains of music, and I will repeat them in my mind throughout the day, commit them to memory so that I can gauge their memorability and their music.

Tell us about your favorite experience reading for an audience.
I had the great pleasure for a period of years to read for groups of painters studying with the wonderful painter and teacher Tim Hawkesworth who conducts week-long workshops at a farm in Pennsylvania.  Those groups were my most fertile and appreciative audiences.

What is the funniest/strangest response you’ve ever gotten to telling someone you are a poet?
I don’t say this much.  I think it must have something to do with that book my ten year old self left out for the dog.

Dawn.  Light snow blurs the hills,

stirs the ringing silence.  Hawk

screes hunting the morning.  Mourning

has broken, pours like the river

running west to catch the Methow.

“Met how” they say.  I met you long ago

far from this brilliant emptiness. Tomorrow

I go west to go east again, going and coming

become one, how we meet, confluence

merges us.
.
.
Crystal Bacon

Photo Credit: Lauren Rutten

Yesterday, Montclair State University announced the launch of its Center for Cooperative Media, a remarkable leap of progress for strengthening and expanding the news here in New Jersey.

The Center is a hub for journalists and media organizations throughout the state by:

• providing office space, access to tv and radio studios, and a shared newsroom on its campus;
• facilitating coordination and collaboration on reporting projects;
• curating the best reporting around the state through a daily news digest;
• offering business and journalism training as well as other services to support the whole news ecosystem here in NJ; and
• providing important linkages and opportunities for MSU faculty and students to the Center’s efforts.

Impressively, a number of partners are already sharing office space on campus, including New Jersey Public Radio, NJ Spotlight, WBGO, NJTV, NJ.com, Patch – New Jersey, North Jersey Media Group, and Reuters International, as well as NJ News Commons which is an initiative of the Center.

Dodge is a major funder of the Center, along with our partners at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, because we believe that people need high quality news and information in order to make educated decisions on issues that impact our lives. And yet, living in New Jersey has always meant tuning into news dominated by the New York and Philadelphia media markets. We’re trying to change that. We do this by supporting: individual media organizations (including NJ Spotlight, New Jersey Public Radio, NJTV, WBGO, and WHYY’s NewsWorks, among others); community engagement efforts and projects; and the Center’s work to serve and strengthen the New Jersey news ecosystem.

For more information about the Center, visit their website. You can also sign up for their daily news digest here, featuring the best reporting around the state. Debbie Galant, the director of the NJ News Commons, is also a regular blogger for the Dodge blog. You can read her popular blog posts here.

Related Reading:

Montclair State Launching Partnership with 6 NJ Media Companies; Expanding New Communications School (NJ.com)

Pew: News Industry in Crisis (Debbie Galant, NJ News Commons)

Business Mentoring is One Way to Beat the Hyperlocal Cooties (Janet Coats/The Patterson Foundation)

Image: TJ Russell delivers the news during Introduction to Control Room and Studio Production at Montclair State University’s DuMont Media Center.
(John Munson/The Star-Ledger)

Trying to get the 565 cities and towns of New Jersey to work collaboratively isn’t easy, but sustainability issues are a good way to get the conversation started.  Many sustainability actions, like air and water quality, extend beyond municipal boundaries and can more effectively be planned on a regional scale.  Although Sustainable Jersey currently only certifies individual municipalities, we put great value on regional collaboration.

Working with regional networks that have similar interests has enabled Sustainable Jersey to have widespread coordination, harmonization and impact across New Jersey.  Moving forward, Sustainable Jersey will be developing and implementing long-term capacity strengthening activities through the development of regional hubs.

We have found that although regional programs can reach a wide number of organizations, the collaboration takes time—from relationship building to transfer of ideas and then application.  Here are a few tips/stories from some of our partners and participating municipalities:

Four Tips for Developing a Regional Sustainability Network

1) Hire a County Director of Sustainability

Did you know that Camden County was the first county in the United States to mandate recycling? The county to date has preserved 2,400 acres of open space and has created a series of trailways and bikeways and is now pursuing “Sustainable Camden County,” an initiative that will not only deal with environmental concerns but will help to educate the public about what individuals and businesses can do.

Chris Waldron presenting at the Haddon Heights Green Team’s Community Visioning event

Chris Waldron, LEED AP, is the newly appointed Director of Sustainability for Camden County.  Waldron was first introduced to sustainability issues when he was asked to oversee a sustainability audit at the Philadelphia Zoo where he was a zoo keeper and habitat curator.  After the successful audit, he got his LEED certification and has never looked back.  Now, as Director of Sustainability, he is working on sustainable habitats for people rather than primates.

The creation of the Director of Sustainability position was championed by Camden County Freeholder Jeffrey L. Nash.  “I understood the fact that our county needed someone to provide the vision, strategy and focus for advancing our operational sustainability efforts by working directly with the community,” said Freeholder Jeffrey Nash.  Nash added “Camden County has large cities and small towns with vast geographical differences and contrasting needs.  Now, with Chris, we are working to consolidate and unify the efforts of our municipal Green Teams, so they can take advantage of economies of scale, which will result in more impactful strategies that save money and improve our communities.”

Of Waldron’s many job duties, he is working with the 37 mayors in Camden County to assist the towns with their Sustainable Jersey certification.  He provides the on-the-ground support and cheerleading that towns often need to move forward on sustainability actions.  Waldron said, “It’s exciting to see how people embrace the Sustainable Jersey program.  By attending Green Team meetings in different towns, I am able to share best practices and suggest ways that groups can work together to have a bigger impact.”  He is currently working with Green Teams in Camden, Collingswood, Haddon Heights, Pennsauken, Runnemede, Somerdale, Stratford, Voorhees and Winslow.

In Camden County there are 5 certified towns, 17 that are registered and working on the program and 15 that are not yet signed up.  Waldron added, “It’s not always easy to get towns to work together.  Some towns have friendly but competitive relationships with neighboring towns and don’t want to share ideas.”  But this month, Waldron was excited about his participation in the Haddon Heights Green Team’s Community Visioning event.  Silver-certified Cherry Hill Township shared their success stories at the workshop, and Waldron made sure that representatives of the Haddonfield and Pennsauken Green Teams attended the meeting to see the value of a visioning session for setting sustainability goals.

In late spring, a new website will be launched (SustainableCamdenCounty.org) that will provide resources for towns, including the draft five-year Camden County Sustainability Plan which will serve as a model for other counties.

2) Share Best Practices and Resources

The benefit of sharing best practices is to learn from others and avoid reinventing the wheel.  To be successful, many organizations and Green Teams are abandoning their ideas of information hoarding in order to participate in knowledge sharing.

HART Commuter Information Services is a non-profit that promotes sustainable transportation in Hunterdon County by working with commuters, employers and communities.  HART’s Sustainable Hunterdon initiative provides local municipalities with free assistance as they pursue Sustainable Jersey certification.  In addition to staff support, HART provides an e-newsletter to community Green Teams. The newsletters offer information and resources to help communities achieve the actions required for certification.

Frenchton "Green Awareness through Film" Series

Tara Shepherd, Executive Director of HART Commuter Information Services, said “Green Teams can often get overwhelmed as they attempt to take on various action Items.  In many cases, HART can help because we can facilitate conversations between various groups in the community that are already doing things that could be documented for points.”  As part of that facilitation role, HART supports the use of shared resources.  The organization surveyed municipalities last year to see what they were interested in pursuing.  Overwhelmingly, the response was, “Community Outreach & Education” and “Green Challenges.”

But the Green Teams were unsure how to get started.  HART worked with towns and came up with some innovative ideas.  HART acquired the public screening rights to several highly motivating environmental films. The films are available for loan, along with a projector and screen, free of charge, to any Hunterdon municipality interested in hosting a screening. The screenings provide a great way to launch a Green Challenge or to kick-off a Green Fair.  Each activity earns 10 points toward Sustainable Jersey certification.  Additionally, HART provides meeting facilities so that Green Teams can meet and discuss collaborative efforts.  The Flemington Green Team was recently able to share their Sustainable Jersey experiences with High Bridge.  Also, Sustainable Hunterdon offers Green Teams use of their customized online tracking/surveying tool for initiatives like green challenges.

Sustainable Jersey municipalities throughout the state can get support from their local Transportation Management Association (TMA).  TMAs can assist by providing free programs that align with certification categories including transportation fairs, onsite bicycle and pedestrian safety programs for children and adults, anti-idling awareness campaigns and “Complete Streets” programs.

To find the TMA serving your county visit: Transportation Management Association Council of New Jersey.

3) Identify Areas of Common Concern and Success Stories

For progress to be made in regional collaborations, participants should agree on common issues and interests.  Generally, municipalities will have some issues and interests in common and others that are of concern to only one town.  Creating clarity of purpose involves establishing and consolidating links among participants while creating a shared vision and purpose.

In the fall of 2011, the Glen Rock Green Team decided to implement an innovative strategy to foster a regional approach to sustainability. They hosted the first-ever Northwest Bergen County Environmental Commission (NWBCEC) and Green Team Summit.  Representatives from seven municipalities attended and based on the enthusiastic first meeting, set up a schedule to meet quarterly.  The second meeting attracted 50 representatives from Environmental Commissions, Green Teams and Shade Tree Committees from across Bergen County. These two events were the first of their kind in northern New Jersey.

Prior to the Green Summit, the Glen Rock Green Team surveyed participants to identify their areas of greatest concern, potential topics to cover and success stories.  Based on responses, the group identified three success stories that were shared at the event and key topics to discuss.  A key element of the event was allowing each participant to introduce themselves to the group; the intent was to initiate relationship building.  At the conclusion of the meeting, all participants enthusiastically agreed to be placed on a joint mailing list, to create a NWBCEC LinkedIn group for ongoing communications and to meet quarterly to continue the dialogue.  After the meeting, the Glen Rock Green Team sent out an email with links to resources which had been shared and an invitation to join the LinkedIn group.

4) Provide Access to Experts and Resources on Hot Topics

Many successful regional collaborations can be traced back to an issue or hot topic that served to unite participants.  The structure and relationships gained in working around the pressing initiative are then used for collaboration on other issues.

For example, shortly after the Glen Rock Green Team Green Summit, Northern New Jersey suffered a snow and ice storm on Halloween weekend which caused extensive loss of mature trees and tree limbs, extensive damage to homes, as well as prolonged power outages, road closures and school closures. Residents with mature trees on their properties were afraid of future damage.  In consultation with the Glen Rock Shade Tree Advisory Committee liaison to the Green Up Glen Rock Team, the group identified “Vibrant Communities and Urban Forests: Mapping a Strategy to Save our Trees” as the topic for the next event.

The group invited two guest speakers. The first was a representative of the New York Restoration Project, New York’s lead community greening organization and sponsor of Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC Million Trees initiative.  She presented the results of a recently released national report on Urban Forests.  The second speaker was the NJ Community Forester.  He gave practical information on community forests, their role in stormwater management and management of trees during extreme weather conditions.

Due to the caliber of the speakers, the group publicized the event to all Environmental Commissions, Shade Tree Committees and Green Teams in Bergen County with the help of the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions and Sustainable Jersey.

Over 50 participants attended, including the entire Upper Saddle River Environmental Commission.  One issue that was raised by participants was development of shade tree management ordinances, as many Bergen County communities have recently passed ordinances and others, such as Glen Rock and Ridgewood, were in the process of developing or passing ordinances and were very interested in sharing information with other communities.

This served to build a Bergen County network and strengthen communication among the participating organizations.  Members are now sharing information via the mailing list and the LinkedIn Group.  With information gathered from this event, the Glen Rock Shade Tree Advisory Committee was able to testify before the Glen Rock School Board about its plan to remove over a dozen mature oak trees to make room for two artificial turf fields.  The Committee also drafted a Shade Tree Management Ordinance that the Borough Council is close to passing.  Glen Rock plans to build on this on foundation by continuing the series of events and strengthening communication.

They say that those who learn to collaborate prevail!  We look forward to rolling-out our regional hubs to strengthen Green Team efforts across New Jersey.  Check the website for progress on our regional collaboration strategy, and comment here to tell us your collaboration tips.

For more about Sustainable Jersey®:

Website | Facebook | Twitter

Images courtesy Sustainable Jersey

Sustainable Jersey staff and partners are regular contributors to the Dodge blog

Some of the Creative Orange participants

The City of Orange Township, NJ has a powerful spirit that is fueled by its passionate, committed residents, nonprofit leaders, business owners, teachers, and local officials.  Last Friday and Saturday, nearly 100 of these community leaders assembled for a Call to Collaboration to answer the question: Making Orange Pop:  How Can We Embrace Culture, Nurture Creativity, and Drive Innovation?

Following in the footsteps of Creative New Jersey’s other “creative communities” Creative Orange’s Host Team achieved great success in assembling an incredibly diverse group of participants.  The folks who joined the Call to Collaboration represented arts & cultural organizations, the Orange school system, community development organizations, city government (thank you to Mayor Dwayne Warren for joining us!), healthcare, local businesses, financial institutions, higher education and a host of community nonprofits, and ranged in age from 16 to 86 years old!

The organizations represented included HANDS, Inc.; ValleyArts; Church of the Epiphany; Orange Board of Education; City of Orange (Mayor’s Office and Dept. Of Recreation); New Jersey Institute of Technology; Rising Tide Capital; Arts Unbound; Investor’s Savings Bank; ORNG, Ink.; FAMILYConnections; South Orange Performing Arts Center; TerraNoble Design, P.A.; Hat City Kitchen; Luna Stage Company; Greater Newark LISC; Montclair State University; Catholic Charities; Millburn Public Schools; MBD Strategic Communications, and dozens of other companies, organizations and institutions. The cultural and racial diversity in the room was also very exciting as a mix of African-American, Latino, Caucasian, and Native American voices spoke in a unified manner about the future of this urban center.

The multi-cultural Church of the Epiphany, under the leadership of Reverend Miguelina Howell, hosted our convening.  This center of community life was a perfect location in which to hold our Creative Orange convening.  Over the course of two days, the participants created their own agenda, and 34 breakout sessions occurred.  These intentional, action-oriented discussions focused on topics such as:

• The creation of an Arts Alliance for The Oranges;
• The development of meaningful, sustainable and engaged community involvement in program development, community solutions and political accountability is vital for the success of Orange and its exciting future.  Lack of an informed citizenry perpetuates status quo as well as deprives those with ideas and a desire to participate in their community from any meaningful community engagement.
• The development of a robust branding and communications strategy for Orange.

There were also several discussions which embraced a cross-sector approach to solving challenges; one such example focuses on the health and wellness of Orange residents.  Participants discussed a variety of ways to combat community health issues (not the least of which is a high rate of diabetes and obesity) ranging from establishing community vegetable gardens, to promoting healthy physical activity through the arts (i.e. dance and theatre), to insisting city officials enforce codes relating to freshness expiration dates, to establishing a Creating Healthy Families program using the creative industries to promote and champion affordable and accessible healthy food choices for all Orange residents.

Several sessions focused on the city’s youth and opportunities for bringing the youth together with the senior population.  This multi-generational approach was present throughout the convening and it was exciting to witness the synergy between the generations as the conversations ensued.

Throughout the convening, several individuals expressed themselves creatively in haiku, sketches, and in song.  One member played two songs on his harmonica for us during the opening session of day 2 while others left their creative mark on a large white canvas.

By Saturday afternoon, small teams coalesced around specific issues and immediate, short-term action steps were established.  In the coming weeks, these teams are gathering to continue developing their strategies for effecting change in Orange in a creative, cooperative and sustainable manner.

All of us at Creative New Jersey applaud our Creative Orange colleagues.  Personally, I feel very grateful to have worked alongside the members of the Creative Orange Host Team (led by our friends at HANDS, Inc. and ValleyArts) and am equally excited for the privilege of engaging with the larger group of Creative Orange participants.  Their passion is infectious.  Their spirit is overwhelmingly positive.  We know they can create the prosperous, healthy, and sustainable future they deserve and we stand at their side ready to assist in whatever way we can.   Congratulations Creative Orange!

Elizabeth Murphy is the Director of Creative New Jersey.  She is also currently assisting the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers with their coordination of the Post-Sandy Philanthropic Response in NJ.

Creative New Jersey is dedicated to fostering creativity, innovation, and sustainability by empowering cross-sector partnerships in commerce, education, philanthropy, government, and culture in order to ensure dynamic communities and a thriving economy.

Creative New Jersey’s leaders and partners are regular contributors to the Dodge blog.

Each week, a Dodge Poet will answer some questions about themselves and provide a selected poem of their own work. We hope that this will be a way for you to get to know the Dodge Poets a little better, and you can get an idea of why we love working with them so much.

The first poets we will be featuring are all leaders of Spring & Fountain sessions. If you have registered for a s session, you may see you leader featured.

Without further ado, our first Dodge Poet is Edwin Romond.

Photo Credit: Lauren Rutten

What are you reading?
I am reading The Art of Loss, a poetry collection by Myrna Stone, and I am also re-reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to help my son who is studying the play in his 10^th grade English class.

When did you first discover poetry?  What poets made you want to write poetry?
I had three “poetry awakenings” in my life. Although I had always respected the art form I really came to love it when I was student teaching in Wisconsin in 1971. Having to give more intense attention to literature that I would be teaching in front of a class brought me to a much deeper place. I was amazed at how much I loved teaching the poems in the text book and remember with special fondness Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station” and how my 9^th grade students responded to it.  What turned that love of poetry into a passion, however, was the night in March, 1977 when I heard Robert Bly read in Demarest Hall lounge at Rutgers University. I had never heard anyone present poems with the fire that Bly had that night and I drove home from New Brunswick a very different person. Even though Bly opened my eyes to poetry in a new and exciting manner, I didn’t become interested in writing my own poems until seven years later when I was a member of Stephen Dunn’s poetry workshop at the Artist-Teacher Institute at Stockton College. Those ten days changed my life again for Stephen helped me learn about making poems in a way that I could not only understand but also embrace. Whatever I am as a poet I owe to Stephen Dunn.

Richard Hugo said we’ve written every poem we ever loved.  He was particularly proud of having written Yeats’ “Easter, 1916.”  What great poem are you proud of having written?
Joseph Pintauro is better known for his novels and plays but I love his poem “Lizzie and Blondie” from his book, Kites at Empty Airports. I have lived with this poem 42 years and each time I read it privately or share it in a workshop I continue to be deeply affected by the brilliance of the poem’s construction and the restraint with which he handles the delicate subject matter (the death of his mother.) I have grown old with “Lizzie and Blondie” and my life experiences have only increased my appreciation of both the poem and the artistry of the writer.

Tell us about your favorite experience reading for an audience.
In 1989 I did a reading in Dublin at the James Joyce Room which is directly across from St. Stephen’s Green. I had been thrilled to be in Ireland for the summer but this joy was tempered by the thought that both of my parents died before they could return to the country of their ancestors. When I was growing up they spoke often about their wish to travel to Ireland and see where their families came from. That night in Dublin I read “My Parents’ Honeymoon,” a selection I had read in public many times before and I shocked myself by breaking down in the middle of it. I think it all caught up to me that I had been able to do what my parents had only dreamed of doing so when I read about their honeymoon, the beginning of their married life, I was overcome with emotion. That had never happened to me at a reading nor has it happened since. Reading about my mother and father to an Irish audience stirred such deep feelings in me that I could not help but have a physical response as well. It hit me that even though my parents could never be there in person, that night in Ireland, through my poetry, I could finally bring them home.

Painting

One Saturday
when I was ten my father,
a truck driver, taught me
how to paint using our porch
steps as his classroom.
I can still feel his huge hand
around mine guiding the brush
brilliant with green paint
across the wooden step
and the thrill of watching
the pigment sink in, turning
scuffed to glossy. My father
told me, “Always bring the
brush back into where you
have just painted, before
you go on to the new spot,”
and he would move my hand
to the left then slide the brush
onto the next patch of worn wood.
We painted two steps together
then he let go of my hand and
honored me by letting me paint
the bottom step on my own.
I still hear his voice urging
me to bring the brush back
to blend the paint into one
continuous stroke of green.
I don’t know why after 50 years
these words remain
like lyrics of a favorite song
but I keep seeing that Saturday,
and feel the paint on my fingers
and hear my father’s soft
instruction as I now bend to
my young son and guide his hand
holding a paint brush across
his skate board ramp. I repeat
the exact words of my father
and hear him speaking with me
then feel his hand upon my hand
holding his grandson’s hand
as together we guide Liam’s brush
across the ramp, reaching back
to go forward, our brush marks red
as a bloodline, seamless, beautiful.

Edwin Romond
(“Painting” previously appeared in Verse Wisconsin)
Photo Credit: Lauren Rutten

The idea of taking a position is an uncomfortable thought for many organizations.  I once heard journalist Linda Ellerbee speak about her decision to put aside her neutral, objective reporter’s hat on one issue that she cared deeply about it. She described it as “stepping off the curb” to join the others who were marching.  The world has changed and as the tax reform discussion begins to take shape, the Council felt it was important to add our voice to the conversation.

This is not something CNJG does regularly or lightly, and we are an organization of members that bring many perspectives to the table. Engaging at this level as advocates requires clear consideration.

As the tax reform discussion began to take shape, the Council’s Leadership & Policy Committee felt it was important to add our voice to the conversation.  Following our recently adopted procedure, the issue was thoroughly and methodically reviewed by the Committee before the recommendation was made to the Board.  The central principle of our position is that any changes made to the tax code must continue to include an incentive for charitable giving. As I pointed out in my testimony to the Ways & Means Committee, in New Jersey, the federal deduction is the only tax incentive for individuals to direct their assets toward their charitable gifts. Especially in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, it is critical that this incentive not be diminished. Indeed, we are also in good company, as 15 of the 34 regional associations that comprise the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers have taken a similar position.

This represents an expansion in how the Council promotes and supports the work of our members.  And more importantly, how the philanthropic sector begins to engage at a policy level.  While the charitable giving incentive may not directly impact the philanthropic sector, giving by individuals is strengthened and leveraged with grantmaker giving.  This issue will now be a key talking point when we meet with our Representatives in Washington later this month during Foundations on the Hill.

Nina Stack is President of the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers, the statewide association of more than 120 funding organizations working in New Jersey. She also serves as Chair of the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, a 34-member network serving more than 4,000 foundations, corporations and other donors across the country.

Opening remarks will be delivered by Pam Breaux, Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism (DCRT).  Pam is also First Vice-President of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and former Executive Director of the Louisiana Division of the Arts.  Pam has “in the trenches” experience and graciously offered to share the story of how Louisiana rebuilt its tourism industry following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  Pam is recognized nationally as a cultural tourism leader and for her role in developing Louisiana’s valued creative industries. Her advice is certain to be eagerly absorbed by the change makers who are charged with tackling New Jersey’s own unique redevelopment challenges.

To place cultural tourism in context, it’s helpful to refer to a 2009 study by the US Dept. of Commerce Office of Travel & Tourism that revealed that 78% of all U.S. leisure travelers participate in cultural and/or heritage activities while traveling, translating to 118.3 million adults each year, and ultimately $192 billion of economic activity.  In New Jersey these statistics are critical since state funding for arts, history and tourism is derived from the NJ Hotel/Motel Occupancy Fee.  In other words, we have skin in this game, and while all visitor related spending is coveted, our ultimate target is the overnight visitor.

The NJ Conference on Tourism is a perfect opportunity for cultural organizations to network with the rest of the hospitality industry, and smart arts marketers will invent new ways to partner with hotels, restaurants and other venues to create packages that will lure cultural tourists.

And there’s always fun, too.  On Thursday morning, Tony Award winning actor, John Lloyd Young, the original Frankie Valli of Jersey Boys, will present the NJ People’s Choice Awards to 14 non-profit arts organizations that were declared favorites by over 7,000 voters throughout the state.  From favorite performing arts center to favorite downtown arts district, cultural venues will shine with pride from knowing their audiences appreciate offerings on stages, in galleries, museums and art classes throughout the year.  Discover Jersey Arts coordinates the annual People’s Choice Awards that has grown over 5 years to reach the public in new ways, most recently through creative social media marketing.

Ultimately, all good partnerships involve trust, respect, commitment and cooperation, and this annual conference offers ways to strengthen those values and promote “pride in place.” That mutual goal benefits not only the partners involved, but enterprise and economic development throughout New Jersey.

Images courtesy of ArtPride

Ann Marie Miller is the Executive Director of ArtPride, the premier arts advocacy organization in New Jersey, and a regular contributor to the Dodge blog.

As is often the case, TV’s satirists — Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers — do a better job of getting to the truth of things that those of us actually practicing journalism. A few weeks ago, it was Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein who managed this with their satirical sketch about the Portland Tribune being sold to an internet outfit called Link PDX. Armisen and Brownstein storm the newsroom, quickly explain the art of Gawker-like breeziness and get the Tribune editor, played by George Wendt, to think more of himself as a “linkalist” than a “journalist.” In the end, the editor sheepishly accepts his new publisher’s praise for writing the most popular post in Link PDX’s history, garnering 70 million hits: “Charlize Theron NSFW” (Watch that sketch here.)

Exaggeration of the state of journalism in America today? Perhaps, but not by much. Photos of a scary-looking lamprey eel found by a fisherman on the Raritan River garnered 1.2 million views on Reddit last week, and the story got picked up by the Houston Chronicle and the Christian Science Monitor. We at the NJ News Commons weren’t immune to the story either.

Meanwhile a report issued by New Jersey Watchdog about 45 New Jersey superintendent “double dippers” who get pension pay along with their salaries got a mere handful of pickups in the press.

Stories like Jennifer Aniston’s upcoming nuptials, Justin Bieber’s disappointing 19th birthday, and Obama’s metaphor mixing Star Wars and Star Trek terminology are a main staple of the US news diet these days. And these aren’t just being served up by lowest-common-denominator news portals, but — in the case of the Star Wars/Star Trek story — esteemed news sources like NPR.

As it happens, I recently read the very good piece of journalism in The New York Times Magazine about the science of addicting people to junk food. For those of us who have berated ourselves for eating a whole bag of chips, the story offers a bit of solace. It turns out that we’re not just weak of will power, we’re addicts. And our addiction has been created by science. Selling junk food is profitable, and if the cost is a nation full of fatties, that’s not the food industry’s problem, is it?

So how about a news diet filled with lamprey eels, Justin Bieber and Jennifer Aniston? Is it simply that such morsels are irresistible, or is a junk news diet equally engineered? As it turns out, yes it is. It’s called Search Engine Optimization. AOL famously came under attack two years ago when a document, “The AOL Way,” a treatise on SEO-driven “content creation,” leaked out to Business Insider. And it’s hardly just AOL that practices SEO journalism; it’s just AOL that got busted. A few years ago I was handed a secret SEO tract that came from another big online publisher, with instructions to read it and never, ever reveal the source. I’m sure such manuals circulate constantly. And if nobody slips you one, you can just go to Amazon and buy a book on it.

To some extent, it’s smart to know what Google likes. It’s when the tail wags the dog that we’re all in trouble. And a smart sketch like the one on Portlandia is a cheeky reminder that there’s a bunch of dog wagging going on.

“So if the cost of junk food is a national obesity epidemic,” I asked my husband right before starting this essay. “What’s the cost of junk journalism?”

He didn’t hesitate.

“The Iraq war.”

It’s not like if we buy any story a Kardashian is selling, we’ll spend a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives on a search for fake weapons. It’s that our attention is precious, and when we’re this engaged in watching the sideshow, we’re not watching the store.

I like salty, fatty and sugary foods as much as the next person, and admit to looking at pictures of the lamprey eel. But junk news, like junk food, isn’t harmless. Sometimes you just have to get on the scale.

Debbie Galant is director of the NJ News Commons, a project of the School of the Communication and Media at Montclair State University. It resides within the Center for Cooperative Media and is funded, in part, by contributions of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

This past Saturday, Dodge Poetry Staff spent the day with the 11 Dodge Poets who will be leading Spring & Fountain sessions all across New Jersey starting this month. For this meeting, we all get back to the heart of the Spring & Fountain model – the pleasure of being read to.

Dodge Poets and Poetry staff approach the meeting the same way that a teacher would experience a Spring & Fountain session — we all bring 4 poems or excerpts, and choose one to share aloud. It’s a rejuvenating day for us and the poets, and we all come away with a giant packet of great poems to take home; some which are new to us, and some that are renewed by hearing them read by others. It’s a treat!

We want to share the poems that were chosen and read on Saturday. We’re always surprised by the poems that are shared. We hope they will be a nice read for you as well. Enjoy!

“Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Stephen Mitchell)

“Drinking a Sonoma Gallo Reserve Merlot, Alc. 13.9% by Vol” by Alan Britt

“For Radha, Two Days Old” by Elyse Fenton

from Henry V (Saint Crispen’s Day Speech) by William Shakespeare

“Love Poem” by Donald Hall

“Lucky House” by Cornelius Eady

“Lullaby” by Reetika Vazirani

“Song of the Barren Orange Tree” by Federico García Lorca (trans. by W.S. Merwin)

“The God Abandons Antony” by Constantine P. Cavafy (trans. by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard)

from “The Echoes Return Slow” by R.S. Thomas

“The World Inside This One” Jean Valentine

from “Two Poems About Nothing,” (first poem) by Gregory Orr.

“When They Ask Me My Name” by Aracelis Girmay

For more information on Spring & Fountain and other Dodge Poetry programs,
visit our website www.dodgepoetry.org

Have you read Martin Farewell’s recent blog Poetry Friday: “But I’m Not the Creative Type”? Martin is a creativity champion, and I am always grateful for his prolific musings on the subject of creativity! For as long as I can remember, I have held the belief that human beings are inherently creative—long before the words creativity and innovation became the “mot du jour.” Recently, our burgeoning Creative New Jersey movement is taking hold as we encourage New Jerseyans to embrace and acknowledge their creative capacity. If you are a follower of our Creative NJ blog, you know that our bloggers have shared with us how creativity is manifesting itself in their work and many of the Dodge Foundation blogs highlight examples of “creativity in action” across all sectors.

While we are making progress, I think our creativity movement can learn a thing or two from the sports industry. Millions upon millions of individuals around the globe play sports. For many, the enjoyment of sports usually begins in childhood and while most of us do not possess an ability that can place us in the major leagues, the inclusiveness of sports, on the whole, engenders a life-long admiration and appreciation for professional athletes. Have we ever heard a professional athlete or team manager advocate for the abolishment of the extensive Little League network or the discontinuation of community bowling and softball leagues? Sounds absurd doesn’t it? No one confuses the avocation of playing sports with the full-time vocation of highly-trained professional athletes. Nor does the multi-billion dollar sports industry feel threatened by the fact that millions of Americans emulate their star-players. On the contrary, they support, applaud and encourage the inclusiveness of the industry—they don’t profess to own “athleticism.”

Yet, we continue to confuse creativity with artistic talent. The Arts, like the professional sports industry, consists of trained, highly-skilled and exceptionally talented individuals; they have much to offer the national creativity movement. And while our Creative New Jersey movement recognizes that no single discipline owns creativity, the Arts help to guide us in developing our creative capacity, and offer us multiple opportunities to strengthen and sharpen our imaginative spirit. We know that creativity is present everywhere—in nature, agriculture, science, medicine, technology, education, business, community planning, philanthropy, and the arts. Let us all make a commitment to exercise our creative muscle…and share your stories with us so we can champion your imaginative ideas and share them with our creative communities around the state.

Elizabeth Murphy is the Director of Creative New Jersey. She is also currently assisting the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers with their coordination of the Post-Sandy Philanthropic Response in NJ.

Creative New Jersey is dedicated to fostering creativity, innovation, and sustainability by empowering cross-sector partnerships in commerce, education, philanthropy, government, and culture in order to ensure dynamic communities and a thriving economy.

Creative New Jersey’s leaders and partners are regular contributors to the Dodge blog.

Sometimes Sustainable Jersey’s work can seem daunting.  The challenges are immense–extreme weather, economic change, crumbling infrastructure, workforce education, climate change, energy efficiency, waste, water resources and biodiversity.  But the Sustainable Jersey Small Grants program serves as a bridge for these large problems.  The innovative programs and creative leadership we find in New Jersey towns continues to inspire me.

The Sustainable Jersey Small Grants program has empowered over 119 New Jersey communities to implement projects that are important to them and will move their sustainability goals forward.

The Small Grants program has been made possible with generous funding from Walmart and the PSEG Foundation. Walmart provided $595,000 to fund the 2009-2011 Sustainable Jersey Small Grants program.  Sustainable Jersey collaborated with the New Jersey League of Municipalities Educational Foundation to support and administer these grants.  The 2012 program, funded by the PSEG Foundation, provided $200,000 to municipalities in the form of small grants.  The funded projects serve as examples and resources for other New Jersey towns contemplating the same initiatives.

An independent, expert committee selected the grant winners.  The panel included representatives of the Association of NJ Environmental Commissions, NJ Future, the NJ Department of Environmental Protection, the New Jersey Business Action Center of the Department of State/Office of Planning Advocacy, the Citizens’ Campaign, the Center for Executive Leadership in Government at Rutgers University, PlanSmart NJ, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and the New Jersey Highlands Council.

It will take both types of problem solving, big and small, to tackle our sustainability challenges.  The ripple effect of small grants in New Jersey communities has already made a big impact.  Do you have a green project that needs funding to move it into reality?  Check for updates on the Sustainable Jersey website and Facebook.  The 2013 Sustainable Jersey Small Grants program will be announced soon.

2012 Small Grant projects (partial list) funded by the PSEG Foundation

$20,000 Grant: Organic Curbside Waste Program, Princeton, Mercer County
The grant will expand the Organic Curbside Waste program.  The curbside program provides participating households with rolling waste bins that are picked up weekly.  Residents use compostable or biodegradable trash bags and fill the bins with food and organic waste, including everything from fish bones to pizza boxes, kitchen trimmings and plate waste. The waste is trucked to a compost facility which turns it into nutrient-rich soil.  There are a number of benefits to the Curbside Food to Compost program. Not only does it save money for the town due to increased recycle rates and lower trash dumping fees, but it turns waste into a usable product.

“We are thrilled to accept this grant to assist Princeton in expanding its Curbside Food to Compost program. We believe the program is a model that can be replicated by towns across New Jersey.   Not only does curbside compost make financial sense for a community but it keeps organic waste out of New Jersey’s overburdened landfills and turns it into nutrient rich soil.” -Matthew Wasserman, Board Chair of Sustainable Princeton

$20,000 Grant: Green Infrastructure Demonstration Project, Hoboken, Hudson County
With the grant, the City of Hoboken will work in collaboration with the Rutgers Cooperative Extension’s (RCE) Water Resources Program to identify and prioritize opportune locations for stormwater curb extensions. The City of Hoboken will install two demonstration curb extensions.  Stormwater curb extensions on commercial streets are similar to those on residential streets. They are rain gardens typically located near the corners that can also provide the pedestrian with a more comfortable crossing. This demonstration project will help inform and evaluate the potential for green infrastructure solutions to urban stormwater runoff challenges and the results will be shared with other urbanized communities throughout the region.

$20,000 Grant: Innovative Bioswale, Island Heights, Ocean County
With the grant, Island Heights hopes to transform public parking lot medians adjacent to the Barnegat Bay Estuary, an estuary of national significance, into an innovative bio-swale that incorporates native plantings, public information, and local art, while helping to absorb and treat stormwater runoff and address non-point source pollution. This completed project will be a beautiful, functional, and adoptable example of a green technology for homeowners, borough officials, neighboring towns and county representatives.

$20,000 Grant: Middle Township Water Conservation Project, Middle Township, Cape May County
Middle Township will use the grant to do a water conservation educational program.  The Township is committed to preserving the highest quality water and reducing the export of freshwater out of basins in support of meeting water supply needs and natural resource protection. Reclaimed Water for Beneficial Reuse involves taking what was once considered a waste product, giving it a specialized level of treatment and using the resulting high-quality reclaimed water for beneficial uses.

$10,000 Grant: Stormwater Management Solutions, Hightstown, Mercer County
Hightstown is implementing a Stormwater Run-off Ordinance that will be one of the most progressive Stormwater Run-off Ordinances in New Jersey.  As a way to encourage support for the ordinance and to educate the public on how to minimize stormwater run-off, Hightstown will use the grant funds to construct and implement three unique solutions for stormwater management on an existing affordable housing property.  To minimize stormwater run-off, the project includes the installation of rain barrels, a rain garden and dry-wells where rain gardens are not feasible.  Each solution will be accompanied by an educational element.

$10,000 Grant: Sustainable Landscaping Certification and Mini-Grant Program, Galloway Township, Atlantic County
The Galloway Green Team wants to educate property owners in the Township who do not understand how their quest for a green lawn hurts themselves and others.  The use of chemicals and exotic plants are harmful to the homeowners and business owners.  These practices also have ramifications for the Township as a whole: polluting the ground water systems, air, and depriving native wildlife of valuable habitat. The grant will be used to take the awareness campaign to educate property owners about the value of sustainable landscaping to the next level.  The Green Team will provide incentives to those who wish to convert all or part of their yards to native species plants and reduce their lawn size. These incentives will also include building native rain gardens to remediate runoff on their properties.

$10,000 Grant: “Growing” Our Green Team Projects, Gloucester Township, Camden County
The grant funds will be used to facilitate a raingarden installation on the grounds of the municipal building. The location of the raingarden will help address an existing drainage issue and prevent major erosion problems in the future. The funds will also be used to support the Farmers’ Market, expand the Green Team, improve the Green Fair and purchase several items to enhance the Community Garden.

$10,000 Grant: Open Space and Recreation Plan, Maurice River Township, Cumberland County
The grant funds will be used to do a comprehensive Open Space and Recreation Plan. The Township has various natural resources and open spaces. To allow these natural resources to better serve the Township’s residents, the plan will assess the needs for identified and future recreation and open space.

$10,000 Grant: Community Gardens, Mt. Olive Township, Morris County
Mount Olive, working with The Land Conservancy of New Jersey, will use the grant to build an 80-plot community garden.  The goal of the garden is not only to provide a place for residents to grow vegetables, but for it to become a “community gathering point,” said Barbara Heskins-Davis of the Land Conservancy.  “We hope to offer educational programming and community events and really make it a place to meet your neighbors,” she said.  With the growing demand for food supplies from the local food bank and growing low income population, the township sees the project as an opportunity to let residents grow fresh fruit and vegetables to supplement their diet, as well as save them money.

$10,000 Grant: Wildlife Interaction Plan, Park Ridge, Bergen County
The Borough of Park Ridge is planning to create a Wildlife Interaction Plan for the Electric Lake area and Pascack Brook which extends through the center of the borough. In the past ten years, there have been numerous projects to improve the infrastructure of the Lake and Brook, including the rebuilding of the Hydro Dam, creating a Historic Museum at the Hydro Electric building, and installing a new Footbridge over the Pascack Brook. These projects have enhanced the Infrastructure of Electric Lake, the historic value of Park Ridge and have created improved accessibility in the area for the community; however they have not focused on integrating a Wildlife Interaction Plan to sustain the environment for wildlife.  The grant will now provide the plan.

$10,000 Grant: Conservation Easement Program, West Amwell, Hunterdon County
West Amwell Township has prepared an initial inventory of the existing conservation easements.  The town will use the grant to establish a stewardship program to protect the valuable resources and educate landowners as to their care and importance to the Township and region.

Images provided by Sustainable Jersey

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Such defensiveness is not entirely unwarranted.  Some creative people can be condescending to those they consider trapped in unimaginative work.  Perhaps because they are more verbal and even dramatic, they are better at expressing their judgments.  But to be fair, they too are likely to feel defensive after a lifetime of being called flaky or impractical.

All of this really comes down to a too narrowly defined notion of what it means to be creative.  Just because I can’t appreciate the elegance and beauty of an equation (This is how mathematicians talk about their subject!) doesn’t mean someone who can is less creative than I am because I can do that with a line of verse.  If you listen to a CPA or an IT person talk about that moment when all the parts of a challenging problem suddenly come together, the excitement in their voice and their obvious delight in their work is very much like that of an artist describing an inspiration coming to fruition.

What do we usually mean when we say people are or aren’t creative types?  To put this politely, we would say those people we usually call creative are probably guided more by intuition than logic.  There is probably a certain amount of truth in this on the surface.  But this relatively minor surface distinction leads us to compartmentalize people, and often ourselves, into opposing personality types:  Practical vs. Impractical, Realistic vs. Unrealistic, Responsible vs. Irresponsible, Rational vs. Irrational.  The insulting nicknames we’ve come up with for folks we condemn to either of these extremes illustrates what a disservice we do to ourselves and to others with this kind of thinking.

And what do we mean when we say someone is practical, responsible, realistic?  We probably think of someone like the local business owner who runs the corner deli, has a repair shop, auto parts store or local restaurant.  These strike us as very down-to-earth people, and certainly hard-working.  If you know anyone in the food service industry, particularly restaurant owners, you know how hard they work.  But are they practical?  Realistic?

According to Businessweek, twenty-five percent of new restaurants go out of business in their first year; 60% close within three years.  With these odds, it makes no sense to start a restaurant.  Now, you might reply that restaurants are a particularly risky proposition.  But these figures hold true for all small, independently owned businesses, not just restaurants.  In the face of these cold facts, anyone who starts their own business of any kind is motivated by something other than practical considerations, and making decisions using some faculty other than reason.

Dare we say instinct?  Intuition?  Creativity?  When a business owner or investor says “I went with my gut,” or “I just had a feeling about this guy…” what are they operating on?  Think of all the self-made businessmen from hardscrabble backgrounds who built a business from nothing only to have their MBA-bearing son drive it into the ground.  We say the son had book-learning but no common sense.  What do we mean by common sense?  Isn’t it imagination, adaptability, creativity?

Let’s take a cold, logical look at logic.  If it ruled our lives, no one would start a restaurant or any other small business.  Who would marry?  At most, we’ve got a fifty percent chance of success.  Fifty percent of teachers will have left teaching within five years. This doesn’t suggest an education degree is a smart investment.  In a recent theater season, 44% of Actors Equity members were employed, with a median income of $7,200: thousands below the federal government’s designated poverty level for a single-person household.  If we were to figure in the income for all the actors who are not members of the union, these statistics would be far more dismal.

And what about athletes?  Think of all the hundreds of thousands of kids in the little league, on local high school football or hockey teams.  Compare that to the tiny number of adults who make their livings as professional athletes.

How impoverished our lives would be if everyone used only logic and reason to make their life choices.  Try to imagine a world with no musicians, actors, painters, singers, poets, dancers; no Olympics, no U.S. Open, no baseball, basketball, football or hockey season; no restaurants, coffee shops, candy stores, or small businesses of any kind in any local downtown.

Can you imagine such a world?  No one would want to live in it.  Fortunately, we don’t have to.  If you can imagine such a dismal world, you already know the reason why:  Because we have imaginations.  Even you do, however much you may claim to not be a creative type.

Some people might say the real explanation is emotion: some of us are ruled by our hearts, others by our heads.  In that case, where does the owner of the local dry cleaners or butcher shop fall?  See the statistics above.  Starting either business is not a logical choice.  But we live our lives somewhere between these two extremes.  Our hopes and fears are informed by our reason and experience.  The choices we make that shape our lives almost always require what we sometimes call a leap of faith or a creative leap.  To live in the world as a human being is to be a creative type.

Let’s take another look at athletes.  They are famous for their discipline.  They have to manage every aspect of their lives through rigorous training and nutrition regimens.  The relentlessly focused and driven preparation that distinguishes the great athlete from the mediocre seems anything but creative.  And yet almost every world-class athlete practices visualization: they visualize, that is, imagine themselves succeeding.  For decades now, motivational speakers have been instructing business leaders to use this same technique.

Athletes and salespeople, like artists, know all the study, discipline and preparation in the world isn’t enough.  Dancers go through training as rigorous as any athlete’s, and composers, playwrights, sculptors and painters spend decades working with an intensity that seems almost obsessive-compulsive.  But to truly succeed, something else has to happen.   Athletes and salespeople know something rare is happening when they are “in the zone.” A poet might call it inspiration.  It’s no coincidence that when Michael Jordan was in those moments he was described as poetry in motion.  Even the most unpoetic of us knows what that phrase means.  Likewise, whatever we call it, we also know what it means to be inspired, and to encounter someone or something that is inspiring to witness.

The above may seem like a pretty silly question,  but the process of courting potential donors, Board members and other supporters too often neglects the very real moment when the organization’s financial reality intrudes upon the glowing and attractive mission work we bragged about when we first invited them over.

The New York Times recently reported on a trend in dating where the topic of debt and credit scores is a red flag that can kill romance before it even begins.  You can read this cheery story here. Basically, single people are including the issues of debt and credit ratings in their assessment of potential partners. Yeah, you might be tall, dark and handsome, but can you qualify for a mortgage?

In my recent presentations for the Board Leadership series, Financial Management: Telling Your Story Through Numbers, we talked about how the financial statements we create are an integral part of the story we tell about our organizations.  Yet for many of us, preparing financial documents to send with a grant proposal or that we bring to Board meetings are at best, a rushed affair. We seldom ask ourselves “what story do these numbers tell about us?”

To be clear, I do not recommend that anyone obfuscate their financials. I suggest that you make every effort to make those financial statements provide clarity and demonstrate professionalism.  If your numbers are sloppy, both in the numbers themselves and in their presentation, I am left to wonder if you understand their importance. Do your financials leave me asking more questions or do they provide greater certainty?

Do you provide comparative data such as actual results from previous periods so folks can assess how your organization is changing financially, and if your projections are in line with, or are a significant departure from your previous financial realities? Do you include footnotes to clarify items that are new or significantly different?

The IRS Form 990 is easily accessible on Guidestar. Do you know what your 990 says about your organization?  Did you take the time to write a detailed (and flattering) description of your program service accomplishments or did you let your accountant type in the mission statement?

What do the notes in your audit say about you?  When someone sees the details of your loans, your leases, your investments and your conflicts of interest do you wish you could provide a clarifying statement?  Then why don’t you?

I often feel when I serve on grant panels or when I consult on nonprofit financial issues, that folks don’t take the time to consider how their financial information is read by others.  The New York Times article quotes people expressing surprise and shock on this emphasis on their financial histories.  We in the nonprofit world should not be shocked by this at all.  We’ve been sending financial information to our Boards and funders forever.

Having a weak financial condition is not the end of the world. If your financial story looks bleak then it is up to your leadership to develop and articulate a plan for improving that situation. It is amazing how often honest and forthright leadership will prove more important than a weak financial report.

Twenty three years ago I was a junior member of a nonprofit organization making hardly any money, with something like $10,000 of student loan debt looming over my head, which I was unable to pay without help. Yet 23 years ago today (as I write this), I managed to ask one of the world’s greatest Ballerinas out on a date. Despite learning about my financial condition (not on the first date I assure you) we were married five months later and are together still.

So having weak financials doesn’t mean you can’t attract a mate or significant support.  You just have to have lots of nerve and a plan.

Image credit: morguefile

David Gray is President of the consulting firm Finance Arts, LLC, and author of the Finance Arts Guide to Nonprofit Cash Flow, published in 2010. He teaches nonprofit Finance at Brookdale Community College and is a frequent speaker on nonprofit finance and management. In addition to being a Certified Financial Planner, he has twice served as Executive Director of nonprofit organizations. David is host of NonprofitNJ, a television program that explores issues that impact nonprofit organizations. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, David and his family live in Princeton.

Last month, I experienced a “rite of passage” for nonprofit executives in New Jersey.  I attended the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce “Walk to Washington”.  For those of you who don’t know, this is 50+ year tradition where the Chamber charters a train for elected officials, policymakers, lobbyists, business leaders, advocates and others for a ride to DC together.  The “walk” is, in fact, everyone walking through the train, car by car, meeting as many folks and making as many connections as one can.  We all arrive in the Capitol for a dinner and speeches – this year from Governor Christie.

New Jersey Chamber of Commerce “Walk to Washington”

You can’t work in Trenton or on anything that impacts the State and not know about the Chamber Train.  I’ve been well aware of it since about 1988.  When I first became President of the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers in 2005 I wasn’t sure if it made sense for me to attend.  The cost is a bit high and given the focus of our work at the time, I could make the case to avoid it.  Every year since though I’ve gone back and forth about whether I should take the leap, or in this case…the ride.  Well I did this year in large part because the focus was on recovery and rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. I wanted to be sure to hear what was being discussed, especially since our philanthropic community has been and will continue to be deeply involved.

Governor Christie was masterful at providing the audience with a heart-wrenching, sobering picture of what our friends and neighbors have and will continue to face.  At the same time, he left everyone in the room feeling inspired and hopeful for what we will do, must do together. There was lots of talk about the contributions that people and businesses have been making. There was recognition of several true heroes who had personally done so much to provide relief.

L-R: Etta Denk of Bank of America, Phil Salerno of Children’s Specialized Hospital
and Nina Stack, during “Walk to Washington”

However, what we didn’t hear was anything about the social sector’s response. In fact, as the speakers would count off all those different industries and groups that have been providing assistance, there was not one mention of philanthropy or nonprofits, the foundation community or the charitable sector. It was disappointing.  But it wasn’t surprising.  Why? Because we, as a sector, are terrible at communicating what it is we do. It is hard to boil down into a compelling sound bite the impact of philanthropy and why it matters.  But if there were ever a time to rise to the challenge it is now.

At the same time policymakers in Washington are arguing about the impact of charitable giving, we know that the charitable community is and will be central to the rebuilding of our state. Part of the problem is cultural…few foundations are comfortable talking about what they are doing. Part of the problem is capacity…nonprofits rarely have the appropriate level of staff capacity to be effective in communications.  What is at stake if we don’t start getting this right?  The continued curse of government leaders believing philanthropy should be able to provide more money as government funding is being pulled away; at the same time they debate creating a new tax structure that does nothing to promote charitable giving because government leaders don’t truly understand its impact.

Next month, CNJG will once again join our colleagues in Washington for Foundations on the Hill. This is our opportunity to tell our government leaders in DC at least the story of what philanthropy is doing to provide relief and hope to the thousands of people and hundreds of communities in our state reeling from the storm – and at most – help them to have that “aha!” moment about how strongly philanthropy supports our communities.  Many groups within the nonprofit sector have these types of “fly-ins” and I encourage folks to participate.  They do make a difference…I’ve seen that first hand in the 8 years that I’ve been attending Foundations on the Hill.

As for the Chamber trip, I’m very glad I jumped on board this year.  There were two strategies that I set up before committing though. First, I made sure I had one of my board members, a corporate executive who runs community relations for his company, lined up to be my escort. He then could introduce me to the many riders he knew from business and years on the train. Not only did I greatly appreciate the introductions but it also help avoid those awkward moments of “what do I do next”.  Second, I knew very clearly what my objectives were – who did I want/need to meet and what did I need to communicate. Both strategies were key to the success of my experience.  I don’t see myself making the trip every year but certainly every few years. At a minimum, it is a classic Jersey experience that every nonprofit leader who interacts in any way with the federal, state or local government should experience at least once.  All aboard!

Nina Stack is President of the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers, the statewide association of more than 120 funding organizations working in New Jersey. She also serves as Chair of the Forum of Regional Association of Grantmakers, a 33-member network serving more than 4,000 foundations, corporations and other donors across the country.

Inspiring Women: Celebrating Visual and Culinary Arts is collaboration between the ArtPride NJ Foundation and the NJ Restaurant Association.  Fine visual art by New Jersey women artists from the collection of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions will grace the walls of Hospitality House, a magnificent period townhouse located directly across from the New Jersey Statehouse in Trenton.  On March 4, women chefs and restaurant owners will offer culinary delights to attendees in a festive and art filled celebration.  Participating restaurants include Salt Gastropub in Andover, Restaurant Serenade in Chatham, Langosta Lounge in Asbury Park, as well as culinary students from Hudson County Community College who will demonstrate their skills. The artwork, which is for sale, will be on display for the month of March.  A silent and online auction (beginning today) will feature a variety of art and food in creative combinations.  Proceeds from the event will benefit ArtPride, the NJ Restaurant Association and the Hurricane Sandy NJ Relief Fund.

Creative cross-industry collaborations like this one continue to be critical as non-profit organizations face dwindling resources everywhere. They are also seen as pathways to innovation and sustainability by for-profit industries including pharma, transportation, technology, and media.  The subject was the topic of a discussion that included panelists from business, healthcare, and land preservation at October’s Creative Conversation hosted by the NJ Emerging Arts Leaders. It will continue to be a shared interest among diverse disciplines as we increasingly understand how inherently arts and culture are connected to all aspects of everyday life and must be valued for their transcendent ability to bridge diverse sectors.

Last year’s inaugural Inspiring Women event was as important for friendraising as it was for fundraising, bringing the missions of both organizations to the attention of different constituencies, and gaining new supporters for both.  The history of art and food goes back centuries and crosses cultures, genders, political persuasions and geographic boundaries, making the pairing not only complementary, but delightful to the senses.  We hope you will join us in Trenton on March 4 for Inspiring Women 2, and here are some photos from last year’s celebration to tempt your eye and your palate!

Images courtesy of ArtPride

Ann Marie Miller is the Executive Director of ArtPride, the premier arts advocacy organization in New Jersey, and a regular contributor to the Dodge blog.

Starting this month, we are working with Southern Regional High School in Manahawkin, Central Regional High School in Bayville, and Communications High School in Wall Township.  Dodge Poets Crystal Bacon, Robert Carnevale and BJ Ward have been selected to work with these students and teachers, respectively.  In an effort to create a bond between the visiting poet  and the students and staff, the same poet will visit each school several times.  The three schools have been offered a 5-day program, and will be implementing the program in slightly different ways.  Below is a brief description of the elements of the program.

STUDENT SESSION 1:  DODGE POET VISIT

The Dodge Poet provides an informal introduction to contemporary poetry by sharing some of their work, some poems of other writers who matter to them and talking with students about their responses to the poems.  The students will hear about what drives their writing, how the poets write, who they read, what they do when they get stuck, etc.  There is no pressure for the students to learn anything specific about poetry or to write in response in these informal, collegial conversations.

STUDENT SESSION 2: GIVING VOICE

The Dodge Poet will facilitate a Giving Voice session with students, modeled after the work we do in our teacher program, Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain. In this session, students choose poems they are drawn to from a prepared packet and read them out loud to each other, and listen to each other read. The focus of the session is on sharing honest responses to the poetry.   There is no right or wrong response, no analysis, no need to understand every word or judge the poems.

STUDENT SESSION 3: WRITING AND SHARING ACTIVITIES

The last session is focused on students having an opportunity to write.  However, this is not a writing workshop.  The focus is on students’ self-expression rather than on critique or feedback of the writing. It is entirely possible that some students will write and not want to share their work at all. It is also likely that some students will write and have the impulse to read their writing aloud to the class. Both of these impulses will be honored and accepted.

TEACHER SESSION: GIVING VOICE

As with the Giving Voice session for students, teachers will have the experience of reading poemsaloud and listening to poetry being read.   Because there is no pressure to “teach” the poems or to “learn” the poems, we hope that this session will offer teachers a way to reconnect with their imagination and to reconnect with their colleagues through the simple enjoyment of poetry.

CULMINATING EVENT for STUDENTS AND FAMILIES

Our schools are arranging events during the school day or afterschool, where students can share their writing with a larger audience, including other students and their families.    Our hope is that these events will encourage a sense of community, and support students as they continue to grapple with their experiences and express themselves.

DODGE POETS

Crystal Bacon’s first book of poems, Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, won the 2003 A. Poulin New Poetry America prize from BOA Editions and was published in 2004.  She is a 1995 graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications in the US and Canada and Taiwan.  Her poems explore the nature of being, living on the edge between spirit and matter, the finite and the infinite. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia.
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Robert Carnevale’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Alaska Quarterly and other magazines and anthologies. He teaches writing and literature at Drew University and Kean University.

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BJ Ward’s most recent book is Gravedigger’s Birthday. His earlier books are Landing in New Jersey with Soft Hands and 17 Love Poems with No Despair. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and two Distinguished Artist Fellowships from the NJ State Council on the Arts. For his teaching, he has received the Governor’s Award in Arts Education from the State of New Jersey and was named Teaching Artist of the Year by the New Jersey Writers Project. He has been on the faculty of The Frost Place Festival, the NJ Governor’s School for the Arts, and the Controlled Burn Seminar for Young Writers. He teaches year-round in the Creative Writing Program at Warren County ……………………………………………………Community College. He grew up on the ……………………………………………………Musconetcong River.

1. A Frequently Asked Questions section, which we will continue to update as questions arise.
2. A discussion forum (“Let’s Talk”) to facilitate conversation about Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts.

We have created the discussion forum primarily as a place for nonprofits and communities to reach out to one another, ask questions, share information, and  generally to gain a better understanding of the Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts already underway as well as the ideas and projects that are emerging. Keeping the lines of communication open is essential to collaborating and coordinating our work more effectively, and to avoid duplicating efforts, so we encourage you to make good use of the discussion forum.

We are also communicating information regularly on Facebook and Twitter, so if you haven’t connected with us there, please do.  You should also connect with the Community Foundation of New Jersey on Facebook and Twitter.

One final note: as a reminder, the New Jersey Recovery Fund will support transformational ideas with long-term impact. It is not designed to support small, short-term projects with limited impact. Also, the Fund is not intended to provide disaster relief to individuals, businesses or nonprofits for damages sustained during the Hurricane.

Please visit the New Jersey Recovery Fund section on the Dodge website for full application information, including guidelines, deadlines, and a listing of the Fund’s major partners.

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the Community Foundation of New Jersey established the New Jersey Recovery Fund to support the immediate and long term needs of New Jersey’s communities and its nonprofit sector in response to the Hurricane. To date, national and regional foundations as well as individual donors have pledged nearly $5 million in support of this effort.

Today, the Community Foundation announced the guidelines for the New Jersey Recovery Fund, which focuses on five overarching areas:

1. Public information and community engagement
2. Reframing the conversation: policy reform to support resiliency and sustainability
3. Innovative community/regional planning demonstration projects
4. Environmental protection and restoration
5. Community-driven/participatory arts projects

In addition to inviting targeted proposals from specific organizations, the Community Foundation has designed a process that is open to a broad array of possibilities and partnerships. Communities and nonprofit organizations, as well as partnerships which may include individuals, nonprofits, businesses and municipalities are invited to submit their best ideas for consideration.

In order to be eligible for a grant, applicants should be based in New Jersey or partner with a New Jersey nonprofit organization or municipality, though exceptions may be made (see the guidelines for further details).

The Fund will support catalytic ideas and projects with an emphasis on innovation, collaboration, resiliency and sustainability as New Jersey recovers from Hurricane Sandy. It is not designed to provide disaster relief funding for businesses, individuals or nonprofits.

APPLICATION PROCESS:

In coordination with the Community Foundation, the Dodge Foundation will be managing the online application process. All applicants must first submit an online letter of inquiry.  After a thorough review of the letters of inquiry, applicants that are invited to apply will be asked to submit a full proposal.

DEADLINES:

• Online Letters of Inquiry may be submitted any time between February 4 and February 25^th, 2013.
• Applicants that are invited to submit a full proposal will be notified no later than March 6, 2013.
• Proposals from applicants invited to apply will be due no later than March 22, 2013.

All inquiries and proposals will be reviewed and grant recommendations will be made by participating contributors to the Fund. Grant awards will be disbursed by the Community Foundation of New Jersey.

For full application details, guidelines, and a link to Dodge’s online application system, please visit the New Jersey Recovery Fund pages on the Dodge website.

Image of Sea Bright, NJ after Hurricane Sandy is courtesy of Community Foundation of New Jersey

–Teresa Dwyer, West Milford High School, West Milford

Trepidation, anxiety, a tight feeling in your chest…
Cold sweats, nail biting, excessive “ummm”ing…
Pacing, bellyaches…

It’s either a blind date, or it’s poetry. Think of it.  They both have the tendency to send us into the crazy zone.  You want to enjoy yourself but you’re afraid you won’t. You want to look good but you also want to be true to yourself. You’re wondering if you’ll make a connection, knowing that other times you felt completely confused or disengaged.   You doubt yourself like a lunatic. What should I wear? What should I say?  Will I sound stupid? And most of all you wonder, can this thing last?  Could I possibly fall in love?

If you’re really lucky, your blind dating days are behind you and you’re with someone who you love more deeply the more time you share. And if you’re even luckier, your love of poetry grows more and more through the years.

The Dodge Poetry Program has been curing teachers’ poetry-induced fears since 1992 when the Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain Program began.  At Dodge Poetry, we think poetry is first and foremost, meant to be enjoyed, just like any other art form.  And we think teachers deserve great experiences with poetry—both to support their teaching and as a respite from the pressure of teaching.

In our Spring & Fountain sessions for teachers, enjoyment and pleasure come first.   With the guidance of a Dodge Poet, teachers read poems aloud and share their responses.  Imagine the simple beauty of being read to, and of reading to others.  Nothing quite compares.  Knowing that everyone’s taste and experience with poetry is different, teachers contribute poems for the sessions so that the discussion is essentially driven by the group. Some bring poems they memorized in 2^nd grade.  Some bring poems they teach and grapple with.  Some bring poems they’ve recently discovered.  There is no right or wrong poem to bring to the session and no right or wrong response.

What happens is pretty wonderful.  By discovering new poems, and rediscovering old favorites teachers reconnect with their own imagination.  While we can’t promise that your blind dates will be this good, we can promise that Spring & Fountain is like a combination of a book club, an improv show and a trip to the spa.  Lots of surprises, lots to think about and a great sense of having gotten away from the daily grind.

Spring & Fountain is available for any teacher who lives or works in New Jersey, and NJ Professional Development hours are awarded for participation.   All the information you need about registration is here.

Here we are….on the last day of the first month of the New Year.  The month of January connotes new beginnings and a fresh start.  It is also designated as International Creativity Month—a time to remind individuals and organizations around the globe to capitalize on the power of creativity, which many of us believe to be vital for our personal and professional success in this age of accelerating change.  January is a time in our collective psyche when we universally resolve to make positive changes in our lives, in our workplaces, and in our communities.  It is the great “do-over month” when we draw a new self-portrait and give ourselves permission to create healthier, more sustainable habits.  Our imaginations are chock-full of infinite possibilities, and these ideas activate our creative capacities, which in turn, puts into motion actions that manifest the new portrait.  It is a powerful, transcendent truth and every human being has the capacity to excel in this arena.

In recognition of International Creativity Month and in celebration of our imaginations and inherent capacity for creativity, the Dodge Foundation asked its monthly bloggers to share our insights into how creativity intersects with our professions.  Our readers know that our regular bloggers represent diverse fields including sustainability, the arts, education, media and journalism, the environment, poetry, philanthropy, nonprofit best practices, cross-sector collaborations and creativity.  Each month, my fellow bloggers share their insights and opinions on a host of issues, and I am consistently grateful to them for enlightening my world view.

This month, I’m especially excited to read their essays detailing how creativity intersects with their work.  For those of us at Creative New Jersey, we are keenly interested in learning how organizations, schools and communities can become stronger, resilient, and more sustainable by embracing creativity.  And while creativity might mean something different to each one of us, I do see some common themes emerging from this month’s posts.  Generally speaking, I think we all agree with the definition put forth by Dodge Program Officer Wendy Liscow in her Celebrate the New Year with Creativity post:

Personally, I believe that thinking and working creatively changes the conversation, and I am hopeful that collectively we can begin to define what a Culture of Creativity looks like for New Jersey.

As I reflect upon this month’s essays, the idea of embracing the unknown emerges as an essential component of creativity.  Debbie Galant writes about “jumping into the unknown” in her post, It’s Time for Journalists To Learn Math which defines the burgeoning concept of data journalism and the recent conference HackJersey.  Rachael Faillace spoke of the “blank agenda” in her post about the recent Creative Rahway: Call to Collaboration.  And Allison Trimarco tells us that “familiarity with the status-quo can be a creativity killer” in her post, Does Structure Inspire Creativity?

In Wendy Liscow’s second January post Philanthropy and Prometheus, she reminds us of the two life enhancing gifts from Prometheus:  fire and blind hope, the second of which describes optimism in the face of the unknown.   And she elaborates on the Creative Leadership Teams being established in some of New Jersey’s schools.  “These teams are working to establish cross-discipline teacher collaborations and generate student learning opportunities that require critical thinking, creativity, and analytical skills.  The schools have some terrific “What ifs…” including:  What if teachers and children felt empowered to make mistakes, make adjustments and try again?  What if teachers and students didn’t search for single answers but instead explored complex problems that didn’t have predictable outcomes and required innovative solutions?”

Dodge Program Director Martin Farawell also shared his thoughts on the relationship between education and creativity.  He artfully unpacks for us the limitations of “teaching to the test” and describes how this is “narrowing the focus of education to questions with predictable answers”. He further states, “This ignores the most important questions we will have to answer: the ones that will determine the quality of our lives and our character.  These questions have no predetermined answers.  They are part of the unknown.  For these, we need creativity and imagination.”

A structured, decisive approach to creativity is also explored in several blogs, such as in Laura Otten’s Board Recruitment: It’s Not Just Paint By The Numbers, and Donna Drewes’ Linking the Arts and Sustainability: Creative Communities.    We learn that creativity is often intentional and that for some, it takes the form of a cross-sector approach – one that integrates diversity in order to achieve sustainable results – such as Creative Morristown and Greenable Woodbridge.

We also celebrate and explore creativity as it relates to the arts, and Ann Marie Miller’s post The Creative Edge That is NJ Arts and Lawrence McCullough’s post Sustainability and Creativity Perfect Together:  Creating AWE (an Arts from Waste Experience) reminds us that our Garden State is ripe with countless numbers of exceptional artists and arts organizations.  New Jersey’s artists and arts administrators are highly-skilled and have trained extensively throughout their careers, and the quality of life in communities throughout our state is enhanced because of their work.  By nature, artists are drawn to the exploration of the unknown, and generally speaking, they refuse to allow a fear of failure to prevent them from engaging in the act of creation.

So what have I learned from my colleagues’ blog posts this month?  Well, it’s clear that our leaders in the arts, education, sustainability, the environment, nonprofit management, and philanthropy are all embracing creativity as an essential component for achieving success; in fact, they are down-right Promethean!  They are boldly creative and imaginatively original and are using creativity to their advantage.

Creativity takes courage.  Creativity takes intention.  Creativity takes commitment.  Creativity comes naturally if we surrender to its transcendent properties.  And creativity can be a guiding force as we begin to think about rebuilding and re-imaging a better New Jersey.

Elizabeth Murphy is the Director of Creative New Jersey.  She is also currently assisting the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers with their coordination of the Post-Sandy Philanthropic Response in NJ.

Creative New Jersey is dedicated to fostering creativity, innovation, and sustainability by empowering cross-sector partnerships in commerce, education, philanthropy, government, and culture in order to ensure dynamic communities and a thriving economy.

Creative New Jersey’s leaders and partners are regular contributors to the Dodge blog.

Watching someone like Matt Ericson of the New York Times show off the fabulous data visualizations that his department makes is a little like watching a master magician. What is there, after all, to pulling a rabbit out of a hat? Bubble maps of the words most used at the Democratic and GOP national conventions? What’s the big deal about that? A graphic of every male 100-meter sprint Olympic medalist ever, showing how much faster athletes have gotten over time? Ok, that’s pretty impressive. And the two-and-a-half minute video with pitch-by-pitch visualizations of Yankees closer Mariano Rivera? Well, that’s kind of like sawing a lady in half.

Still, even when lifting the curtain and showing what went into these pieces of data visualization, it still looks easy.

It’s not.

I didn’t actually see anyone crying during a 24-hour Hack Jersey hackathon at Montclair State University last weekend, but it came pretty close. In a fit of pique Sunday afternoon, participant Elaine Clisham tweeted: “Biggest takeaway for me from #HackJersey? I am an ignorant, useless idiot. Aiming to change that.”

Linda Moss, who covered the event for The Record, tweeted: “Boy, do I have a lot to learn about data journalism.”

Almost all of us do.

The fact that American students lag their peers in other countries in math skills is well known. And data journalism — surprise, surprise — is math. It’s not a skill that most of us who chose journalism as a profession have given much thought to either. Until now. Now we see that if we want to do more than chase fires, if we want to actually compare fires and see trends, we have to learn the tools of data journalism. We need to learn spreadsheets, fusion tables, API keys, Javascript and more.

Hackathons aren’t uncommon, but hackathons that combine the skills of journalists and coders are still rare. One thing we learned this weekend is that combining those skills effectively during a 24-hour contest isn’t easy. There were times when the journalists were just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, watching the coders on their teams fire away at code. And there were teams that didn’t finish because the single coder they relied upon conked out and didn’t make it in the next morning.

I got my little lesson in how I lacked this proficiency Monday afternoon, the day after Hack Jersey ended. I am taking a data visualization class being offered online by the Knight Foundation, and I’d been so busy organizing parking and food and 80 million other Hack Jersey logistics that I’d never had time to do my homework from the previous week. I looked at the homework, started it, and soon found myself close to tears — just as I had in fifth grade when I was having trouble with Roman numerals. The problem was that, aside for totting up a column of numbers, I had never learned how to use functions to manipulate data in spreadsheets. Google Forms kept returning the message “The required data format for the Column chart doesn’t match the current data.” Same for the Pie chart, the Line chart and every other chart I had at my disposal.

I reached out to my professor, who asked for a screenshot of what I was doing, and she sent a screenshot back that suddenly made it all clear. Within minutes I had created a pie chart of my Facebook friends’ favorite characters on Downton Abbey. (No surprise, it’s the Dowager Countess.) I was positively giddy as more and more data started showing up in my spreadsheet, and consequently in my chart. Hey, here’s a vote for Lady Mary!

To be sure, the programmers last weekend had more important things to count than the relative popularity of Lord Grantham and Matthew Crawley. The winning project, CrashDataNJ, managed to identify the most dangerous stretch of the Garden State Parkway: the 10-mile segment between mile marker 130 and mile marker 140. The Cost of Radiology in NJ was able to show how widely the cost of a mammogram varies in a single county.

Click graph to enlarge in a new window

But I’m still extraordinarily proud of my Downton Abbey visualization. I posted it on Facebook, tweeted it, and — at the encouragement of my own web developer — printed it out and tacked it on my bulletin board.

It’s fun to gain a competency, and it’s especially gratifying when that competency is hard won. I hope that Hack Jersey is the first step for me, for the journalists who attended and for the field of journalism as a whole. That way we can do more than tell breaking stories. We can measure what we cover, compare, add context, see how stories develop over time.

Image: Ryan Miller.

Debbie Galant is director of the NJ News Commons, a project of the School of Communication in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. The NJ News Commons is also part of Montclair State’s Center for Cooperative Media, which is funded by the Dodge Foundation as well as the John L. and James S. Knight Foundation. It co-sponsored last weekend’s hackathon, along with Knight-Mozilla Open News, and was one of two prime organizers of the event, the other being Tom Meagher of Data First Media.

Finding the right board members is part science and part art.  The science is easy; the art, as with anything creative, is the harder part.

In a nutshell, the science part of finding good board members who bring to the table the skills, energy, evangelism, and overall non-fiscal assets (though fiscal assets are always welcomed)—that your strategic plan suggests are needed to accomplish all that is laid out therein is this:  the more you treat your recruitment and on-boarding process as you would a hire, the more successful you will be in finding board members who meet your needs and who will do the work.  Essentially, that means the following:

• Determine what the position of board member will require;
• Write the job description;
• Determine the interview process—from phone screen to first interview to second, etc.;
• Identify what knowledge you want and need the candidates to have during the recruitment process, remembering that the more a candidate knows about the organization and the job of being a board member for your organization before saying yes, the more likely it is that s/he will do the work once s/he comes onto the board.  Provide an accurate and full picture of the organization and the board;
• Identify what experiences candidates should have during the recruitment process, from attending a board meeting to watching the mission in action to serving on a committee for some period of time;
• Decide what you will offer those candidates who don’t make it onto the board but who you want to keep close to the organization.  Service on a standing committee or an ad hoc committee? (Yes, this is divergent from a true hiring process, as we don’t normally get the “runners up” to stay involved in the organization.);
• Design a good orientation process, realizing that much of the content of this process should be reinforcing what the current board members learned during recruitment and remembering that you must orient new board members to both the organization and the role of a board member and board;
• Assign a mentor to each new board member.

This is, to a great extent, an almost paint by numbers process:  a challenge to the creators of the product but a piece of cake to those who must simply follow the design.

The creativity lies in the execution.  Just what skills and qualities are  needed on the board at this point in time in the organization’s life cycle?  Remember that what is needed on a board changes as an organization evolves through its life cycles and as its strategic priorities change.  And while it is relatively easy to identify those hard skills and areas of expertise that would be beneficial to a board and an organization, it is the soft skills and personality traits that are so essential to forming a good strong “community” of board members.  These aspects are harder to identify and even harder to discern in others until they are seen in action.  And yet, it is more often than not a board member’s personality that causes a board to move from function to dysfunction and not his/her expertise that compromises the dynamics.

Assessing those more intangible qualities that make for a great board member requires the creativity.  It could be as simple as requiring service on a standing committee prior to being nominated for a board seat or having the on-boarding process involve multiple kinds of situations, from formal interviews to social situations to small group work or any of a multitude of imaginative options.

Anyone who has ever done any hiring knows the challenges of constructing questions to get at the information you really want to know.  For example, there is logic (and anecdotal evidence) in the thinking that a person who understands and embraces the importance of philanthropy is more likely to accept as part of a board member’s job the responsibility to be an active participant in fundraising.  It would, however, not be a fruitful idea to try to determine a candidate’s commitment to active philanthropy by asking the straightforward question, “Do you embrace the importance of philanthropy?”  Nor would you get where you need to go by asking, “Do you like to fundraise?”  Rather, finesse is required here—and creativity.  Perhaps a request to hear about the candidate’s earliest recollection of working on behalf of a nonprofit (such as collecting money for UNICEF when trick or treating or joining a parent for a charity walk/run/ride) and why they did it and what they learned; or perhaps you ask a candidate to talk about the role charity/philanthropy played/plays in her/his family.  Or perhaps you ask about his/her most recent philanthropic activity to discern the candidate’s understanding of philanthropy.

In a different vein, we want every board member to be passionate about our organization’s mission; simply liking it isn’t good enough!  How will you tease out the existence of that passion?  What questions or scenarios can you develop to achieve that goal? How will you make sure that all candidates who go beyond the first round embrace the organization’s core values?  For example, if a core value is integrity, it is hard to imagine someone saying, in response to the direct question, “No, I don’t believe in the need to always act with integrity.”  So, once again, how will you get the real answer to that all-important question?

Inventiveness is required from the start of the on-boarding process—identifying what you need–to its end—orientation.  The orientation process should involve more than reading a manual.  It is an opportunity to shine the spotlight on the organization’s work and its staff, clients and accomplishments; it must emphasize the work of the board and its responsibilities and consequences for failing to fulfill them.  And here, inventiveness can take flight—from tours of competitors’ organizations to shadowing a staff member for a day,   to having mentors for each new board member.

If you want good board members, the science is essential; but the sugar, spice and ingenuity also play are role.  With over 40,000 nonprofits in the state of New Jersey, your organization probably isn’t the only one pursuing the same potential board candidate.  Make your on-boarding process standout from start to finish and show candidates the true caliber of your board.

Image: Found on xexchicago, color-in dress by fashion designer Berber Soepboer and graphic designer Michiel Schuurman.

Laura Otten is the Executive Director at The Nonprofit Center at LaSalle University. She is also a faculty member of the Dodge Technical Assistance Initiative. Find out more about our nonprofit capacity building workshops here.

The result is a narrowing of the focus of education to questions with predictable answers.  This ignores the most important questions we will have to answer: the ones that will determine the quality of our lives and our character.  These questions have no predetermined answers.  They are part of the unknown.  For these, we need creativity and imagination.

Without imagination and creativity, we cannot navigate what is often called “the real world,” that is, the world that exists beyond mere abstract reason, the world where our image of ourselves is challenged by how we respond to actual people and dilemmas, where our ideals are tested by difficult choices, and where how we think things should be confronts how they are.

Some people may respond that they are not “creative types,” and that, regardless of how much we do or don’t rely on standardized tests, there are just some things that can’t be taught in school, that can only be learned by experience.

It’s true that as children, adolescents and young adults, there are things and people we believe we could not live without.  Later in life, we know a lot more about our capacity to endure loss, move beyond failure and disappointment, and adapt to unexpected news (good and bad) about our world, our circumstances and ourselves.  Our flexibility and creativity, regardless of whether or not we are creative types, have likely been challenged and expanded in ways we never anticipated.  This knowledge is invaluable, and it builds the kind of life skills no standardized test can measure.

And so do the arts.

From as far back as the earliest extant critical essay on poetry, Aristotle’s Poetics, it has been posited that poetry (and for centuries the word included theater, song, storytelling, epic and lyric poetry) offered us the opportunity to live through deep, complex, even profound experiences.  Aristotle’s catharsis is often discussed in the limited context of it allowing us to vent, or purify ourselves of intense emotions, which is how he described one of the social benefits of tragedy.

But religious historian Karen Armstrong has pointed out that the Greek tragedies Aristotle commented on were acted out as part of a mandatory multi-day festival that evolved from much earlier religious rituals, which engaged participants in the reenactment of myths.  This reenactment was the one way to genuinely understand the deeper meanings of those ancient stories: not through intellect, but by living through them.  Aristotle was certainly writing with this context in mind.

The earliest Greek tragedies were also based on the reenactment of myths.  Anthropologists cannot discover a boundary between the emergence of theater and religion, or between art and religion.  These distinctions were drawn later by historians and scholars, and would have been meaningless to the original participants.  Ritual and theater have always given us direct experience of the mythos of our own belief systems, regardless of what that system is based on. Religious rituals, theater and all the arts continue to function in this way.  This is one of the ways we obtain our education regarding the unknown.

A look at rituals can shed some light on how art also provides this education.  If we consider the nature of ancient initiation rituals, especially those that marked the passage into adulthood, they all have a number of shared characteristics.  Chief among them is that they are very carefully orchestrated.

The ritual often begins with a violent wrenching out of the familiar: for example, the initiate is dragged from their sleep in the middle of the night and taken away from home and family by masked creatures. Over hours or days, the initiate endures tests of their courage and strength, usually including terrifying events where their life appears to be in grave danger, and sometimes actually is.  The senses are distorted by hours of drumming, dancing, chanting, fasting and sleeplessness.  Having persevered through these physical and psychological trials, the initiate is celebrated, rewarded and welcomed warmly back into the community.

This ritual pattern is called the dramatic plot in theater: The protagonist endures fear, disorientation, exhaustion and doubt during a series of increasingly challenging trials that transform his or her character and lead to some form of redemption.  It is the classic hero myth made personal and immediate because it is acted out by the individual.  The ultimate meaning of the myth is learned through experiencing it, not having it explicated in a lecture or sermon.

The hero myth is also the basic plot of The Odyssey, King Lear, Rocky, Star Wars and Life of Pi.

As you were reading the description of initiation rituals above, did images from those you’ve seen in documentaries or elsewhere come back to you, perhaps only in flashes?  Did even those brief flashes cause minor physiological changes in your body: muscles or stomach tightening, changes in breathing? If so, why?

It’s an old philosophical question: why can’t we watch another person being tortured without feeling anything?   Rationally, we should feel nothing because it’s not happening to us.  But we do.  We have empathy, sympathetic compassion.  We feel for others.  This is not sentiment; it’s science.  Using MRIs, neurobiologists have shown that the same pain receptors in the brain light up when we directly experience pain as when we witness someone else’s suffering.  We have mirror neurons that allow us to experience what someone else is feeling.  To those neurons, there is no difference between our suffering and someone else’s.

Some people find the torture sequences in Zero Dark Thirty so unbearable they have to shut their eyes. Many of us have had a similar experience watching other films.  Even knowing such scenes aren’t real, that the blood and bruises are make-up and the victims actually actors pretending to be in agony, we cringe, hold our breath, avert our eyes.  Apparently, our mirror neurons can’t tell the difference: we feel empathy for the characters being portrayed by actors.

A powerful film, poem, novel or play is an experience we live through.  Physiologically, our bodies do not distinguish between a real and a vividly imagined event.  If you have ever wakened from a nightmare bathed in sweat, or felt your stomach flop and heart race in anticipation of something that finally never occurred, you know this is true.

This physiological response is not always the result of an automatic unconscious reflex; it can be consciously manipulated.  Physical therapists can lower their patients’ blood pressure by having them imagine themselves in a soothing, peaceful place.  Those we call “Method” actors can step onto a bare stage and convince us they are walking along a beach, not through mime, but by deliberately journeying inside memory and vividly re-imagining the specific sensual experience of walking in sand: The image in the mind is transmitted to the actor’s body, and we “feel” them walking on a sandy beach.

The vividly imagined poem, like a nightmare, a meditation image, or an actor’s sense-memory exercise, comes alive in the body.  It’s no wonder then that the experience of certain poems or plays stays with us.  Every memorable experience, whatever we have learned of importance in our lives, has come to us in this way.

Whatever we know of importance about love, death, honesty, cowardice or loyalty has come to us through the senses, through the body.  Such words remain mere abstractions unless we’ve lived through an experience that has made them real to us.  It’s one thing to read the platitude that we should have compassion for others, quite another to be mugged or in a car accident and have total strangers come selflessly to our aid, or, to have them turn away and refuse us.

It is no wonder that spiritual leaders have always used parables to teach moral lessons.  They know that only by vividly imagining ourselves living the story will we understand it in a deeply personal way.  It is this experience that plants the lesson in memory.

In On Moral Fiction, novelist John Gardner argues that the purpose of all great literature is to put our ideals, morals, opinions and beliefs to the test.  It’s likely many writers don’t have this purpose at the forefront of their minds at any point in the composition process, and we can disagree with how Gardner or any other author might define morality, but it’s impossible to call to mind a literary masterpiece that moved us greatly that did not address fundamental questions in some way.  These are the questions that have no predictable answers.  We need all the help we can get when we must ask them of ourselves.

Not just in fiction, but in the course of our lives, our ideals, morals, opinions and beliefs will be tested again and again.  How well we adapt, how creative and flexible we are in response to what we learn about ourselves and the world after enduring those tests will determine the quality of our lives.  We live in the grey area where there are no clear black and white answers to essential questions.  We live in the space between true and false, and it is here that teaching toward standardized tests utterly fail us.

It is in the real world, the one we actually live in, that we need art.  Our ancestors understood this when they created rituals.  These were communal, shared experiences.  They gave participants the opportunity to live through challenges, test themselves, grow and learn new skills, new ways of thinking and a new way of being in the world.  Rituals included playacting, poetry, song, dance and storytelling. They were meant to be transformative experiences.

A profoundly moving work of art changes us just as rituals do.  They force us to confront our flaws, prejudices, ideals and fears.  Their impact can linger for weeks, years, even decades as we imagine ourselves in the new context they provide.  The light of reason may be one of humanity’s distinguishing characteristics, but it is not the only one.  Creativity and imagination are two of our most unique features.  So far, the best means human beings have developed to foster them is through the arts.  Regardless of whether or not we make art ourselves, our encounters with art are real, lived experiences that teach us new ways of being in the world.  If we fail to provide such experiences for our young people, we fail to educate them.

Creative Rahway: A Call to Collaboration formed around the question “How can our evolving community ignite creativity and innovation to ensure a thriving Rahway?” Fostering Rahway’s arts community has been at the focus of the city’s redevelopment plan for years, and while the Arts were discussed in numerous conversations, the Open Space format allowed for many topics to be suggested in a democratic way.  Sessions ranged from “How can we bridge the gap between the Arts and Athletics?” to “How can we encourage reinvestment in our downtown from within our community?”

As Day One came to a close, it was fascinating to watch and listen as people shared their experiences from the day’s discussions. There was genuine excitement and enthusiasm in the air.

Day Two began with an atmosphere of collaboration and focused energy. By reviewing the notes from previous dialogs, as well as through their own participation, individuals were aware of other participants’ interests. Spontaneous brainstorming sessions sprang up, relevant conversations took place, and groups formed around specific action items (including “branding” Rahway, and a new task force “Creative Rahway for Education”.)

As the convening came to an end, Creative Rahway participants felt – in their own words – “Optimistic”, “Hopeful”, and  “Excited” about Rahway and their role in helping to shaping our town’s future.

Individuals came to the meeting, perhaps wondering “What will I get out of this? Why is it important for me to be here?” They left as a team: Informed about what is already happening in the town; Empowered to act on ideas that were discussed; Connected with other individuals who have similar interests; and United as a whole in the shared goal of ‘a thriving Rahway’.

Open space principles say “Whoever comes are the right people; Wherever it happens is the right place; Whenever it starts is the right time; Whatever happens is the only thing that could have; and When it is over, it is over.” But it feels more appropriate to say, “When it is over, it begins.” At least, that seems to be the case in Rahway, because now that the convening is over, Creative Rahway is just getting started.

Anyone interested in joining the Creative Rahway movement can send an email to creativerahway@gmail.com and connect to our Facebook page. You can also join us at our upcoming Creative Drinks meet-up on February 27 at 5.30pm at The Rail House’s new annex at 1443 Irving Street……Creative Drinks is an event created by our friends at the Arts Council of the Morris Area and Creative Morristown……we loved the idea so we launching that in Rahway!  We hope to see you there!

Images courtesy of Creative Rahway

Rachael Faillace is the Executive Director of Rahway Arts District, Inc., a non-profit arts and economic development organization supporting the businesses in the downtown Arts and Central Business Districts of Rahway, NJ. Working with the City government and the cultural community, we work to promote Rahway as a center where the visual, performing, and cultural arts converge; as a place where artists live and work; and as a go-to destination for exceptional dining and unique retail experiences.

Wikipedia reports that the word “Philanthropy” was first coined by the Greek playwright Aeschylus (or one of his contemporaries who didn’t get the appropriate credit) in Prometheus Bound. The myth begins with Zeus, the king of the Olympian deities, wanting to destroy primitive humans because they lacked knowledge, skills, or culture of any kind.  The Titan Prometheus, whose name meant “forethought,” out of his “philanthropos tropos” or “humanity-loving character,” took pity on these primitive creatures and gave them two life-enhancing gifts: fire, representing all knowledge, skills, technology, arts, and science; and “blind hope” or optimism.  The two gifts were complementary.  The fire allowed the humans to feel less fearful and be more optimistic.  With this newfound optimism, they were empowered to develop innovative uses for fire that improved the human condition.

Fast forward 2500 years or so from our Greek scribe’s first use of “philanthropos” and you will find that modern philanthropists still endeavor to support innovation that improves the circumstances of individuals and the communities in which they live.  Foundations, which have become the predominant vehicle for modern-day philanthropy, essentially provide “optimism” in the form of grants to organizations and/or individuals who are working to find new ways to use the life-enriching “fire” of technology, arts, science, and improved knowledge to solve society’s greatest challenges.

You have likely seen Paul Manship‘s highly recognizable bronze gilded statue prominently featured at Rockefeller Center, a famous landmark in its own right, built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., one of our nation’s greatest titan philanthropists.   This statue and the inscription from Aeschylus on the granite wall behind which reads, “Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends,” exemplifies the potential of philanthropic work.

According to the Council of NJ Grantmakers website, New Jersey is home to approximately 2,400 private grantmaking foundations, including independent, family and corporate-affiliated foundations. Over the past 10 years, more than 1,400 foundations have been created in New Jersey including more than 100 of the top foundations in the state. According to the most recent data available, the top 366 foundations in the state hold approximately 95% of the assets and contribute 91% of the giving.  Each philanthropic organization focuses on individualized giving priorities ranging from Health, Aging, Human Rights, and Social Services to Arts, Immigration, Media, Education, Environment, and Civic Participation.  Every societal challenge has a benefactor looking to support creative solutions.

As followers of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation blog or a grantee, you likely know that the “R” in our name stands for Rockefeller.  Our patron namesake was the daughter of Almira Geraldine Goodsell and William Avery Rockefeller, Jr. who, with his brother John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and four other partners helped found Standard Oil.  Over the course of nearly 40 years the various emissaries of Geraldine R. Dodge’s philanthropic spirit have aspired to carry out the intentions of both Mrs. Dodge and Prometheus.  Most recently our efforts are represented through funding innovative grantees working to “Imagine a Better New Jersey.”   Together we plan backwards from a mental image of what a more sustainable and creative New Jersey would look like and fund the best ideas in Education, Arts, Environment and Media to help get us there.

I have the honor to lead our Education grantmaking docket which endeavors to provide school leaders and teachers with “fire-like” tools that can spark a school culture for creative learning.  We want to fuel innovative training practices for pre-service teachers that will yield a teaching force that is able to inspire the future leaders of our nation.  We believe that Arts Education is a primary accelerant of creativity-infused curriculum and practices that will ensure our children are college and/or job-ready and can meet the challenges of the 21^st century.

This weekend I had the pleasure of reading Crayola grant proposals from Promethean school leaders across New Jersey determined to improve student learning through creativity, arts education, and arts integration into the common core curriculum.  Each school hopes to win one of Crayola’s six “Championing Creatively Alive Children” grants of $2,500 plus $500 in Crayola art supplies.  The Dodge Foundation and the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association are partnering with Crayola to stimulate the best ideas that integrate creativity across the curriculum and strengthen creativity leadership.

The schools have put together Creative Leadership Teams to explore how they can establish cross-discipline teacher collaborations and generate student learning opportunities that require critical thinking, creativity, and analytical skills.  The schools have some terrific “What ifs…”  What if teachers and students alike were encouraged take risks and try creative ways of solving problems?  What if teachers and children felt empowered to make mistakes, make adjustments and try again?  What if teachers and students didn’t search for single answers but instead explored complex problems that didn’t have predictable outcomes and required innovative solutions?

There were many exciting examples of creativity in action that demonstrated Aeschylus’ inscription (with a minor tense change) and reflects our expectations of our state’s education titans: “Prometheus, teacher in every art, [bring] the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends.” We look forward to announcing the winners in a few weeks.  Though we know the real winners are children across New Jersey.

While we may disagree about what is essential for an individual in our society to know to be considered educated, no one would refute the value of transmitting accumulated knowledge.  Civilization only emerged when we developed the capacity to pass on learned information, and is impossible without it.  The problem arises when we forget that civilization is also impossible without education regarding “the unknown.”

We’re not referring to spirituality or mysticism, although they also emerged in response to the unknown.  For now, we’ll limit our focus to the unknown that pertains to concrete, practical matters.  This may seem a paradox, but if we take a moment to consider our lives we realize the unknown must be negotiated by everyone.

For example, how do we know what we are willing to die for?  To kill for?  These are not abstract philosophical questions when you come of age in a time of war in a country with a military draft, as I and my peers did.  Martin Luther King Jr. once said that “if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”  We know our society has been changed by people like King willing to put their lives on the line for their beliefs.  What would have to happen for us to make such a choice?  Until the second arrives when we must decide, the answer remains in the realm of the unknown.

The unknown also includes such questions as: What will my life’s work be?  How will my life have purpose or meaning?  How will I live with heart-breaking loss, disappointment or failure?  What am I willing to do to succeed?  What does success mean to me?  Is this person my life partner?  What kind of parent will I be? How will I handle catastrophic illness?  Will I sign a do-not-resuscitate order?

The absurdity of standardized tests asking such questions points to their essential characteristic and chief flaw: by design, every question is a leading question meant to direct the student toward a known answer.

We are told they are the most practical way to measure whether or not a student has mastered the skills and knowledge he or she should have by a certain grade level.  There are many educators who would argue that these claims are untrue and they make many salient points, too many to detail here.  But even conceding (which we are not) that standardized tests are the best way to measure that knowledge which can be objectively measured, they are still completely impractical tools for measuring the quality of education.

That is, unless the goal of education is to make us better at taking standardized tests, a skill of no practical application after we graduate.  A more practical goal is that education help people achieve success in life, however they define it.  This would benefit the individual and society.

Sociological studies done in recent decades have repeatedly shown that there is no correlation between scores on SAT or other academic achievement tests and success later in life, however that is defined.  What they did find, instead, is that success seems to be determined by a cluster of skills, including creativity, emotional intelligence, flexibility, perseverance and the ability to read other people: skills that are not measured with our standardized tests.

Again, the explanation for this is simple: standardized tests can only ask questions that point us toward the already known, that which can be objectively measured and proven by empirical evidence.  This may sound perfectly reasonable, and it is.  Such tests measure what can be known through reason.  If we proceeded with the understanding that this is a severe limitation, there would be no problem.  But we ask too much of these tests; we ask them to be an indicator of the quality of education itself.

This results in a narrowing of focus to that which can be objectively measured.  It reinforces what Howard Gardner defines as the hierarchy of intelligences which, in our culture, values rational intelligence over emotional intelligence.

If it’s true, as the mountain of evidence suggests, that emotional intelligence is a far more accurate indicator of future success than intellect, then our society’s insistence on the superior value of the rational mind is completely irrational.  The only rational conclusion to draw from the evidence is that those who insist on the superiority of intellect are moved by irrational forces, perhaps the most powerful irrational force: fear.

Perhaps, fear of the unknown?

There are certain unknowns where reason and objectivity should be brought to bear.  If you’re running out of cash and gas and wonder if you’ll make it to your destination, those math problems you did in grammar school will come in very handy in calculating if your car gets enough miles per gallon to get where you need to go on the gas you can buy.

But for those questions that can’t be answered through reason, and don’t have predetermined answers that can be handed down from one generation to the next, there are methods, strategies, practices and skills that can be handed down to help us ask them of ourselves.  All spiritual, philosophical, religious, moral and ethical systems or disciplines; every activity ever touted as “character building,” including athletics, military duty, team work, volunteerism; and all the arts are examples.  What these develop are ways of being in the world, of navigating reality and not mere abstractions.  They do so by cultivating our innate imagination and creativity.

“What!?” some people might respond, “imagination and creativity are about navigating the real world?”  Yes.  We’ll talk about how in the next Poetry Friday blog.

The arts bridge all of the components of sustainability: economy, environment and society.  We think there is creative potential inherent in every community.  That is why Sustainable Jersey’s Arts and Culture Task Force is developing two new actions to help communities be more creative.  The first step is to form a Creative Team that will be the catalyst for development in your community by linking arts and culture directly to sustainability.  Read our March 2012 blog for more information on Creative Teams.

Image: Woodbridge mural made with recycled tile and glass by Woodbridge Artisan Guild members in November 2012.

Five Benefits of a Creative Community

Municipalities have a lot to gain from connecting with the arts:

1. Improved local business vitality, community spirit and public safety
2. Rejuvenated neighborhoods and job growth, within and beyond the arts and culture sector, contributing to overall economic development
3. New reasons for others to visit, invest or live in the town
4. Pride and commitment to place, including the physical environment and nature
5. Diverse people are brought together to celebrate, create, inspire and be inspired, improving quality of life and community well-being

Creative Teams in New Jersey

Across New Jersey there are existing and emerging examples of Creative Teams. These towns are the trail blazers having begun the process outside of the Sustainable Jersey guidance that is being developed.  We highlight Morristown and Woodbridge because these towns contain the key elements of vision and collaboration that are at the core of this initiative.

Creative Morristown

What happens when you mix a Municipal Planner, the Office of Sustainability and the Executive Director of the Arts Council? In Morristown, it turned out to be a good recipe for a Creative Community.

In March 2012, the staff of the Arts Council of the Morris Area, the Town of Morristown’s Office of Sustainability, and a city planner from the Jonathan Rose Companies established Creative Morristown (an initiative of Creative New Jersey) in order to foster creativity, innovation and sustainability through community engagement and cross-sector collaboration.

Creative Morristown’s leadership began its work by creating a Creative Team that is a culturally diverse team of stakeholders from a wide range of sectors including education, the arts, local business, social services, city government, philanthropy, media and healthcare.

This Creative Team, in cooperation with Creative New Jersey, produced a community-wide Call To Collaboration, a two-day convening where they posed the question:  “How Can Our Diverse Community Engage Creativity and Innovation to Ensure a Thriving, Sustainable Morristown?” Eighty participants attended the ground-breaking forum.

Image: Creative Morristown participants

Results and Projects from Creative Morristown

The resulting discussion from the Call to Collaboration convening inspired not only a wealth of ideas but also concrete steps toward the implementation of those ideas.

Tom Werder, the Executive Director of the Arts Council of the Morris Area, said “I’m excited about the unexpected new partnerships and collaborations that have formed through Creative Morristown.  Phil Abramson (the Town Planner), Paul Miller (Office of Sustainability) and I were asked to report to the Town Council about Creative Morristown.”  The town planners recently submitted an application to the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town Grant Program for a Creative Placemaking project. The grant proposes a process to transform Speedway Avenue, which has a long and rich history of cultural and ethnic diversity.  The Speedwell Artworks grant, if funded, will involve artists, engage the community and retailers to come together and determine what will work best for the area.  A Request for Proposals will then be released to solicit artists and creative entities to submit proposals based on the identified needs and goals.

Below are a few of the interesting things have happened since the initial convening:

• The ballroom at the Hyatt Morristown was the home of Morristown High School’s beautiful Sol LeWitt Project.  An art installation of a replica of a Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing was a project of the Freshman Experience Program at the high school, run by English teacher (and Creative Morristown participant) John Madden.  The LeWitt project was particularly relevant to Creative Morristown because of the value placed on process. There was a great deal of excitement about the project and there were numerous conversations about how to get more people to view the work.
• The Arts Council of the Morris Area coordinated the temporary display of all ten of the Sol LeWitt Project’s 4’X8’ panels at the Gallery at 14 Maple.
• Morristown plans to incorporate the arts into the Master Plan process.  An open house for this event kicks off next week: Morristown Open House.
• As mentioned above, an innovative grant was created and submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town Grant Program for a Creative Placemaking project.

Woodbridge Township

Woodbridge Township, a Sustainable Jersey silver-certified town, also pursues a deliberate course to incorporate the arts and culture in order to improve the overall community.

Based on direction from Mayor John E. McCormac, a group of about twenty town leaders from creative fields, representatives of Greenable Woodbridge and local government representatives meet bi-monthly to steer the efforts for growing a creative Woodbridge. Larry McCullough, the Woodbridge Township Grants Officer, is on the Sustainable Jersey Arts and Culture Taskforce that is creating the new Sustainable Jersey actions.

Results and Progress for Woodbridge Township

• Eight Woodbridge Township middle and high school teachers were awarded Green Arts Grants for designing classroom projects that help promote the municipality’s commitment to clean energy and sustainable living. The $250 grants are part of a larger community-wide Sustainability awareness project coordinated by the Cultural Arts Commission of Woodbridge Township and Friends of Greenable Woodbridge, Inc. Funding for the grants comes from a grant awarded by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Each student-made project will employ the arts to express the concept of sustainability. Topic areas include environmental science, computers, aquaculture, math, solar technology and world history.
• Sponsored by the Township’s Greenable Woodbridge Green Team, the EcoRhythm Music Adventure program will begin in January.  It combines education and entertainment specially geared for pre-schools. Accredited music educators from the  Professional Music Academy of Woodbridge will bring instruments made from recycled materials to a school. They will show students how to play the instruments, discuss how the instruments were made, show how to make an EcoDrum or EcoFlute, talk about the importance of recycling and respect for the environment and engage students in collaborative performing.
• A student-made video series is shown at the local schools highlighting sustainable activities by students and their families: “Show Us Your Green, Woodbridge”
• Night of Environmental Poetry at the Barron Arts Center by the Poets Wednesday group
• Bike Rack Design Contest
• Student Recycled Arts Object Contest
• Outdoor Nature Sculpture Workshop
• Street Mural-Making with Environmental Themes by Woodbridge Artisan Guild (see first photo above)

The Sustainable Jersey new guidance actions for arts and culture are under development and should be available to municipalities in 2013.

For more about Sustainable Jersey®:

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Images courtesy Sustainable Jersey

Sustainable Jersey staff and partners are regular contributors to the Dodge blog

Creativity is relative.  It is innovation’s Siamese twin, the artist’s muse, and a commodity in the business world. In the non-profit arts world it is an essential component of management, marketing and fund development. While there are countless ways in which creativity is obvious in the arts and the object of chase by individual artists throughout time, we’ll stick to counting creativity in New Jersey’s non-profit arts community with a “ten best” list from the past year.  Note: ten is a cruel limit to the abundant and dynamic creative energy apparent in all corners of the Garden State.

1. Two River Theatre Company’s creatively used social media to lead a virtual tour via the wildly popular Instagram app.  The company’s young Metro Scholars used the social media website to take photos from the front door to backstage and offered a “behind the scenes” tour to entice new audiences to their Red Bank location.
2. Ten Hairy Legs came on the scene as the evolution of the Randy James Dance Company.  You get the immediate mental image and along with that a glimpse into the creator/choreographer’s humor through the creative title that also has an eye catching logo.
3. Art All Day produced by Artworks in Trenton was born this fall by its wildly successful parent Art All Night. A true community arts event, Art All Day offered a glimpse into the gritty Trenton arts scene with studio tours and city-wide art exhibits in surprising locations.
4. The Gandhi Garden (pictured above) in Trenton was pulled together with an open city block and the limitless creativity of The Sage Coalition, artists and community activists starving for transformation of a blighted neighborhood. Gardening with Gandhi Part II takes it one step further next Monday on Martin Luther King Day.
5. The Shakespeare Theatre of NJ knows no creative limits beyond what happens on the stage as Bonnie Monte’s bold vision transformed an empty valve warehouse into the most creative theatrical workspace imaginable.  It has lifted the spirits of staff, offered new ways to earn revenue and once again lifted limits on what is possible for a relatively small theater company.
6. Perkins Center for the Arts’ Empty Bowls fundraiser that supported individual artists working in clay, Perkins’ Scholarship Fund and the Food Bank of South Jersey. A beautiful exhibit complemented the purchase of empty handmade soup bowls filled with a simple meal and served to a gathering of caring community members.
7. Winter Wonders at Grounds for Sculpture continues to entice art lovers to venture out during the winter months for a second year in a row with innovative outdoor lighting and complementary activities ranging from ice sculpture to a sold out book club featuring titles that highlight different facets of art.
8. Our very own Inspiring Women Celebrating the Visual and Culinary Arts held last March at Hospitality House in Trenton forged a new partnership with the NJ Restaurant Association and helped ArtPride bring together an amazing group of artists and restaurateurs. Look for more info on the second event coming on March 4.
9. Passage Theatre continues to be a source of creative energy (Trenton again!) with its Third Annual NJ One Minute Play Festival happening NEXT weekend, and Dancescapes NJ, a site specific celebration of Mercer County landscapes in partnership with the D&R Greenway Land Trust.
10. Atlantic City has at long last recognized that there’s more to a tourism destination than a boardwalk full of casinos and is incorporating the arts as an integral part of their comprehensive marketing campaign.  Look for new artist work space in 2013 due to the perseverance of the Noyes Museum and Stockton State College, and the efforts of the Fung Collaborative as it continues to work with local artists through Artlantic to transform vacant space into exciting, engaging and interactive public art environments.

Image: The Gandhi Garden in Trenton.

Ann Marie Miller is the Executive Director of Art Pride, the premier arts advocacy organization in New Jersey, and a regular contributor to the Dodge blog.

For many people, the concept of Sustainable Living as a means of protecting our environment is simple to grasp, yet challenging to put into daily practice.

Sustainability advocates are discovering that a focused application of creativity principles is one of the most effective ways to integrate abstract theory with everyday lifestyle choice and decisions.

In a densely populated corner of northeast New Jersey, local government officials have devised a creativity-grounded strategy they call AWE – the Arts from Waste Experience – a cluster of hands-on Arts programs designed to teach Sustainability awareness and principles to a diverse cross-section of the community.

Woodbridge Township has long been a poster child for New Jersey’s fabled urban congestion. Surprisingly, for a community that’s been a commercial and industrial crossroads since Colonial days, there is actually a fair amount of Nature still remaining.

But with a population density of 4,225 humans per square mile, the state’s largest shopping mall and a welter of superhighways, office parks and retail complexes engulfing the available terra firma, you have to look pretty hard to find it.

In 2010 Mayor John E. McCormac used funding from a U.S. Department of Energy stimulus grant to create the Township’s first Sustainable Community Plan setting forth strategies and actions the Township would undertake to achieve greater Sustainability.

“We have close to 100,000 residents encompassing a diversity of age, occupation, ethnicity and educational levels,” says Mayor McCormac. “The most efficient vehicle we’ve found to deliver the Sustainability message is the Arts. The Arts get people’s attention, get them involved, help them see how these ideas can operate in their daily lives with positive benefit. When creativity is encouraged, the project result is significantly enhanced.”

The anchor element in the Township’s Sustainability campaign is AWE, a community Arts education program that features a fulltime Artist-in-Residence and several volunteer instructors at the Greenable Woodbridge Museum of the Future who offer free workshops on recycled Art techniques for all ages … but especially focusing on young people who will hopefully take the lead as the Sustainability proponents of tomorrow.

Using cleaned recycled materials from the Township’s Department of Public Works, AWE generates a world of Art from Waste limited only by the imagination of the Artist: denim art area rugs; musical instruments from recycled glass, metal and wood; styrofoam sculpture; basket weaving; clay; batik; natural building; patchwork quilts; origami; wire sculpture; puppet making; recycled paper beads; kites from recycled materials; office decor; papier-mâché masks and more.

Immediate outcomes of AWE go beyond teaching Art production skills and principles of recycling and sustainability to thousands of students and community members.

The works created by AWE Artists are introduced in public areas throughout the Township – from shops to parks to public transit locales – presenting community residents and visitors with prominent “visual cues” that encourage them to think about environmental issues at face-to-face level.

It’s creativity-infused Sustainability advertising minus preaching … omnipresent yet memorable social messaging that’s fun to create and experience and supports the Township’s ongoing “Greenable Woodbridge” publicity effort informing residents and businesses about Sustainable Living opportunities in the community.

Caroline Ehrlich, Green Team chair and Director of the Township’s Office of Sustainability, recalls that the Arts were incorporated into the sustainability planning from the very beginning.

“If you want to educate someone about the benefits of using a rain barrel, you can sit them down and lecture them and make a basic intellectual impact,” says Ehrlich, “But if you have them paint the barrel with a fanciful design, maybe even collaboratively with others, they’re embracing the subject on a much more thoughtful and personal level. Allowing people to access their innate creativity is key.”

AWE has inspired a plethora of other Arts and Sustainability initiatives in Woodbridge: recycled Eco-Drum circle sessions, a Girl Scouts recycled fashion show, sustainable-themed songwriting workshops and poetry readings, contests for designing bike signs, street designs and bike racks reflecting Sustainable Living themes, painting street crosswalks highlighting sustainable themes, planting trees at schools and parks where students make and place clay and twig sculptures.

Members of the Township’s local visual Arts co-op, the Woodbridge Artisan Guild, also participate in AWE. Future projects include using public Art installations to bring attention to the Township’s wetlands restoration areas and brownfield redevelopment sites and to promote alternative transport by identifying greenways, bikeways, walkways, mass transit and alternative fuel vehicle stations.

“Our vision of success for these projects is to have thousands of our residents from every walk of life get involved and start thinking of the environment as something they care about very deeply,” says Mayor McCormac. “It’s going to make a big difference in what Woodbridge Township is like in the years to come.”

If AWE can happen in Woodbridge, New Jersey, why not your town?

Lawrence E. McCullough, Ph.D. currently serves as Grants Officer for Woodbridge Township, New Jersey and has been an active organizer of Arts and non-profit community ventures since 1973. Dr. McCullough is a musician/composer and author of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and film scripts (see http://www.lemccullough.com for full publication/performance details). He lives in Woodbridge, New Jersey with his wife, the actress Lisa Bansavage, with whom he operates an educational film and theatre organization, Pages of History, Inc.

NOTE:  Creative New Jersey extends its appreciation to Lawrence McCullough for providing this blog post as we celebrate International Creativity Month and we look forward to our continuing discussions regarding the launch of a Creative Call to Collaboration in Woodbridge, a certified Sustainable Jersey municipality since 2009.

Image: “Sitting Man” by Lisa Bagwell in front of the Greenable Woodbridge Museum of the Future. Photo by Lawrence E. McCullough.

In strategic planning, it just might…

When we hear the word creativity, we often envision a wild, unfettered environment in which great ideas seem to pop up effortlessly. It brings to mind artists being suddenly struck by inspiration and spending two days painting a masterpiece.

But do we have to wait for creativity to strike? Or can we make it happen?

This is often a fundamental question for nonprofits as they approach strategic planning. Everyone acknowledges that a “new year, same plan” approach to our work is not working. Everyone is eager to find new and creative ideas that will help to advance their mission. And our rapidly-changing environment means that the traditional ways of running a nonprofit often are not working well anymore.

So how do we call on our creativity to find new ideas that can be explored during strategic planning? Surprisingly, adding a little more structure to your process will often inspire creativity in the group. Vague conversations that start, “well, what should we do next?” do nothing to stimulate new lines of thinking. Try one of these techniques to inspire some creative ideas in your planning discussions:

1) Bring new data to the conversation. Strategic planning is a great opportunity to talk to people, conduct some research, and surface new issues that might inspire creative thinking. Remember that the board and staff members participating in the planning process have a familiarity with the status quo that is often a creativity killer (either they’re comfortable with how things are, or despairing of ever being able to make a change). Before your planning retreat, send the planning committee out to talk to stakeholders, look into trends that might affect you, and analyze your past program results. Distribute this information widely prior to your retreat, giving people a chance to think it over. This new perspective will often lead to some creative thinking. Visit www.managementhelp.org/strategicplanning for some ideas on how to conduct this kind of strategic analysis at the start of your process.

2) Add some rules to the discussion. People often complain that meetings are boring or unproductive – and this is usually because the discussion is too broad and vague to be engaging. Structured discussion encourages creativity because it keeps your mind from following the usual path, and often insists that you discover new options. One of my favorite techniques is the TOWS Matrix, which expands on the traditional SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis and asks you to think about how your actions will be influenced by those four factors. When you think of the SWOT as a list-making activity, it doesn’t really inspire creativity – it just asks you to write down what you already know. Instead, ask yourself: how can we use our strengths to take advantage of an opportunity or combat a threat? Which of our weaknesses is keeping us from capitalizing on positive trends? Where do our weaknesses and threats interact to create truly dangerous conditions? These are the kind of questions that spark new ideas and new lines of thinking that bring creativity and energy to your planning.

This short video explains what I mean:

3) Play things out. Brainstorming is often heralded as the key tool for creativity, but it’s really only the first step. So, when a brainstorming session yields an idea that starts to gain momentum from the group, insist on playing that idea out fully before you adopt it. Ask the group: if we did this, then what would happen? And then what? And then what? Look for the best results you could hope for, as well as unintended consequences – surprising results (good or bad) that come about because of your strategy choices. Building this fuller, more complex picture will keep the ideas coming, and often cause a more innovative concept to be born.

People often laugh at me when I say “strategic planning is supposed to be the fun part,” but I mean it! It’s a great opportunity to bring creative minds together to find the best pathways forward for your organization and its mission. Putting a little structure on those great minds often helps them work even more creatively to find the innovative ideas you need.

For more helpful videos featuring some of the highlights from the Dodge Foundation Board Leadership Training series, go to http://www.youtube.com/GRDFTA

Allison Trimarco is the founder and principal of Creative Capacity, a consulting firm that collaborates with nonprofits to find creative solutions to management challenges. She is also an affiliated consultant and instructor at The Nonprofit Center at La Salle University.

On October 29, 2012 the ‘new normal’ crashed into the east coast in the form of a tropical cyclone, forever altering the landscapes and collective psyche of my home state of New Jersey.    The now infamous Sandy claimed 80 lives, wiped out entire neighborhoods, and turned reality upside down.  Those in the know tell us it will take upwards of a decade to recover from this event, though I am not certain I understand exactly what recovery means.

Some sobering statistics:  Sandy’s storm tide ranged from 8 – 14.3 feet in the NY/NJ metro area; 72,000 structures were impacted in New Jersey alone; and an initial estimate of $29.4 billion in physical economic damage is projected to rise as the full economic impact is evaluated, including impacts to New Jersey’s $38 billion leisure, hospitality and recreation industry.  Comparatively speaking, Sandy wasn’t even that big of a storm.  When you consider that with the additional 1 – 2 feet of sea level rise expected to occur in the region due to climate change, storms less intense than Sandy could generate higher storm tides by mid-century.

One thing I am certain of is that a catastrophe like this makes a compelling illustration of the connections between health and the environment. The impacts of this storm event on individuals and communities are staggering and many of us find ourselves at the beginning of a very steep learning curve.  We are learning that the psychological impacts of immediate devastation and long term recovery are deeply felt by the first responders, residents and business owners who grapple with the emotional toll of destroyed houses, displaced families, and economic loss.

Our collective failure to shore up our public infrastructure over the decades is painfully obvious, as failing sewage treatment plants spew untreated effluent into bays and rivers, threatening critical natural resources and public health.  Tons of garbage and debris are piling up;  Where and how to dispose of it remains a puzzle to be solved, and the impacts to the health and safety of the workers responsible for it of immense concern.

New Jersey boasts the dubious distinction of having the most listed Superfund sites in the country, many in populous urban communities. The Environmental Protection Agency has requested millions of dollars from Congress to stabilize those sites impacted by the storm and to assess and clean up suspected or actual petroleum releases from underground storage tanks.   There is also growing concern over relaxed regulation of repair and reconstruction activities in coastal, water front, and tidal wetlands, raising questions about environmental protection and community resiliency in the event of future storms.

If any good can come of this event, it will serve as an opportunity to re-imagine and re-build communities to be resilient, and to engage citizens in a robust recovery and planning effort that challenges old rules and attitudes that will no longer serve us.  We are seeing some encouraging signs.   For example, a recent poll by Monmouth University reveals that an overwhelming majority of New Jersey residents want the Jersey Shore rebuilt, but in a thoughtful, responsible, and cost-effective manner that takes a regional view and incorporates storm risk assessment to inform decisions on where to allow redevelopment.  Also, anecdotal reports from experts and ordinary citizens alike indicate a renewed and expanded appreciation for the protection that natural systems like sand dunes, protected open space, and flood plains provide communities.

In response to these extraordinary circumstances, the Dodge Foundation has partnered with the Community Foundation of New Jersey, contributing $1 million to establish the New Jersey Recovery Fund to support intermediate and long-term recovery efforts.  Through this vehicle, we hope to attract investment to support creative and innovative projects to address the wide ranging impacts of this storm.  A priority is to support community and nonprofit partners representing a broad range of sectors, including the environment, public health,  human services, the arts, and media .

Already, several partners have joined the Fund including: the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with a pledge of up to $250,000 to provide matching grants to support community information and storm recovery coverage by local, nonprofit media outlets; the Subaru of America Foundation, providing $250,000 in funds aimed at recovery efforts in south Jersey; and the Dave Matthews Band with a $1 million contribution.  The total committed to the Fund to date is more than $3 million and growing.

We can learn from those involved in previous disaster recovery elsewhere.  Many of our colleagues in the philanthropic community have reached out to offer advice and assistance on how best to meet the needs of people and the environment in the wake of this storm.

As a state, we will face difficult choices about where we dedicate our resources and what policies will best serve our citizens.  As a foundation, we welcome the input and participation from our colleagues as we learn and face these challenges.

Reprinted from Giving InSight

Image: Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey (Photo: REUTERS/Les Stone/American Red Cross)

The decline of the American newspaper is generally seen as a tragedy of modern journalism. The villain in the story is the internet, that great disruptor — which, by the way, has disrupted the businesses of book publishing, real estate, retail sales and many other fields as well.

It is true that the economics of the news industry are tough these days. But — just as talkies did with silent pictures — the internet has created a whole new dimension for the practice of journalism. It’s not just the