Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Introduction by Wendy Liscow
Program Officer

Laura Otten, Executive Director of the LaSalle University Nonprofit Center, has been the lead consultant working with the Dodge Foundation to design a comprehensive board training series, now in its fourth successful year. If you have missed a workshop or would like to share some of the key “take-aways” with your colleagues, check out the Dodge Foundation’s Board Leadership Training Video Series. There are interviews with each of the workshop trainers on key board development issues including: the most critical issues facing boards today; the importance of understanding organizational lifecycles; implementing assessment practices that measure what matters; strategic planning tips; and how to recruit and keep strong board members.

A sample video from our most recent Care and Feeding of Board Members workshop is below. However, if you are interested in the topic of improving your board engagement through the creation of more productive board meetings, we suggest you read the complete blog post…it just might be what you need to transform your board.

Want to rachet up your board’s performance? Change your agenda.

By Laura Otten

My 23-year old son has his first board meeting for a nonprofit coming up. He is so excited, so thrilled at the opportunity to help, a bit nervous that they view him as a finance “expert” but his joy at the prospects of this board service is palpable. I hope he’s equally excited after the meeting.

This fear is not just a mother’s fear; it is a fear I have for the vast majority of board members attending their first meetings. Though I’ve no scientific information to bear this out, my anecdotal information is overwhelming: nonprofits lose more board members through boredom at meetings than they do through fear of fundraising! Think about that. And funny thing about this is that you can turn a boring meeting into an engaging meeting in far shorter course than you can turn a reluctant fundraiser into a confident one.

Oddly, what makes board meetings so boring is the fact that the vast majority of boards do not do board work at board meetings! It is really that simple. If you look at a typical meeting agenda for most boards, it looks something like this:

XYZ Center Board Meeting: 20 January 2012

8:00am-9:30am

Approval of the minutes of the last board meeting

Reports

• Executive Director Report

• Finance Committee Report

• Committee A Report

• Committee B Report

• Committee C Report

• Committee D Report

New Business

Adjourn

This process, start to finish, can take anywhere from 1.5 hours to three hours, or even five or six (as I hear far more often than I should). Assuming a board is meeting every month or every other month, a typical board meeting should last no more than two hours, with 1.5 hours being an ideal. Obviously, grappling with a large or particularly contentious issue might force a board meeting, on occasion, to go beyond that time frame, but that absolutely should be the exception rather than the rule.

In following this agenda, however, a board is not doing board work; it is merely collecting data, albeit data that it needs to do good board work. But when board meetings focus on learning about things that have already happened, things over which board members have no control—as they have already happened—boards are not doing their work. They are being sponges, soaking up important data, but data they should be using to move an organization forward, not simply absorbing; they are learning about what happened instead of thinking about what could and/or should be. This data should be shared and absorbed in advance of a meeting, so that board members are equipped to use that data productively at board meetings. (Compounding the boredom factor is that far too often these reports are simply read aloud at meetings, taking away from board members any initiative they might have.)

I can guarantee you that no board member joins a board because s/he wants to be a sponge. Rather, they, as you might expect, want to make a difference, make a contribution, give back, help others, etc. In order for any of these to happen, we must engage people’s brains; droning on about what has passed just doesn’t do that.

So, what do you? There are multiple options, none of them scary in and of themselves; they are only scary in that each signals change. All, however, must address both form—or content—and function. Read the rest of this entry »

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

In his 1991 essay, “Slow Down for Poetry,” former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand wrote that poetry invites us to step out of the pace of our everyday lives and slow down.  It requires we change the speed at which we usually absorb information.  We can’t skim over a poem the way we do newspaper or website pages.  With poetry, we pause to meditate over a line, phrase or image, rereading passages, stanzas, whole poems many times.  We don’t so much slow down for poetry as allow poetry to slow us down.

Speaking to students at the 2006 Dodge Festival, current U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine said that everyone needs to find their poetry.  Poetry, for him, was the one thing that engaged all the many aspects of himself, that made him feel most fulfilled, most true to his truest self.  He said that everyone needs to find something like this in their lives.  For some people, like Levine, it’s poetry, but it could be any art, or work, or hobby.

We’ve all had the experience of being so deeply absorbed in something—creative work, meditation, conversation—that we lose all sense of time.  We look at the clock and are shocked by how much later it is than we’d thought, or, we complete a challenging task and discover with focused attention it took a fraction of the time anticipated.

Perhaps we don’t need to slow down for poetry so much as to allow ourselves to make the time to forget time.  There is no better way to do this than to make time for our poetry, whatever that is: gardening, wood working, playing or listening to music, dancing, yoga, reading or writing.  It is particularly important to do this when we are certain we have no time.  During periods of my life when adding anything extra to my schedule seemed impossible if not downright insane, I would set the alarm a little earlier to create time for silent reading in the early morning.  I’m certain that’s how I got through those stressful times.

And let us not make “resolutions” to do this, as if to do what brings us joy requires resolve.  Instead, let’s make gifts, little gifts to ourselves of an evening here or there, or even fifteen minutes in the morning, to do something we find fulfilling.  You might discover it is poetry.  But whatever it is, allowing ourselves time for it is not a selfish act.  Doing what brings us fulfillment makes us less impatient, less frustrated, calmer and more centered.  It makes us easier to be around, which makes us better friends, partners, citizens, parents and co-workers.  Of course, we already know this.  Perhaps the first gift is to allow ourselves to act on what we know about ourselves.

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For more information about the Dodge Poetry Festival and programs, visit www.dodgepoetry.org
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By Randall Solomon
Sustainable Jersey

College Students’ Need for Experience Meets Green Teams’ Need for Staff

This fall, eighteen college students crowded shoulder to shoulder with Mayor Donnelly and members of the Green Team and Environmental Advisory Committee in the eclectic Jersey Made store in Mill Race Village in Mount Holly.

The students were given a pep talk before going door to door to talk to residents. The objective was to learn about community members’ attitudes and preferences for shopping local versus at the big box stores and elsewhere. The data collected provided the necessary information to help develop a planned Buy Local Campaign in town to promote the local stores.

Top: Students ready to go door to door in Mount Holly
Bottom: Students survey residents for Buy Local Program in Mount Holly

Just one month before, nineteen energetic students got down and dirty. They built two rain gardens in Mount Holly. The students dug a large hole and planted it with deep-rooted native plants and grasses to soak up rainwater. In this case, the garden will capture and filter water runoff from a huge parking lot, preventing it from entering the nearby creek. A rain garden can soak up to 30% more water than a traditional lawn. This will help protect the quality of water downstream by preventing runoff from getting to the creek and storm drains.

Perfect Green Swap

It was a perfect green swap. Mount Holly needed staff to get a long list of environmental projects started and the college students needed hands-on work experience.

Thanks to a grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Sustainable Jersey partnered with The College of New Jersey’s (TCNJ) Bonner Center for Civic and Community Engagement to form a team of Bonner/Sustainable Jersey scholars that help municipalities to achieve Sustainable Jersey actions. Towns were selected through a competitive application process. Bonner Fellows also help to mobilize TCNJ freshmen students engaged in Community Engaged Learning (CEL) to work with towns participating in the Sustainable Jersey program.

Students working on the Shinn Cabin Rain Garden

By helping to plan and execute green projects throughout the year, the Bonner Scholars are aiding officials from four municipalities—Mount Holly, Trenton, the City of Burlington, and Green Brook—in their goal of attaining the 150 points necessary to get Sustainable Jersey’s bronze level of certification by October of 2012.

This partnership extends the practice of student community engaged learning with service beyond typical non-profit community partners to local governments. The partnership has been beneficial all around, according to Heather Camp, senior program director at the Bonner Center. “The partnership helps us to connect to different communities throughout New Jersey in a meaningful, long-term way. What I think makes the Bonner Center a good partner for the project is that we have the opportunity to mobilize a greater number of students to help communities meet their Sustainable Jersey needs,” Camp said.

This arrangement is useful for towns. Dan Rita of the four-person Mount Holly Green Team said, “Mount Holly is really struggling right now. It has been incredibly helpful to have the students organize and get the projects off the ground.” Each project gave Mount Holly 10 points for a total of 20 points toward Sustainable Jersey certification, moving their total from 90 to 110 points.

Students complete work on the Burlington County Jail Rain Garden

The students get a lot out of the experience as well. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), new college graduates who had participated in internships did far better in the job market than their classmates who did not have that experience. The students gain experience, develop skills, make connections, strengthen their resumes, learn about environmental fields, and are able to assess their interests and abilities. In Mount Holly, Dan Rita of the Green Team makes sure that the students get a full experience.

This spring, the students plan to help Mount Holly install community gardens. The other towns participating in the partnership have some worthwhile projects in the pipeline with the students as well. Stay tuned for updates on the students work with the Green Fair in the City of Burlington, an anti-idling campaign in Green Brook, and asset mapping projects in Trenton.

For more about Sustainable Jersey®:

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All photos by Randi Rothmel

By Nina Stack
President, Council of New Jersey Grantmakers

2012 is already shaping up to be quite a year for New Jersey’s philanthropic community.

We have two national organizations coming to Newark in the next few months. At the end of this month, the Association of Black Foundation Executives will launch its 2011-2012 Connecting Leadership Fellowship program with a Leadership Summit in Newark. The Fellowship, which began in 2005-2006, is a yearlong professional development experience which aims to promote the professional mobility and visibility of mid-career Black executives in the field of philanthropy.

Another first is being planned by Grantmakers for Education. The organization will convene one of its three 2012 Urban Education Study Tours in Newark. These study tours bring funders from around the country together for an extensive, multi-day site visit. Their visit is being designed now.

What these two gatherings affirm is the recognition nationally that New Jersey’s philanthropic community is working in innovative and successful ways — pushing the envelope beyond the traditional operating patterns of foundations. We are seeing members connect more and collaborate more. New Jersey’s philanthropic leaders are taking on national leadership roles as well — serving on the boards of national affinity and infrastructure groups. These include the Schumann Fund’s Barbara Reisman with Grantmakers for Education, the Dodge Foundation‘s Laura Aden Packer with the Grantmakers in the Arts, Novartis’ Rhonda Crichlow with the Association of Corporate Contributions Professionals, and Risa Lavizzo Mourey of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation with Independent Sector.

When I sit at Council on Foundations Board meetings and share with my fellow trustees the exciting things that we are doing in New Jersey, it piques great interest because they are hearing about New Jersey’s accomplishments from their colleagues in the field – both far and wide. For instance, they have learned of the way CNJG brings our members together regularly with key legislative officials in our “Conversations With the Cabinet.” Or, they’ve heard about our other policy work, like Facing Our Future, for which we’ll be releasing updated and expanded information in the next month.

When CNJG advocated for, and ultimately created, the Newark Philanthropic Liaison position, there was only one other in the country. Five years after embedding Jeremy Johnson in Newark City Hall and Mayor Cory Booker’s administration, he’s been directly responsible for attracting more than $45 million and leveraging millions more.

These and many other CNJG programs throughout the state have placed New Jersey’s philanthropy among those providing best practices and successes that will be replicated across the country.

Nina Stack is the President of Council of New Jersey Grantmakers, the statewide association for corporate, family, independent, and community foundations. She is a regular contributor to the Dodge blog.

On the first day of the new year, promise shines, but on the second day, it begins to dim. Returning to teaching, although it’s a new semester with new courses, isn’t accompanied by the start-up glow of the fall term. For me, and maybe for some of you, the Eastern Standard Time of a Mid-Atlantic winter not only means early dark and late light, but a downward slide into ordinary time, the standardized minute-tick of day-to-day life, and the sense that something within has shrunken down to its hard, tart core. In his poem, “The times are nightfall,” British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says it all:

“The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:”

And then he proposes a counter to the nightfall: “Or what is else? There is your world within.”

So in early January, I turn my attention to cultivating my inner life with a brief yet leisurely retreat at the Jersey shore where the order of the day is read, write, eat and walk on the beach. The focus is to keep poetry alive within me for another year, the same goal that prompts my participation in the Dodge Poetry Program’s Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain sessions each year, sessions that are mini-retreats in their clarity and simplicity.

Why poetry? Because it’s slow. It’s unpredictable. It’s non-linear. There’s no right answer, but there’s clarity. The poem never asks more than I can give because reading a poem is a collaboration between the poem and the reader. I can return to the same poem every day and find something new in it, and in me because I’m seeing by the light of the poem. Or maybe the poem strikes a spark in that flinty winter core, and I’m the one who lights the poem in a new way. Either way, it feels symbiotic and surprising, as a good friendship does.

During Spring & Fountain, reading poetry isn’t forced: I’m not retooling a syllabus, searching out information for a report or required to learn anything. There’s no purpose except the doing of it, no rubric or anticipated outcome, no quantifiable result. When I share a poem, I don’t have to read to the end of poem, or even to the end of a line. As I listen to a poem being read, my attention can flit like the piping plovers I pass on the January beach at sunset, lifting and wheeling off, a delicious form of seasonal ADD that loosens the internal strictures developed from decades of studying, teaching and writing.

Why is this loosening necessary? Like stretching before exercise, flexibility. As a teacher and writer, language is the tool through which I practice my art and craft; if my use of it becomes rigid, my life-work is in trouble. I could endanger the art that keeps me awake in the world because, for me, poetry is the purest source of discovery and refreshment. And so this symbiotic relationship with poetry is not unlike that of humans with the endangered piping plover. When I create a protected space for poetry during Spring & Fountain, I develop practices that protect my own survival as an enlightened being.

Now I’m back in the classroom knowing winter’s long dark will continue for weeks. One solace is this year’s Spring & Fountain session where I’ll be with a group of educators, each of us making discoveries as we read and listen to poems. Like a walk on the beach, our collaboration with poems may be unpredictable and invigorating; there’s no telling when we’ll change direction, where we’ll wade in or wade out, or what the poems will toss up that we’ll want to look at more closely. Our Spring & Fountain mini-retreat will strike and fan a spark. When we leave, its protected space will remain a world within, a sanctuary that keeps giving light.

BIO

J. C. Todd currently teaches creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rosemont College after many years of teaching secondary English and leading Artist-in-the-Schools workshops.  Widely published in journals such as The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, her most recent collection of poems, What Space This Body, is published by Wind Publications. She’s had a happy affiliation with the Dodge Poetry Program for more than 20 years.

Photo courtesy of Lauren Rutten Photography

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For more information about the Dodge Poetry Festival and programs, visit www.dodgepoetry.org
Be our friend on Facebook,  and follow us on Twitter @DodgePoetryFest