Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

David Grant, President and CEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another cycle of grantmaking is underway.

Wendy Liscow, Program Officer

I remember distinctly the moment I knew that the moniker “leader” could apply to me.  I was a sophomore in high school, and I had signed up to help with costumes for a musical review at a local community theatre company.  I thought I would be helping a costume designer sew a few costumes.  It turned out that I was the designer for the show which featured 35 teenagers requiring over 90 costumes and had to be cranked out in two months’ time during  evenings and weekends.   I had been taken under the educational wings of a talented husband and wife team who believed that if you immersed teens in theatre-making you created future leaders.  Not just future theatre artists, but leaders in general.

(more…)

Ross Danis, Program Director, Education

You may hear the mention of a number of “gaps” when people are talking about education: the achievement gap between various income groups and races; the gap in funding between school districts; and the gap between athletics and, say, the arts. Perhaps the most serious gap is between the skills of even the most successful, best educated students and the skills required to be successful in a complex, rapidly changing, and very challenging world – the creativity gap.

View the situation this way: our children are just as literate as they were 20 years ago, but the standards for being literate have changed. The stakes are higher. Today, children will enter, as adults, a world where the “creative class” will rule. In fact, creativity is right up there with the basics of mathematics and reading. UNESCO reports that almost 60% of all the jobs in the 21st century will depend on the capacity to be creative. (more…)

Ross Danis, Program Director, Education

If there is a silver thread in this dark economic cloud, it is the potential to raise the number and the quality of teachers working in high need disciplines such as math and science, in high need districts such as Newark and Camden.

One has to imagine that there are some of the “downsized” engineers and scientists who worked in New Jersey’s high tech businesses who would make fine teachers if properly trained and mentored. One can also imagine a new group of young people currently seriously considering teaching as opposed to, let’s say, banking, as a career choice. In both scenarios, I think motives are relevant, and that in addition to shifting economic realities, I sense a shift in values. A life defined by service, contribution, and meaning, as well as having a career that is relatively secure, makes teaching very attractive.

(more…)

As the Dodge Foundation shifts its focus this time of year to our Education grants, Education Program Director Ross Danis notes the work of an organization in Newark helping young people succeed, even under the most difficult of circumstances:

Dr. Vincent Mays runs the Youth Education and Employment Success Center (Ye²s Center), a remarkable partnership between the City of Newark, the Newark Public Schools, Rutgers University, and a spectrum of non-profit organizations. He is a “can-do” guy, who, with an extraordinary team, is helping to improve education and employment opportunities for the youth of Newark.

(more…)