Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

If you are a regular reader of the Dodge blog, you know that we’re constantly encouraging you to join us on Facebook and on Twitter too. And not just because we want to share Dodge Foundation & Poetry Festival information with you. We see these social media tools as a learning opportunity for us – we love to hear about the work our grantees and partners are doing across the state. Moreover, we want to share your ideas, information and success stories as broadly as possible. We welcome your comments, conversation and links on our Facebook page, and we look forward to following you and hearing from you on Twitter.

So consider this is an open invitation – particularly to all current Dodge grantees – to email us at blog@grdodge.org if your organization has a Facebook fan page and/or you are on Twitter. We want to connect with you. In the coming weeks, we will share who is using these tools so that you can connect with them too.

I’m going to get you started. Here are environment groups – recent or current Dodge grantees and all members of the New Jersey Keep It Green Coalition – who are on Facebook:

American Littoral Society
Appalachian Mountain Club
Bayshore Discovery Project
Clean Ocean Action
Conserve Wildlife Foundation
Edison Wetlands Association
Greater Newark Conservancy
Hackensack Riverkeeper
Heritage Conservancy
Hunterdon Land Trust Alliance
Isles, Inc.
Land Conservancy of New Jersey
Natural Lands Trust
New Jersey Audubon Society
New Jersey Conservation Foundation
New Jersey Future
New Jersey Highlands Coalition
Passaic River Coalition
Pinelands Preservation Alliance
Regional Plan Association
Skylands CLEAN
Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association
The Nature Conservancy
Trust for Public Land

We love the preservation success stories that Keep It Green shares on Facebook.

Becoming a fan is just a click away!

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Patricia Smith’s reading of her poem “34” reminds us that poetry comes out of an oral tradition that predates written language by tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.

We know the epics and sacred texts that built the foundation for all the literature that has followed were originally composed on the tongue. They were passed on, generation by generation, through the oral tradition.

It has been argued that the truest histories have been written by our poets, who capture the human costs of those momentous events that the official histories tend to abstract and glorify.

The Iliad chronicles one of the great disasters of its age: a war that raged for a decade and ended in the destruction of a once beautiful and flourishing city. In the centuries since, poets have striven to understand the catastrophes of their own times.

This is never more so than in those cases when vast human suffering seems the inexplicable result of our own folly. For Homer, it was the fall of Troy; for Patricia Smith, it is the fall of New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina.

In Blood Dazzler, her book-length sequence of poems from which “34” is taken, Smith assumes the personae of countless participants in and victims of the disaster. We would like to make sense out of such an event, but we also know its survivors can never fully explain why it happened. To hear Smith read one of these poems is to enter into their unending dilemma. In writing and reading these poems, Smith pulls us directly into her struggle to understand.

A biography of Patricia Smith can be found in the 2008 Festival Poet Pages.

Return to Poetry Fridays in the weeks ahead, when we will feature video clips of readings by Kevin Young, and others.

Become a fan of the Poetry Festival on Facebook and follow the Dodge Foundation on Twitter!

Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

Philanthropy411 published a list of 90 foundations on Twitter. Several more foundations (including us) added our names to the list, so that it’s now 99 Foundations (thanks to Socialbrite for the updated list) and growing on Twitter. You can find the list here.

But more importantly, Dodge wants to connect with its grantees and with New Jersey non-profits on Twitter. Are you there? Who else is on Twitter that we should know about? Tell us and follow us @grdodge.

Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

One of the amazing things about Twitter is the instantaneous access to a wide variety of resources, including all kinds of articles we at Dodge think are useful and interesting, not just to us,  but also to our grantees. Often, we tweet about them on Twitter, but in case you’re not a Twitter user yet, here are a few recent social media links we think are worth reading:

Mashable: The Social Media Guide is a go-to resource for social media article and how-tos. Yesterday they posted an interesting article about collaborative blogging. Their list of really informative How-To guides is here.

The Connections blog by Steve MacLaughlin has a great article on social media strategy: Creating a Social Networking Strategy (Part 0). And a useful follow-up: Social Media is a Big Waste of Time. He also has an Online Guide for Nonprofits that you might find useful.

The Case Foundation tells us that nonprofits are taking the lead in using social media – far outpacing universities and businesses. They also link to a great Social Media Strategy Handbook written by Wendy Harman for the Red Cross.

We mentioned last week that Dodge is on Twitter now; you can find us @grdodge. We’re discovering that Twitter is the perfect tool for communicating all of the useful pieces of information that come to us in our field visits, as well as through invitations and emails we receive from our grantees and peers, and through articles and books we’re reading – most of which we’re often not able to get up on our website quickly enough. Twitter, moreso than our website and blog, is the tool that helps us redistribute this information in a very timely way.

Are you on Twitter? Are you struggling with how to best use social media? How can Dodge help you sort through and learn what you need to know about social media? We’d love to know.