Every morning, on my way to my e-mails or the news, I pause over the Dodge homepage. This Sunday, November 8th, I did more than pause, for there, finally, were the revised guidelines and all the accompanying materials people need to apply to Dodge for grants in 2010. We’ve been working on them for months.

It doesn’t take four or five months to write seven or eight pages and redesign some forms. But it could take forever to decide what’s in them, such is the freedom foundations have to choose among worthy ideas and efforts to support.

At this point in time, I hope we have found that sweet spot where change is so based on current practices and opportunities that it feels logical and right. These guidelines reflect what we have learned from our grantees, and I believe almost all of those organizations will find themselves in this new presentation of what Dodge supports.

At the same time, the new guidelines encourage big-picture thinking, which is different from our supporting discreet programs in different disciplines. They reflect a long-term vision of New Jersey as a creative place and, as a result, a more sustainable place. And they are built around the importance of having well-run and well-governed nonprofit organizations serving that vision both alone and, increasingly, with others.

Thus you will notice some new language about “high-potential, innovative, collaborative programs and models.” What do we mean by this? We think of the Sustainable Jersey coalition of local governments, universities, state government, businesses and nonprofits now working so effectively to give people on the local level the tools they need to make their places more sustainable. We think of the work Young Audiences of New Jersey and the Foundation for Educational Administration is doing to launch a state-wide creativity initiative. We think of the work The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education is doing to involve schools, school-systems and their communities in understanding the mind-sets necessary to create a sustainable future together.

And we believe there will be other important ideas and effective approaches that will come our way because of the new guideline language about creativity and sustainability. As we say elsewhere on this site, quoting playwright David Mamet, “We steer where we are looking.”

I hope somewhere out there my successor is looking — and liking what he or she sees.

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 ever 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.

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Amidst the sweeping change at the gubernatorial level, 52% of NJ voters voted “yes” on yesterday’s ballot question, ensuring $400 million in public funds to protect water sources, natural areas, farmland, parks and historic sites. Although the detailed analysis is not yet in, the story behind the success of the ballot measure seems likely to be one that rises above partisan politics.

My projection of land and historic preservation as a nonpartisan issue is based on the diversity among the organizations that supported the ballot measure.  The organizations ranged from the NJ Farm Bureau to environmental justice advocates, and from outdoor recreation enthusiasts to urban community development corporations. How many other issues in NJ can draw support from these different corners? I take this as a hopeful sign that the notion of a “sustainable New Jersey” links our natural environment to our built environment, spans rural, suburban and urban concerns, and examines the interrelatedness of economic prosperity, equity and access, and environmental and human health and well being.

I love the images utilized in the NJ Keep it Green Campaign. To me, it says that the public funding question is as much about preserving open spaces and natural resources (which is often portrayed as putting land and animals above people), as it is about the future of our urban centers, opportunities for our youth, green jobs, health, recreation, and so much more.

I found an interesting article by University of Pennsylvania Professor Tom Daniels and University of Southern Maine Professor Mark Lapping (who was the founding Dean of the Bloustein School of Planning at Rutgers University) entitled “Land Preservation: An Essential Ingredient in Smart Growth.”  In it, the authors assert that land preservation needs to become less of a reactive and more of a proactive effort in terms of smart land use planning, especially at the local government level. They note the following:

Planning in America has traditionally meant ‘planning for development.’ But residents in hundreds of communities have recognized that it is also necessary to plan for the preservation of recreational land, natural environments, and working farm and forest landscapes. Striking a balance among the natural environment, working landscapes, and the built environment is one of the biggest challenges that local governments face.

When you consider that NJ is a home rule state comprised of 566 municipalities, this challenge is striking. I am fortunate, however, to work with numerous Dodge grantees whose members work tirelessly to bring new and creative solutions to natural resource, land and water use, and farmland and historic preservation issues, including collaborative efforts and capacity building assistance at the local government level. In fact, of the 135 members of the NJ Keep it Green Campaign, thirty-two are long-time Dodge grantees (note that none of their Dodge funding was used to support lobbying activity). Yesterday’s vote will fuel their mission driven efforts throughout New Jersey.

I know there is the real and nagging question about increased state debt that goes along with the bond measure. I was drawn to the following interview with economist James Hughes, Dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, who talked about the profitability of land conservation. While his views may not satisfy everyone, he makes a strong case for public investment in land preservation. He noted that during the current economic downturn that we may have a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire land at affordable prices.” He went on to say that “you can get much more bang for your buck now, making it the opportune time to engage in land acquisition.”

I hope that the diverse voices of support on the ballot question signal a new era of cooperation and creativity on land and historic preservation issues. The pathway to a sustainable future will take investment of all kinds – and it will have to take place in and across all sectors. So as NJ experiences a gubernatorial administration change, here’s to nonpartisan efforts that clearly speak to the future of this great state.

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.

As I designed, organized my crew of parent stitchers, managed fittings, sewed all night, attended rehearsals, and performed as a dancer in the production, I knew I was mastering career-building skills and invaluable communication and leadership skills.  I didn’t know that this theatre experience would be the pivotal experience that would begin the transition from childhood to a career as a professional stage director, theatre administrator, and now foundation program officer.

Take a minute to think of the key moment(s) that led you to where you are today.  Are they linked to an experience where you discovered something about yourself that surprised and delighted you?   It likely delighted others, and you were rewarded with encouragement, more responsibility and… “the rest is history.”

This belief in the importance of creating opportunities to develop young leaders is at the core of many of our grantees work.   So when New York City-based Sadie Nash Leadership Project expanded their highly successful leadership program for young women to Newark, NJ, we were honored to support their efforts.

This past summer marked their second year working in Newark.  While I was visiting the program, one of the program leaders summarized what I was witnessing:  “The young women are discovering their personal map for transforming their lives and ultimately for changing the world.”  Wow.  No small task, but what a worthy endeavor!  The 30 young women took classes like, Womanist Thought and Spirituality, Building a Feminist Collective, Art and Womanhood, and Dear Hip Hop. They looked at power, identity and issues surrounding privilege.  They explored how to use art to channel their energy and communicate with others.  They put into practice their organizing skills with a final project that engaged their families, friends and community.

I think the story of this summer is best told by one of the students in her own words.   Please meet Shanavia:

My name is Shanavia. I am a senior at Newark Tech High School.  I was blessed with the opportunity to be a part of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project (SNLP) for the past two summers.  My experience being in this program was nothing less than amazing.  I created bonds with people I probably would have never met in my life, bonds that I believe will last a lifetime.  This program is wonderful in so many ways. It reinforced leadership skills I already began developing.  We as Nashers were exposed to so many different things.  Although my two summers in the program were very different, I believe I gained something from each of my experiences.

During my first year as a Nasher, I really didn’t know what I was getting into, because this was the first year SNLP was brought to the Newark community.  I must admit that summer was probably one of the greatest experiences of my life, as the females that I shared those weeks with became my family. My second year in the program was a little different because since I felt secure in what I was getting into, I felt like I knew how the summer would go.  My mission being a second year was to let the first year Nashers know that they would gain so many things by being a part of Sadie Nash.  I wanted to show all the things I learned. I was a leader in so many ways.  Sadie Nash has helped me grow, not only as a leader but as a woman in my community.  I am extremely grateful that I had the opportunity to become a part of an organization I will hold in my heart for the rest of my life.

For those of you how like statistics, I think you will find the final evaluations results also tell a story of success:

92% agreed with the statement “I have more options for my future”

92% agreed with the statement “I feel more excited about or interested in going to college”

100% agreed with the statement “I can take what I have learned at the Summer Institute and apply it at school”

100% “Feel more confident because of participating in the Summer Institute.”

Tell us when you first knew you were a leader or when you first felt empowered to create change in the world.

Robin Robertson savors the flavor and texture of words as much as he does their capacity to connect us to the physical world through the carefully wrought image. Listen to his reading of four short poems during the Saturday Night Poetry Sampler at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival.

Words are corporeal for Robertson. It is as if the oral/aural qualities of syllables themselves—pitch, tone, texture, duration—were the characteristics of physical objects. One can almost feel him weighing words in his hands to find the perfect fit.

He is just as careful in choosing the exact detail. Robinson reminds us that imagery extends beyond the visual. His poems are full of tactile, olfactory, and auditory images that engage all the senses. We can almost taste the “Artichoke” in his poem.

But he does not relish the shape and feel of words for their own sake, and his attention to detail is about more than technique. A poem like “Ghost of a Garden” reminds us that living in the world means living with irreparable loss. Robertson brings the same quality of careful attention to this poem as he does to “Artichoke” and “Wedding the Blacksmith’s Daughter,” two poems that celebrate sensual pleasures.

For Robertson, the act of cherishing just the right syllable or descriptive detail is the act of cherishing the world. This act is even more important in those poems, like “Donegal,” which confront the truth that we are transitory creatures.

“Artichoke” is from Robertson’s first collection, The Painted Field. “Wedding the Locksmith’s Daughter” appears in Slow Air. “Ghost of a Garden” and “Donegal” are from his latest collection Swithering. Robertson has also written a modern translation of Euripides’ Medea. A biography of Robin Robertson 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 Patrcia Smith, Kevin Young and others.

We lost a great educator last week. I suspect that many of us in the boomer generation who went into teaching paused over Ted Sizer’s obituary in The New York Times with appreciation for the man who dominated our sense of what good schools – and good teaching – should be like.

One of Sizer’s metaphors was “teacher as coach.” It is a profound notion if you contrast it with the unspoken alternative in the schools where I first learned to teach – teacher as star. When you have a good coach, the students become the stars. It was at the center of Sizer’s vision of a good school – the students are the stars. As someone who experienced the seduction of the other model, I felt as if he saved me.

In one of his books, he wrote that in good schools, “students feel known and know where they are going.” Simply being known set the stage for commitment and achievement. That has affected my ideas about scale and about how communities should work ever since.

The coalition of schools inspired by Sizer’s work are called “Essential Schools,” and the adjective “essential” is most often used to modify “questions.” Sizer believed you should build your curriculum around questions that don’t have right answers. You never get to the end of essential questions, in school or in a lifetime of learning. But the pursuit of these questions is at the heart of a liberal education. Here too I feel his influence in my daily work: What is effective philanthropy? What does a humane and sustainable society look like?

My work as co-founder of The Mountain School in Vermont brought me together with Ted Sizer over the years. Once, in a speech he gave at The Putney School, he cited The Mountain School as an example of how independent schools should use their independence. For me, it might as well have been God saying, “And it was good.”

When my wife Nancy and I visited Ted at his home to talk about how to measure the impact of The Mountain School on its students – how to “prove” its effectiveness — he said, “Don’t bother. The sample is too small. The students self-select. There is no control group.” Then he grinned, “But you have your graduates. Just tell their stories.” So that’s what we did.

And I tell this story, too, the week after his death, with deep respect and gratitude.

photo: John Foraste/Brown University

It’s not easy being a nonprofit arts organization in New Jersey according to the latest results of a survey done by ArtPride/New Jersey, our state’s arts advocacy organization. And it’s really tough being an employee of a nonprofit arts company. Ann Marie Miller, ArtPride’s Executive Director, surveyed the arts field back in February, at the height of the economic downturn. She re-surveyed the field in early September and the results were quite interesting, although not surprising.

An excellent cross-section of organizations responded, 139 in all. This cohort:

• Had budgets ranging from under $100,000 to over $10 million.
• Had great geographic distribution: 28% of the respondents were organizations based in south Jersey; 33% central Jersey; and 39% north Jersey.
• Was diverse: one-third focused on performing arts, one-third on community/arts education; 19% were visual arts oriented; and 13% were service organizations and/or local arts councils.

Here are some of the key findings from the survey:

Income:

Earned income (such as ticket sales) has stayed relatively flat – that’s the good news. 56% reported a decrease in foundation support; 63% received decreased support from corporations (32% of which were down by 25% or more); 77% saw less government dollars (not surprising, considering the New Jersey State Council on the Arts suffered a 25% cut this year); and 46% reported that support from individuals had declined.

Programming:

• 27% had eliminated some programs; 28% had decreased programming
• 92 programs, 20 exhibitions, 18 productions and 127 performances had been cancelled. And what was most frequently cited as eliminated? Free programs in the schools.

Staffing:

• 39% of organizations had reduced their staff in the prior six months; 17% more expected to within the next six months.
• 132 positions had been eliminated, running the gamut from receptionist to executive director.
• 29% had reduced administrative hours and/or hours open to the public. An additional 17% expected to do so in the next six months.
• Many organizations reported using salary decreases, furloughs, reduced hours and moving from 5-day to 4-day work weeks (with 20% cuts in pay) as strategies for survival.

Finances:

• 40% predicted that they would not have a deficit in FY ’09. 25% weren’t sure yet. 35% thought they would have an ’09 deficit.
• Organizations were predicting anywhere from a 10% to a 50% cut in their operating budgets for 2010.

But arts organizations are beginning to feel a bit more optimistic. When asked back in February what they thought the future would hold, 63% thought things would get worse in the next six months. By September, only 26% were thinking things were going to get worse; a healthy group of glass half-fullers – 28% – thought the economic climate would get better.

What kinds of measures did your organization take during the height of the economic crisis to contain costs and secure future financial stability? Which strategies worked and why? Which ones didn’t? Are you more optimistic now about the future of your organization than you were six months ago? What do you think the future holds for public funding of the arts in the next year? Leave your comments for us below – they could be extremely helpful to your fellow nonprofit organizations.

To find out more about our state’s arts community, visit ArtPride’s website. There you will find all kinds of up-to-date information, including the answers to questions regarding the arts that ArtPride posed to the three major candidates for governor. There is also a link to the gubernatorial debate which took place on Thursday, October 22 and was aired on WBGO and other public television stations. A question about arts funding was featured prominently, and the responses from the candidates are quite informative about their perspective on the importance of the arts and state arts funding.

Are you on Twitter? Dodge wants to connect with you, especially if you are a Dodge grantee. Find us @grdodge.

Poet Jack Wiler has been a part of the Dodge poetry community for over twenty years. He read at the 1988, 1996 and 2006 Poetry Festivals, and throughout those years worked with New Jersey teachers and high school students in our Poetry-in-the-Schools Program. All of us at Dodge are deeply saddened by the news of his passing.

Jack’s was a singular and unmistakable voice. His poems were fueled by a quest to understand what it meant to be a human being living in America in these particular times, by bewilderment at our capacity to wound ourselves and others, by an urgency that we embrace the possibilities of life while they are available to us, and by impatience that we so often fail to do so.

To hear Jack read his poems meant to laugh until you ached. His poems often startled and provoked even as they made us laugh because he refused to turn a blind eye to his own or others’ weaknesses.

“Chucklehead” was his favorite term of endearment for himself or anyone who’d blundered, and he treasured us and our blunders, mixed beratement with benediction, in poem after poem. And his poems will continue to berate and bless us.

Love Poem at the Beginning of Summer
by Jack Wiler

This is a love poem about empty places.
About blank walls.
About light in the night and noises on the street.
This is a love poem where no one is there.

This is a love poem for you.
This is your house.
This is the light you make.
The soft light of a summer night.

The noises from the bar down the block.
The girls screaming at their lovers.
Your clothes spread across the bed.
You spread across the bed.

The sun in the afternoon. Too hot sometimes to bear.
The smell of your skin.
You mixed carrots and soda for tanning cream.
That taste is this poem.

This is a poem without you in it.
Like every love poem should be.
A poem with an empty heart.
A poem with a smell you can’t quite name.

I say, you smell almost like cotton candy.
You show me your perfume and it’s cotton candy.
I say you smell like my life.
You show me getting up and going to work and coming home tired.

I say, I love you and you say, I love you
and we could say that over and over and over.
But what I know is the spray of tanning oil on the deck.
The spilled Corona.

The taste of your breath, thick with beer and tobacco.

This is a poem with no one in the house but me and two dogs.
This is a poem with the deep sighs of my dogs.
The breeze from a summer night.
The wail of a siren.
The music from my neighbor’s radio.
Cumbia.
Soft mountain music.
Music about places and islands I’ve never seen.

Your hair is scattered on the sink.
Clothes are tossed on the bed.
The dogs are snoring.
The girls and boys from the bar are yelling.
It’s a loud poem.
It’s a poem that won’t let me forget.

So I wander out and look at the pale Hudson County sky.
I can’t see a single star.
The moon is hazy with neglect.
The dryer is turning and turning.
The dogs are tossing.

Everything in the world is asking about you.

Jack Wiler’s most recent collection is Fun Being Me.  The photograph above of Jack at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival was taken by his friend Mark Hillringhouse.

On my block, there are four houses across the street from us. One of the houses is unoccupied, and the other three each have giant trampolines in their backyards. My husband and I had the same reaction when we realized this – couldn’t our neighbors have bought one trampoline that they all shared?

When I saw this story about NeighborGoods on Re-Nest last week, it made me think of the trampolines.

NeighborGoods is a newly-launched online marketplace which encourages people to get more use out of items they – or someone nearby – already own by lending, renting, borrowing, buying or selling stuff among their neighbors.

Why buy a brand new snow blower, when you can rent or borrow one from the neighbor? Why throw away your kid’s bike when you can sell it to the family down the street who wants it? Makes sense, right? And it keeps more trash out of landfills and more money in your pocket. NeighborGoods facilitates these kinds of transactions while also fostering a sense of community and sharing and reminding us that we can live less wasteful lives.

Micki Krimmel is the force behind NeighborGoods. She’s well-known for her Web 2.0 work which focuses on sustainable community development and authentic, participatory community dialogue. She was instrumental in leading interactive media efforts for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and formerly worked as a columnist for WorldChanging.com – a website and its founder Alex Steffen whose work we follow here at Dodge.

Unfortunately for most of us, NeighborGoods is only available for southern California, but I know you can already imagine how useful a site like this would be in your neighborhood. If you’re interested in starting your own neighborhood sharing system, here’s another post from re-nest featuring the book The Sharing Solution, which teaches you how. Shareable is another useful online resource, which covers a wide range of topics about sharing beyond exchanging tangible goods.

If you’re already on Twitter, you can follow Dodge, NeighborGoods, Micki, Alex Steffen, Worldchanging and Shareable. If you’re not, what are you waiting for? Sign up and see what everyone is tweeting about!

You probably know about TED talks and their tagline “ideas worth spreading.” I got to spend Sunday afternoon at a live TEDx talk organized around the theme of “What is possible in School.”

The “x” factor in the TED community stands for an independently organized TED event, and here’s where the “blue” comes into play because this event was hosted by the Blue School, which was founded by . . . yes, you guessed it, the Blue Man Group. If you want to get a glimpse of how radical education transformation manifests in a school, the Blue School is a must on your learning journey.

As a Dodge representative who is trying to help the Foundation continuously weave together the threads of creativity and sustainability throughout its grantmaking, this day was a feast for the mind presented by pioneering Education gourmets whose backgrounds ran the gamut from brain scientists to sustainability movement builders, and from far reaching school designers to psychologists. As soon as the video link of the presentation is live, we will send you a “high alert” and invitation to listen-in.  For now, let me introduce the presenters – all of them “provocateurs” in their own right (see note on David Rock’s work) – and whet your appetite for this TEDxblue talk.

Part of the beauty of the TED is that the effort is building a community of thought leaders, which enables a talk organizer to pull “idea spreaders” from the TED archives. This day started with a replay of Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

Sir Ken likens the current education practices to strip mining our children’s minds to extract a single commodity rather than educating for a world that understands and develops the richness of human capacity. He wonders how many children we are losing because we “educate them from the waist up . . . then the head up . . . and then to one side” of the brain. Sir Ken believes that we are educating the creative capacity out of our children. If we are trying, as Sir Ken asserts, to “educate children for a future we cannot grasp”, it seems that we are “ruthlessly squandering” an opportunity to ignite their inherent creative capacity to deal with and shape that future.

Imagine a discussion on “what is possible in schools” where Sir Ken is the appetizer! Chris Wink, representing the Blue School Founders, has done a lot of thinking about how we can more aggressively promote creativity in schools. If you have had the rich experience of seeing the Blue Man Group perform you might recognize the “six mindsets” that Chris believes we can more “deliberately explore” and “move through” to tap our creative juices. He explained them as three pairs of diametrically opposed mindsets:

• Scientist v. Shaman (our rational selves versus our instinctual, primal, inner-world explorer)
• Group member v. Trickster (our ability to be attuned to others and experience creative collaboration versus the impulse to push past the constraints of convention and stimulate new ways of seeing and being)
• Hero v. the Innocent (our ability to hold our resolve, to resourcefully push through obstacles and focus on a goal (soon to be referred to as “grit”) versus our ability to enter an emotional, fully present place where we experience childlike vulnerability — how many of us in our adulthood are adept at going here?)

When the Blue Man Group is at the top of their game, they move through and express connections among these mindsets. So is it not possible to educate our children to experience and move through these mindsets so they too have a fully developed mind palate?

Ok, so you are riding the creative high with me now, but what enables people to move from great experiences to high achievement? We think about this at Dodge all the time. Experiential education, a main focus of our grantmaking, might help a child enter a mindset they have not fully explored, or tap creative expression, or turn on a passion (all incredibly valuable), but what is it that makes it stick. University of Pennsylvania researcher Angela Duckworth believes we need “true grit”  to become a high achiever. Angela talked about capacity (our talents) and industry (the path to unlocking the talents). She measures things like the “tendency not to abandon tasks in the face of obstacles” or when faced with “changeability.” Her studies of students who perform best in spelling bees revealed that it is not intelligence that is the highest predictor of success, rather it is those who become “deliberate in practice.” This means that they “isolate what they don’t know, focus in and improve in these areas,” which, by the way, requires a willingness to operate – and persevere – outside one’s comfort zone. True grit.

Educate for creativity, check. Support the development of true grit, check.

But can you clear the hurdle of how we’ve hardwired our children’s brain to do almost the opposite of this? Brain scientist David Rock knows we can, but he asserts that it requires a “novel intrusion” to inspire such change – enter the role of the “provocateur.” The Blue School is integrating the provocateur into the classroom and curriculum. As David Rock explained, the provocateur “notices subtle signals, is ok with uncertainty and knows how to create change.” In essence, these are quiet leaders and change agents. Hmmm, what would happen in classrooms across the country if class aide positions were transformed to class provocateur positions? If you need more convincing on the brain science, pick up a hot off the press copy of David Rock’s book “Your Brain at Work”

So we can rewire the brain to inspire a generation of creative thinkers and actors, but how do we address the “better world” challenge? As Jaimie Cloud, founder and president of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education says, “We wouldn’t need to educate for sustainability if there was no such thing as unsustainable.” As Jaimie notes, we “spend” 20% more natural capital than humans or nature put back into this earth, which “undermines the systems on which we depend” – and that’s unsustainable.

You may know that the Cloud Institute is a long time Dodge grantee and that Jamie’s work has the Foundation focused in on “systems thinkers” who can “gain new knowledge, apply insights and shift paradigms toward a sustainable future.”

Cloud’s curriculum gets at multiple, interconnected and integrated systems for sustainability learning. I’ll run through them here, but you really need to dive deep to understand their transformative power.

With that caveat, let’s go – we can educate in a way that children understand how to read feedback (this is the fuel for re-wiring the brain circuits) and get new results; we can teach kids that there are limits in a healthy system and that they can tap the power of limits (usher in creative thinking); we can teach children to live by natural laws (why skip this critical lesson – we teach laws created for safety, ethics and the like, but as Jaimie says, we don’t give kids the “operating principles of the planet”); we can teach children that we are all responsible and interconnected, especially in terms of understanding and protecting the commons (and there is the neurobiology of “we” to back this up – see Dan Seigel’s work). In essence, life is not a zero sum game and we can transform education in a way that our children understand that a healthy and sustainable future is possible. How? In part, because INTENTION TRUMPS our hardwiring (did I mention that Jaimie is one of my heroes?).

Dodge is promoting Cloud’s work in a number of ways in New Jersey, including curriculum shifts at Unity Charter School and a train the trainers program called NJ Learns: Schools and Communities that Learn Together for a Sustainable Future. We are also helping Cloud link this work into the exciting Sustainable Jersey program.

Jaimie often talks about educating for sustainability as preparing us to “write a new narrative.” Sometimes, though, we need people to lead us through existing narratives we have yet to explore – and to understand how to listen and discover. That teed-up the archive of Benjamin Zander’s TED talk wherein the famous conductor presented ideas about “Classical music with shiny eyes”

In 18 minutes, he makes classical music resonate with everyone. He moves from single note impulses to deceptive cadence and whole phrase impulse (it is not the same without the music). He is a conductor who understands his leadership makes other people powerful, that his work awakens possibilities, and that he succeeds when he looks out and sees shining eyes. I suspect that all the arts do this and can prepare us to write that new narrative of human interaction and experience, but our challenge, as Benjamin states, is to ask “who am I being that my players eyes are not shining?” He asserts that what we say (to our children – to each other) makes a difference.

How to start to put all these concepts together? Dr. Dan Siegel talked about an “integrated mindsight.” He would add three new Rs to the education system– Reflection, Relationship and Resilience – all based on the brain science that we have two main circuits in our brain: the physical (the traditional three Rs address this) and the world of the mind (the circuit that is undeveloped by current education – usher in the three new Rs). He talked about kindergarten being the last time in school where we focus on interpersonal relationships, and he noted that we spend the rest of our education shaping the mind through the traditional 3 Rs. By doing this, he asserts that we miss the opportunity to develop the circuitry that deals insight and empathy, and that helps us see the world as interconnected. He invoked Einstein’s quote about our “optical delusion of our separateness.” He stresses the brain as our social organ, one that school and our modern culture have imprisoned. He sees reflection as the “opportunity to see that relationships are our life’s blood.” Basically, we have a social emergency in that we are less capable of regulating our internal world because we can’t see what’s inside. We have no “mindsight” to see and shape the internal world and little “face to face interaction that enables us to track it.” It seems to me that we will have to turn to each other and resolve (with true grit) to develop some strong mindsight to turn education on its head so we can write that new narrative.

I feel like the waiter who just described a menu of new tantalizing dishes with exotic ingredients, each one with its own allure that is swirling around in your head. I imagine you thinking, “what was that middle dish about grit,” or “can you tell me more about mindsets and mindsight?”, knowing full well you will need to listen to this TEDxblue talk over and over until you’ve fully tasted each dish and re-wired your own brain along the way. I’m guessing that notions of traditional school “reform” are looking a lot less attractive and that you are hungry for education transformation that will enable everyone to order from this menu –this will be our collective challenge.

Do you have examples of schools that are serving these items? Please share. Would you be interested in a large scale, multi-venue viewing of this TEDxblue talk in New Jersey – perhaps one that invites conversation and records community responses? I think Dodge might be able to play a role in something like this – let us know your thoughts.