In the meantime, if you’re on Twitter, please follow us @grdodge.

Thank you for taking the time to read our posts and visiting our website. We’ll see you back here in a few days.

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Last Monday a team of “Dodgers” gathered at the Laurel Hill Paddling Center and boarded a pontoon boat so we could see, smell, and touch and better understand the stories behind the rebounding health of the Hackensack River. While there are a number of factors in play, like better environmental regulations and improved industry standards, many of the River recovery stories begin with one person – Captain Bill Sheehan, the Hackensack Riverkeeper.

I have to admit, being a former field hockey goal keeper, I have a particular affinity for the “waterkeepers.” There is something unique about watching and trying to influence actions that are unfolding across the entire playing field, and then serving as the last line of defense. Of course the stakes couldn’t be higher for the Waterkeepers. They are often the last line of defense against ill-planned developments and uneducated (and sometimes just unconcerned) polluters that stand to wipe out critical habitat that protect us from flooding, clean our waters and support wildlife.

During our eco cruise Captain Bill laid out the challenges: the legacy of industrial activity, the impact of the NJ Turnpike, the impact of the Newark Airport, and the continued environmental violations from industry, businesses, and developers (just to name a few). One of my colleagues recalled her childhood images of the Meadowlands as a filthy wasteland. When she took her first eco cruise with Captain Bill a few years ago she was amazed that the River and the surrounding wetlands offered a sanctuary for wildlife and presented scenic views.

Now to truly understand the transformative actions of the Hackensack Riverkeeper, you need to be front and center for Captain Bill’s rich storytelling. I won’t attempt to capture the details of those awe-inspiring stories here, but I will share a few images to pique your interest in the River’s rebound.

No more than five minutes into our eco cruise along the Sawmill Creek Wildlife Management Area, we were greeted by a black crowned night heron.

Two minutes later an egret flew across the bow of the boat.

Mallards engaged in an endless series of short take-offs and landings that would have sent the air traffic controllers at Newark International into a frenzy. And as the traffic along the turnpike whizzed by, we were following the beginnings of the Hackensack Riverkeeper’s water trail.

A main take-away about the River’s rebound is the approach of the Riverkeeper. Captain Bill believes in partnerships and he stands ready to make eco-heroes out of anyone willing to listen, learn and act on the River’s behalf. Take PSEG for example. As we rounded a bend in the River, we were greeted by the site of the last remaining coal-fired electric generating facility in New Jersey. Following advocacy by the Riverkeeper and strong leadership at PSEG, measures have been taken to improve the emissions, as well as to protect fish from water intakes. The fish story has been such a success that there is now a nesting pair of osprey on telephone pole adjacent to the plant. We moved in slowly to catch a glimpse of a mother and chick, but note that Captain Bill is on patrol here to keep fisherman and others away from the area during the breeding season.

Near the end of our eco cruise, after passing under a maze of Amtrak and roadway bridges, Captain Bill pointed up to a bridge landing and to our amazement a peregrine falcon was looking down on us.

The falcon seems to stand as regal harbinger of river health, though there are many remaining challenges in this most urban of ecosystem settings (a mere 20 million people live and work within a stone’s throw of the Hackensack River). By way of partnerships, education, advocacy, and when necessary, legal action, Captain Bill has thwarted countless bad developments, stopped pollution and planted the seeds for renewable energy projects, regenerative development and other positive people-nature ventures.

We returned to the dock with a sense of deep gratitude and a feeling of hope about the work of the Hackensack Riverkeeper and of all our New Jersey based waterkeepers (the Hackensack Riverkeeper is joined by the NY/NJ Baykeeper and the Delaware Riverkeeper). Please join these dedicated frontline waterkeepers and their staffs to learn more about ways to enjoy and protect these precious waterways – and if you see anything of concern when you are traveling along the Hackensack River, just call the Watershed Watch Hotline (1-877-CPT-BILL) to set the wheels of action in motion.

Click here for more information about the Paddling Center at Laurel Hill Park, which is easily accessible by car or train (Secaucus Junction) The Hackensack Riverkeeper has a fleet of twenty-six canoes and kayaks at the Center and is ready to take you on a guided paddle or eco cruise.

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If you live in New York or New Jersey, tune to your local PBS station to see Greetings from Asbury Park, a documentary that explores how eminent domain abuse has affected the family and small resort town of Asbury Park.

The film follows 91-year-old Angie Hampilos, a Greek immigrant and the great aunt of filmmaker Christina Eliopoulos, as she learns that her seaside bungalow—her home of over 50 years—will be taken by eminent domain to make way for luxury condominiums.

The award-winning film will be aired on NJN from July 6  to July 12 and on WLIW from July 11 to July 15.

For a trailer of the movie, and more information, please visit the Greetings from Asbury Park website.

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The Dodge Foundation is off today, celebrating the long holiday weekend. Stay tuned for next week’s blog posts, including a round-up of our field trip with the Hackensack Riverkeeper and a visit with US Poet Laureate (2004-2006) Ted Kooser on Friday.

Have a great holiday!

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Try this on for size: according to a recent article in the Guardian, “More than 98% of supposedly natural and environmentally friendly products on US supermarket shelves are making potentially false or misleading claims.” Hm. Gives you pause, right?

Second, here’s an interesting article from the New York Times about incorporating an agricultural component into planned subdivisions – access to locally-grown produce, wholesome family activities at the farm, etc. – in an effort to rethink the types of communities where people want to live.

And last, some updated pics of our garden. The flowers (and dill!) are taller than us, the zucchinis are growing like mad, and we’re about to have tomatoes coming out of our ears!

This was the view just three weeks ago:

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Today, July 1^st, is the first day in a decade that Ross Danis has not worked for the Dodge Foundation.  Today he officially begins his duties as Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Drew University.

Ross was the first Program Director I hired at Dodge.  We had conducted a long and orderly search for someone to lead our grantmaking and initiatives in Education.  We had done everything by the book and had gone from hundreds of applicants down to two excellent finalists.  But something was missing. I suspended the search and simply called Ross Danis, whom I had met once for about two minutes.

It doesn’t take two whole minutes to appreciate what Ross brings to the worlds of educations and philanthropy.  He has a scholar’s interest in learning, in organizations and in leadership; he has a feel for the classroom that the most gifted teachers have; and he has a passion for improving the lives of young people, particularly the ones who need him most.

Ross has a personal mission to empower others, and it has been a perfect match with Dodge’s mission.  In the past ten years, Ross has served hundreds of Dodge grantees as well as it can be done, and through his creativity, counseling, cajoling, mentorship and leadership, he has improved the lives of thousands of students, teachers and school leaders in New Jersey.

Now he takes that personal mission to Drew, and it very easy for me to imagine that five years from now, principals across the region will be fighting to hire teachers trained at Drew, and ten years from now the essential conversation in New Jersey and beyond about how teachers are trained will be different because of Ross.

Meanwhile, today, all of us at Dodge pause and acknowledge our sense of loss –  and our gratitude for the privilege and the pleasure of having been his day-to-day colleagues for the past ten years.

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Fly: Giver of Life and Light by Judith Harzer

Can you remember your first experience with art and feeling creative?  I can still close my eyes and smell the green thick paint that my kindergarten teacher squirted on a blank shiny white piece of paper and how elated I was when she gave me permission to paint with my fingers.  Such freedom, such ecstasy I felt as I proceeded to get messy and create beautiful art.  As my years in school progressed, those opportunities became rarer and rarer, but I continued to look forward to any art class I could squeeze in, making  the campaign posters for just about anyone who asked, and turning a research project into a shoebox diorama whenever possible.

Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about the role of schools in the development of creativity and imagination in his new book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.  He provides ample evidence on how schools are not designed to nurture creativity, the very element we all need to be successful in life.  You can also get a terrific taste of his work via one of his speeches.

There are multiple entry points to instilling a passion to be creative into the classroom.  The Dodge Foundation feels one of the best ways to do this is to have inspired art teachers – teachers who are active artists outside of the classroom.  Since 1993, the Dodge Visual Artist/Educator Fellowship program has offered $5,000 grants to assist art teachers in pursing their art through a summer experience or project of their choice. We then offer $2,000 follow-up grants to help the teachers implement cross-curricular projects in their schools that build upon the summer fellowships.

Each year, the 100 artist/educator alumni are invited to museum,  gallery and studio tours in the tri-state area.  Art teachers, who typically work in isolation, now have a statewide network and community of fellow art teachers to inspire each other.  They even have started to exhibit together.

This past Saturday I got to meet the ten 2009 Dodge Foundation Visual Artist/Educator Fellows and 30 alumni at a spectacular welcoming event held at the Newark Museum.  After a lovely brunch and a tour of the wonderful new exhibit Unbounded: New Art for a New Century, led by senior curator Ulysses Dietz, the 2009 Fellows presented their plans for the summer and introduced us to their art.   Over the summer and into the fall, Elaine Rastocky, who coordinates the entire program for Dodge, will have an opportunity to keep you abreast of all the teachers’ projects, so I will just give you a taste below:

Catcher by Judith Harzer

Judith Harzer teaches 700 kindergartners at Brick Community Primary Learning Center.  Her painting at the top of this blog post, Fly: Giver of Life and Light, reveals her belief that “children’s creativity and enthusiasm are inspiring and infectious” and that working with these young uninhibited artists breathes life into her own creative spirit.  Judith plans to attend the School of Visual Arts summer residency program to intensely engage and experiment with new media and then bring a community image exchange program back to her school.

Rebirth Mandala by Bernadette Calnon-Buote

Bernadette Calnon-Buote, from Cherry Hill East High School, will be traveling to Japan to research mandalas so she can return to her school and create an environmentally “green” installation centered on an ecology mandala which will help to create an environment of quiet introspection.  Her students will participate in creating a similar mandala/space at the school.

Bottles by Clint Hunter

Clint Hunter from Atlantic City High School will be building a traditional wood burning Japanese kiln so he can both develop his own passion for using local materials (he digs up his own clay) and master the firing process to harness the natural beauty of the kiln’s elements.  His students will help construct a Japanese Zen stone garden on the school campus.

Tell us about a teacher that changed your life!

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A hundred years have passed since the free-verse revolution. Yet the question still emerges of what makes a piece of writing that doesn’t rhyme a poem, and how does it differ from prose. It helps if you begin with a simple distinction: The basic building block of prose is the sentence; the basic building block of poetry is the line. Now listen to Jane Hirshfield read five short poems.

Yes, these five poems are written in recognizable sentences. But the movement and pacing of the language, which creates the rhythmic shape of each poem, is determined by the line. Hirshfield is so attentive to the shape of language that you can almost hear the poem progress, line by line, as she reads.

That we can’t see the printed lines to know where they break on the page offers an opportunity to experience more fully the difference between the line and the sentence. Music and poetry existed for tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before musical notation and written language. The marks on the page were created to record what was heard in the air.

As Hirshfield moves language through time with her voice, she reminds us that lines were originally units of sound, not syntax. A free-verse poet can use line breaks and line lengths to create not only a rhythm, but a rhythm of perception: the pacing of the language determines how the reader or listener moves from one image to the next.

There is a huge experiential difference between “A day is vast until noon then it’s over” and :

A day is vast.
Until noon.
Then it’s over.

Hirshfield uses end punctuation to break these clauses even further into distinct units, allowing her to stress the auditory pauses so that the reader on the page can “hear” the shape of how she speaks the lines aloud. Likewise, even without a written text, the listener can clearly hear that the lines in “A Day Is Vast” are much shorter than those in “The Bell Zygmunt.”

Free verse does not mean free of form. It means free to determine its own form. In traditional verse forms, the parameters the poet must work within are defined. For example, a sonnet has fourteen end-rhymed lines with five beats each. The poet writing in free verse must invent the form for each poem, redefining the shape of the line with every line.

Hirshfield’s poetry is known for its attention to detail and to awareness of the present moment. But her artistry is also revealed in her focus on sound and rhythm. The attempt to understand our perceptions seems to be at one with her listening for the shape of the poem. It is almost as if her careful shaping led to the observations, discoveries, epiphanies in the poems. It is this skill that makes Hirshfield’s poems seem spontaneous and effortless.

“Vilnius” and “The Bell Zygmunt” appear in Jane Hirshfield’s most recent collection, After.   “A Cedary Fragrance”  appears in Given Sugar, Given Salt.  “A Day Is Vast” and “Oil and Vinegar” will appear in an upcoming collection. Visit the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Jane Hirshfield.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright and others.

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Did you see the recent article in the New York Times about rooftop gardening and the movement to replace traditional roofs with green roofs? Not only does a green roof offer many environmental benefits, it also provides an opportunity, especially for people in urban areas, to grow their own food on a larger scale.

Paula Crossfield (pictured above) persuaded the board members of her co-op in New York City to put a 400 square-foot garden on the building’s recently renovated roof.

Crossfield says that the rooftop garden helps inform her work: she writes a sustainable food blog, Civil Eats, for the Times. See this interesting and useful post about sustainable food blogs she published on Mark Bittman’s “Bitten” blog.

We’re experimenting and learning here at Dodge with our own green roof and garden.

So far, the roof and garden look spectacular (thanks in part, I think, to unseasonably cool and wet weather). It will be interesting to see how the garden performs in the hot August sun.

Take a look at some current pictures; the swiftly growing grasses in the background are an easy visual indicator of the roof’s progress.

Sunflowers and zinnias are getting tall. We’ve already started harvesting herbs.

Zucchini! I never noticed before how growing zucchini looks like blowing up balloons to make balloon animals.

For comparison, here’s what the roof and garden looked like a couple of weeks ago.

Stay tuned throughout the summer for garden updates.

Top photo: Robert Wright for the New York Times

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Whew! Grant letters for three dockets (Arts, Environment and Livable Morristown) just went out the door, and the Education grant letters went out in March. That’s a year’s worth of grantmaking in six months. Team Dodge did this to make room for some serious Q2 time (i.e., the time for organizational development activities that are important, but not urgent, and all too often do not get done) .

As most grantees know, Dodge is working on the next evolution of its grant guidelines. In the spirit of being transparent, living our values, and working collaboratively, we want to provide glimpses into our Q2 time and guideline re-visioning process. One of the first steps we’ve taken is to scan the outside world for thought leaders who can help us think about two central themes: sustainability and creativity. We have a running list of people we want to talk to, books we would like to read, and new media sources we need to plug into.

This past Friday, our program team met for lunch and we queued up two talks by WorldChanging’s Executive Editor and cofounder Alex Steffen. If you are a fan of Worldchanging’s website, you probably spend a lot of time searching through the more than 9,000 “visionary articles” on the “big-picture approach to sustainability.” Our workshop room was filled with the smells of Panini sandwiches, a salad, and a leftover dinner (yes, we could go deeper on living our values here, but the herbs and veggies we are growing on the roof have not quite made it to the lunchroom yet) as we started with Alex’s
TED Talk. Feeling inspired, we dove right into his Pop!Tech Pop! Cast.

We then moved into a mini debrief mode. It wasn’t exactly dessert, but there is something sweet and savory about brainstorming with your colleagues on a Friday afternoon. We also tried to avoid just putting our thoughts out into the ether, so we actually started a list of catch phrases (for this and other Q2 talks) that we will revisit throughout the summer.

During these particular presentations we were drawn to sustainable development concepts like leap frogging. Alex refers to advancing technological or economic bases in developing countries by skipping over intermediary steps, but we were thinking about leap frogging opportunities in underserved urban areas in New Jersey. And while we were thinking about urban areas, we recalled Alex’s reference to creating “bright green cities.” If you search World Changing’s site for this topic, you get a mere 176 entries (more summer reading)! I was quite drawn to the notion that “precision, proximity and connectivity,” in the context of place, makes it easier to share things and build social infrastructure. I found a good follow-up article on WorldChanging entitled: Smart Growth, Smart Places and Bright Green Cities. And could it be that the next economy might be built around “dematerialization“?

In between the breakthrough concepts and examples of sustainable practices, Alex underscored two challenges that seem in line with the work of the philanthropic sector. They are as follows: 1) getting to sustainable development requires an investment in the process of “changing states of mind”; and 2) “what we measure changes the way we act.” The latter is reflected in Dodge’s Assessment work, but it is not yet directly tied to our grantmaking around the themes of sustainability and creativity. Alex also noted the political challenges to change. Some seem to think politics is not the purview of the philanthropic sector, but there are plenty who challenge this position. Just this weekend, I started reading Looking Forward: Perspectives on Future Opportunities for Philanthropy. This compilation of essays comes from The Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities and the authors are “leading thinkers in the movement for smarter growth policies and practices that challenge philanthropy to think about its role over the next ten years.”

I anticipate that Dodge’s revised guidelines will begin to reflect some “Looking Forward” notions that get us closer to “NewJerseyChanging.” You can help us fulfill this goal. As you peer in on our Q2 time (this is a first in a series of posts on this topic), we hope you will take the next step by jumping in to make this a collaborative learning process. What sources are you drawing from regarding the notions of creativity and sustainability? Who else do you think the Dodge staff should listen to this summer? We hope to hear from you soon.

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