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!
Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate
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:
Email This Post
David Grant, President and CEO
Today, July 1st, 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.
Email This Post
By Wendy Liscow, Program Officer
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Visit the foundation website at www.grdodge.org
