ÅPARA çPAR@ ` τTEXT ` ┘Dodge, Grace Hoadley1856╨1914social workerBorn in New York City on May 21, 1856, Grace Dodge was of a wealthy family long active in philanthropic work. She was educated privately, for a time at Miss Porter╒s School in Farmington, Connecticut. From 1874 she devoted herself to social work. From Sunday School teaching she moved to teaching in the schools of the Children╒s Aid Society. In 1876 she joined the New York State Charities Aid Association headed by Louisa Lee Schuyler, with which she was to remain associated for many years. After a time as an instructor in one of Emily Huntington╒s kitchen garden classes she helped form the Kitchen Garden Association in 1880. In 1884 she led in transforming the association into the Industrial Education Association, which undertook to provide manual training classes for boys as well as domestic skills classes for girls. Dodge, as vice-president of the association, was its effective executive head. Her work there won her appointment as one of the first two women to serve on the city Board of Education, a post she held from 1886 to 1889. In 1881 she led an informal series of gatherings of working girls that soon became a regular club devoted to recreation, practical education, and self-improvement. Similar clubs sprang up around the city, and in 1885 Grace Dodge assisted them in forming the Working Girls╒ Association of Clubs; in 1890 a national association was established, and she was chosen director, a post she held until 1896. In her work with working girls as with others, Dodge was remarkable for her direct, unassuming manner; although she contributed heavily to the financial support of such groups, she was never guilty of patronizing them. In the later 1880s the Industrial Education Association encountered a shortage of trained teachers of domestic and industrial skills for its own classes and for the classes it had been successful in having incorporated into the public schools. In turning its attention to teacher training, it quickly found itself working closely with Columbia University; Columbia╒s president, Frederick A. P. Barnard, was an honorary member of the association, while the association╒s head from 1887, Nicholas Murray Butler, was a Columbia professor. In 1889 the association was given a provisional charter for the New York College for the Training of Teachers, which in 1892 became Teachers College and moved to a Morningside Heights campus given by Dodge. In 1898 it was formally affiliated with Columbia University. Grace Dodge served as treasurer from 1892 to 1911 and for many of those years personally made up the budget deficit. In 1905 Dodge took the initiative in reconciling the two rival groups that sought to control the Young Women╒s Christian Association movement, the largely Eastern and upper-class international Board and the Midwestern and evangelical American Committee. She planned and underwrote a meeting of representatives from both groups in New York City, and when a unified National Board was agreed upon in December 1906 she was elected president. It was a post that required much application, and in addition to her labor she contributed considerable money, including, with one of her brothers, nearly a sixth of the $4 million raised in the YWCA╒s ╥Whirlwind Campaign╙ of 1913. Other activities of Dodge included the Girls╒ Public School Athletic League, which she founded in 1905, the New York Travelers╒ Aid Society, which she organized in 1907 by consolidating several smaller groups, the American College for Girls at Constantinople, of which she was president of the board of trustees from 1911, and the American Social Hygiene Association, which she formed from several other groups in 1912. She died in New York City on December 27, 1914. Nstyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ . !I ╟ !I ▐ ╥ !I ╙ !I ▐ µ !I I !I ▐ Y !I π 5¬ Σ !I
