October 27th, 2009 | by Zeenat Potia
The year before I came to graduate school in the United States, I taught English and Social Studies at my old high school in Bombay. On the first day of teacher training, our impassioned headmistress Ms. Shirin Darasha, opened with, “There are three things you need to know about being a teacher. I want you to remember these every day as we start the new school year: Encourage, encourage, encourage.”
CHANGE alumni reunited in Boston earlier this month. Photo by: Cheryl Colombo/Oxfam America.
To encourage means to impart courage; to embolden; to give support to; and to foster. Oxfam America’s youth leadership program, the CHANGE Initiative, lives and breathes this value. You can see it in the faces of the 50 or so college students who come to Boston every summer for leadership and advocacy training, which prepares them to promote social change on a local and global level. They are scrubbed full of hope and excitement, and their energy to make a difference is palpable in how they respond to and engage with Oxfam staff during the week-long intensive training. To date, CHANGE has trained nearly 550 students from over 200 campuses.
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December 30th, 2008 | by Anna Kramer
As 2008 draws to a close, we’re highlighting some of the photos that we thought best captured Oxfam’s work this year. Here are my own personal picks; more to come from others.
Photo: Steve Thackston / Oxfam America
This portrait of Biloxi, MS resident Mary Meltz appeared in Mirror on America, Oxfam’s report on the state of US Gulf Coast recovery three years after Hurricane Katrina. Meltz stands in front of her new home, where construction is nearly complete, thanks to the efforts of her son Michael (an artist who covered the walls with elaborate murals), community groups, and teams of volunteers. Visible over her shoulder is the FEMA trailer where Meltz lived for nearly three years.
To me, this divided image–and Meltz’s look of weary, patient hope–captures the in-between state of many of the people I met when I visited Biloxi in June. Three years after the storm, they are still struggling to rebuild their lives, even as they look to better times ahead.
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November 13th, 2008 | by Anna Kramer
University of Kansas students Zach Bealer and Christina Henning show off their (temporary!) Oxfam tattoos at a Kansas City climate change event. Photo: Liliana Rodriguez / Oxfam America
I went to college in the late 1990s, at the tail end of the decade of the slacker. Back then, you might have seen a few activists here and there on campus, but mostly we cultivated an aura of general apathy right down to the laces of our Doc Martens. It was okay to care vaguely about stuff like women’s rights or the environment, but it wasn’t necessarily cool to show too much enthusiasm. If you wanted to make a statement, you might scrawl something enigmatic on your t-shirt with magic marker, dye your hair pink, and leave it at that.
At risk of showing my age, I’ll just go ahead and say it: things have changed.
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