Oxfam America Blog

Oxfam organizer Rasa Dawson.

Every year on the Thursday before Thanksgiving, thousands of Americans participate in Oxfam’s Fast for a World Harvest campaign—attending Oxfam America Hunger Banquets, skipping meals, or taking other actions to fight world hunger. Here’s Rasa Dawson, lead organizer for the campaign, with her thoughts on this annual tradition.

A few years ago, I organized an Oxfam America Hunger Banquet on a small college campus in rural Virginia. I remember we had high hopes that it would be a good event, but as we watched people pouring in the doors, we were shocked.  It wasn’t just students; it was professors, people from the local church, and community members—over 300 of them. 

Over the next hour and a half, it was awe-inspiring to watch the transformation in that room.  People shared food, laughed, told stories, and cried.  Three hundred strangers left the room not strangers any longer, but fellow travelers. They forged relationships because they shared the same fate that, as in real life, was given to them at random. 

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »