Oxfam Hunger Banquet

Oxfam is a global organization whose overall goal is to promote equality in all aspects of life. They have four main focus areas that the majority of their work around the world fits into. The first is climate action, which they advocate for by petitioning large companies to reduce pollution and exploitation, as well as helping communities recover from climate impacts, providing funding for climate projects in lower-income countries, and connecting with small communities to create solutions for all. The next main focus area is economic and racial justice, where they campaign to shift power to ordinary people and fight for equal labor rights. Humanitarian response is the third main focus area through which they use their global network to bring clean water, food, money,

and information to communities suffering from natural disasters, hunger, and other tragedies. The final focus area of Oxfam is women’s rights and gender justice. By partnering with leaders of these movements around the world, Oxfam advocates for gender equality in all aspects of life and campaigns for policy change that improves the lives and experiences of women and girls. Although Oxfam outlines these four areas as its focus, there is overlap in each. For example, you cannot have economic and racial justice without having gender justice. This was clearly outlined in the Oxfam Hunger Banquet that I attended. These events are designed to give you a first-hand experience of how many people are affected by hunger globally. With so many people in the world experiencing extreme hunger and poverty, it can be difficult to envision what that looks like in reality. At an Oxfam Hunger Banquet, you randomly draw a slip of paper that assigns you to a low, middle, or high income identity, and you learn about the person you have been assigned to. Over half of the people are low-income, representing real-world statistics. Although the group participating in this banquet was less than 40, seeing how many of us got low-income was a little shocking and helped me put the real number of people struggling into perspective. This event also helped me think about how different social issues are all deeply connected. The identity that I drew was a low-income widow who was unable to get a job because she was a woman and lacked the skills for many jobs because she never had the opportunity to learn them. This, along with the information we were presented on the slideshow, showed me how many different ways an individual could lose opportunities because of the many different parts of their identity. For example, it is much harder for low-income families to send their children to school and have them complete it, which takes away a lot of opportunities to get a well-paying job. This can also be made even more difficult if you are a girl because in many countries, girls might be kept home to help with housework, because there is no future envisioned for them other than becoming a wife and a mother. Overall, the hunger banquet helped me to realize the interconnectedness of each issue and gain a better perspective on just how many people face poverty and hunger every day.