What an August! Non-stop Action for the Oxfam Action Corps!

This week may have been one of our most active months yet, with activities ranging from music fests to radio shows to farmers markets all over the country! Take a quick look at what’s been happening in the Oxfam Action Corps nation:

Getting petitions signed in Des Moines!

Tabling in Chicago

 Burlington, Albuquerque, Madison, Des Moines, Chicago, Philly, NYC, Austin, AND Seattle have all   been tabling at their local farmers markets. Woo what a mouthful! That’s over half the Action Corps cities!

NYC was rocking out at the Mint Green Music Festival and the Catalpa Festival! All this and a relaxing weekend retreat!

Chicago sparked some interest at the 2012 Leaky Con! (See post here)

Austin stayed up late for a Cinema East film screening of Girl Walk//All Day, then woke up early to help out at a local food bank!

Kansas City set what must be a record with their first meeting attendance of 11 new people! Wow!

Minneapolis at the Homegrown Experience

 Minneapolis grabbed some good eats at the Homegrown Experience, a local food festival!

Burlington spread the word with a segment on Goddard College’s radio show!

Boston and San Francisco started the World Food Day buzz by hosting a Grubwithus dinner and a local potluck! (For more, see post here)

Columbus and Philadelphia jammed with our musical partners Sidi Toure, Wilco and the Bare Naked Ladies! 

Boston volunteers at a Coldplay concert!

What’s the best part about all that's happening? It’s only a small portion of what goes into every day and happens every week with the Action Corps. Each of our 15 cities has been doing so much this month that it can’t nearly be squeezed into one blog post- and there’s only more to come in September! For more information on your city, “Join Us” in the upper left hand corner to sign up for local updates!

NYC Volunteers at the NYC Action Corps Retreat!

Albuquerque Tabling at a local Farmers Market

Burlington Action Corps tabling at Summervale Farmers' Market!

Boston Grubwithus Dinner Success Story!

The Here is a post from August 17,2012 from the Boston Action Corps blog. On August 23rd, the Action Corps hosted a fun and highly successful Grubwithus dinner, a great way to bring like minds together and discuss GROW. What's even better? It counts towards our ever increasing World Food Day dinner count! 

Want to grub in your hometown? Go to  https://www.grubwithus.com/oxfam  to get started!

Last night, we held our first Love Food, Hate Injustice dinner at City Table in Boston. It was a wonderful and enriching experience. Thanks to Grubwithus for picking a restaurant with great food and a beautiful atmosphere.

At first, we were not sure how the evening would unfold, but we were soon reminded that as long as there is good food and kind people sharing the same interests, good times and interesting conversations are sure to follow. 

We were lucky to have Susan Tamoney with us, an incredibly engaging speaker (we even suggested she should consider a career in radio broadcasting), and one of our biggest supporters in community outreach in Boston. Susan came with two wonderful guests, Ed Barker and Melanie Hardy from Land's Sake, who helped us generate ideas for upcoming events like World Food Day, and kindly invited us to pick up tomatoes at their farm in Weston. We will be posting more on all these exciting news soon!

Thanks to all of those who joined us. It was a pleasure sharing good food and ideas with all of you.

Chicago Oxfam Action Corps at the Leaky Con

The Chicago Oxfam Action Corps recently tabled at the Leaky Con, a conference for devoted Harry Potter fans that has recently become more involved with various humanitarian outreach initiatives. Read this great post by Chicago's Jessica Benoit to hear how this unlikely connection turned into a fantastic event for Oxfam!

Bonnie Wright, Oxfam Ambassador, during her trip to Senegal

What do Oxfam and Harry Potter have in common? I couldn’t come up with anything at first, but then I realized: they are both committed to making their 

community a better place. That’s why it made perfect sense that the Chicago Oxfam Action Corps posted up at the Leaky Con for 4 days in order to gain support for the GROW campaign. For those of you who have no idea what I’m referencing, the Leaky Con is a 4-day annual conference held for Harry Potter enthusiasts from around the globe. Fans come from literally all around the world to this sold-out conference to spend a long weekend among those with a similar love for Harry Potter to attend meetings, discussions, classes, concerts, plays, and more in the name of Harry Potter fandom. One of Oxfam’s biggest connections to the Leaky Con is the wonderful Harry Potter Alliance itself. Their Imagine Better Project is currently working on a campaign called Hunger is Not a Game, where they encourage others to pledge and support Oxfam's GROW campaign. Additionally, one of Oxfam's very own ambassadors is the lovely Bonnie Wright, who plays Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter movies. It was great to be among so many others who are concerned about world hunger and willing to stop and learn a little bit about what they can do to help.

Our Goal!

Having set quite a lofty goal of getting 1,000 signatures of Leaky Con goers, Oxfam Action Corps members had their work cut out for them. We set up our table in the vendor section of the conference, but were challenged by being placed in a far corner of the hall with semi-low fan-traffic flowing through. Not to be discouraged, we set to the halls dressed as a banana, talking to the fans waiting in line for events about Oxfam America, the GROW campaign, the GROW method, and how they can get involved with Oxfam in their own communities. We even joined the crowds at the Leaky Con ball on Saturday night, complete with an Oxfam sticker-skirt and banana suit. Among the costumes, ball gowns, and “butter beer,” we managed to stand out, gather a few more signatures, and have a great time. The enthusiasm expressed by almost everyone we approached was welcoming and encouraging, though we fell just short of our goal. Wrapping up the weekend with a total of 698 new GROW pledgers was an amazing feeling, and all our hard work certainly paid off!

A huge thank you to all the volunteers who came and supported us, and helped us inch closer to our goal. We could NOT have done it without all your enthusiasm, energy, and dedication! Check out the pictures below to see more of the fun:
-J.Benoit

View film from Bonnie Wright's trip to Senegal here

 Can the Harry Potter Alliance inspire their world of fans to do a world of good? Let us know your thoughts! Comment below or email actioncorps@oxfamamerica.org

Iowa Action Corps Goes Local

This post "GROWing a Better Tomorrow" was featured in the Iowa Action Corps blog on Tuesday, July 3rd.  Read on to take a look at how Iowa is supporting local farmers!

Crystal used the tiller to prepare the
soil for beans. Check out
that backdrop of
corn nearly ready for harvesting!

On June 26^th, Oxfam volunteers Crystal and Mindi (as well as co-organizers Amy Luebbert and Lance Massey) headed to St. Timothy’s Faith and Grace Garden in West Des Moines for a little community garden action. The 40,000 square foot garden supports local food pantries, community centers, as well as a family violence shelter by producing tons of fresh produce annually. So far in 2012, over 1500 pounds has been grown and harvested. With the love, care, and sweat equity put into this garden by so many volunteers, tonight fewer people have to go to bed hungry. 

That’s how you GROW a better tomorrow!

Mindi place the pole beans in the trenches
on either side of the supporting fence. We
covered the beans up a little later. It'll
be fun to see how much they've grown
next time we go out to the garden!

Oxfam Iowa Volunteers: Mindi, Crystal, Lance, and Amy

Have a great GROW friendly activity happening in your city? Have a stand-out blog you'd like to share? Send it on to actioncorps@oxfamamerica.org and see your post here!

My Week on the GROW Method: Part 3!

By Zoe Johannas, Community Engagement Intern

In this thrilling conclusion to My Week on the GROW Method, I discuss how I achieved the last two GROW Method goals while fighting off laziness and cooking great food.

And this brings us to my third, but maybe not final, grocery store struggle. You see, It’s not that I can’t cook when I put my mind to it, but more that I tend to make only 3 things for lunch- 2 of which end in sandwich. While sandwiches are great and all, they do leave a lot to be desired in variety category. No matter how much I think I want to cook myself a well-rounded meal and use foreign items such as colanders, and spatulas, and stove tops, I inevitably wind up using nothing but a fork and a microwave. So to take on the GROW method I readily embraced the cook smart axiom. I felt more than ready to learn some minimum energy recipes that translated directly into speedy prep times. To round out my GROW Method, I less readily, but just as determinedly, I decided to cut down on my meat and animal product intake as well.

Though I eat very little meat besides my beloved cold cut sandwiches, this is really just because I don’t feel like cooking, not because I think about the necessity of saving water and resources. So even though I don’t eat much as is, I felt that I ought to do what I could to be conscious about my choices, while attempting to expand my puny recipe repertoire. Though for a while I feared that this would mean my ham and cheese sandwiches would simply morph into PB&J’s, I instead decided to actually use some of the Oxfam resources I spend my days promoting.

 If you have yet to visit Oxfam America’s Pinterest site, I cannot suggest it more. I credit this site for not only   luring me in with its mouth-watering recipes but inspiring me to hunt down some of my own! With a couple quick clicks I ended up finding some delicious, gluten free and foolproof recipes that allowed me to give the lunch meat a rest.

Though I’ll always have my ham and cheese sandwiches to fall back on, I found new recipes that are not   only giving me some much needed variety in my limited meal set, but also all take under fifteen minutes to prepare. Who knew cooking smart and being incredibly lazy could go together so well? Some favorite new dishes I stumbled across were avocado soup, kale chips, and burritos as a way to eat basically all leftovers. I managed to eat better, cook better, and make better choices at the grocery store all as a result of applying the sustainable GROW Method. 

Applying the GROW Method encourages me to pay more attention to the products I buy and use them to eat better. Every aspect that I thought would be a burden turned out to only help me make better choices. Though I did not have to sacrifice much, I did gain a new awareness of the importance of my choices and how easy it was for me to concentrate on everything but the specifics of my shopping. And while I will probably always wince at the thought of my weekly grocery adventures, I can now safely say that implementing the GROW Method will be the least of my struggles.

Now it's your turn! Tell us what you've done to make the GROW Method work for you! How are you spreading the word to your friends and families? Give us your stories, tips, ideas, and experiences! Send them to actioncorps@oxfamamerica.org and see them posted here!

My Week on the GROW Method: Part 2

By Zoe Johannas, Community Engagement Intern


For this post, the 2nd of my 3 GROW Method blogs, I'll get into how I managed to fit in the cost of GROW on my college kid budget. Check out my previous post to see how I handled reducing my food waste, an integral part of the GROW Method!

Now here we come to my second grocery store struggle. No matter how much I prepare beforehand, whether I try list-making, pre-shopping protein shakes, or careful, strategic stretching, I inevitably crave every single snack food that I lay my eyes on. From chips, to fruit snacks, to wasabi peas my cravings rotate with every passing aisle. Thankfully, I can usually depend on my wobbly will-power to push me past the yogurt covered yummies, but I always falter as I round the corner to the dairy aisle.

I don't know what it is about me and my cheese, but I can never seem to escape the grocery store without three different kinds. I mean, I always have to pick up some basic cheddar. It's just a simple snacking necessity. And then I obviously need some Parmesan for my go-to, throw on all cooked meals type of cheese. But what about salads! I love feta on fresh summer salads! Oh is that Swiss?

The only thing keeping me in check in the sight of all that is Wisconsin-made and wonderful, is my fat brown wallet, filled to capacity with discount cards, yet almost completely void of cash. So as I took on the task of trying to stay seasonal and fair trade on top of already being gluten free, I was concerned that adding the GROW Method would be a precarious weight to balance on my already wobbly grocery bill. 

As it turned out, shopping with the GROW Method took more of a toll on my schedule than my wallet. For this first round of GROW Method shopping, it took some time to check the labels on various items, to hunt down the local produce, and to weed through the cheaper, bigger, shinier jumbo fruits. The result however, was a delicious arrangement of fruits and veggies. Though slightly smaller and mercifully less shiny, they added up to only a few dollars more at the check-out. 

 Those extra dollars weren’t too bad this time around, but in the future I think that I could eliminate this too by cutting back in other areas. After all, I could have probably cut out the feta. Wait, no, not the feta. Maybe the Swiss. 

Have some other ways to shop GROW on a budget? I could certainly use them! Email us at actioncorps@oxfamamerica.org with your tips and strategies, or share as a comment on this blog!