Save Our Oxfam Centre

Letter by Phyllis Artis

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At the first meeting of Save the Oxfam Centre (SOS) April 3, 2012, we were invited to speak about our involvement in the St. John’s Oxfam Centre and what it means to us. Since that meeting someone asked on our website: How did it begin? I said a few words at the meeting on both: where we started and what Oxfam means to me. Here I will repeat and add to what I said at that time. I hope it and all other letters sent to this site will be read carefully by Robert Fox, who we hope to see tonight, and to the National Board of Oxfam Canada.

This is my Oxfam story as I remember it today.
Phyllis
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I’ve been involved with Oxfam since 1970. I was living in England at the time, where my husband and I were on leave from Memorial. He was doing a graduate degree and I was caring for our two young children. Television pictures of starving babies in Biafra moved me to take part in my first Oxfam initiative, an appeal to collect ‘Blankets for Biafra.'

In 1973, back home in St. John’s, I joined a small Oxfam Committee, which up till then had focused mainly on fundraising for famines and other disasters overseas. Around the world Oxfam continues to raise money for overseas relief, but in St. John’s and elsewhere in Canada, Oxfam was becoming more interested in the root causes of poverty, and in particular its links with oppression. We wanted to work to promote long-term changes and not stop at charity.

We, the St. John’s Oxfam Committee, decided we needed a permanent base in the city for our meetings, staff, resources and expansion of our activities. We found a shabby downtown building used to store furnace parts, persuaded a sympathetic businessman to buy it for us, signed a mortgage (using our own homes as collateral), and proceeded on weekends and holidays to dig out the filthy, oily cellar space, tear down walls, clean, paint, install shelves, scrounge, and spend endless hours writing grant applications, and developing linkages with schools, churches, unions, university, arts organizations, and other Oxfam groups in Atlantic Canada, and more.

Upstairs at the Oxfam Centre we created offices and a comfortable meeting room. I remember many gatherings there. I especially remember Friday afternoon study sessions on Paulo Freire’s, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, maybe other texts too, but the discussions on Freire provided a frame of reference for many of our discussions of education, development and political activism. According to Freire ‘If [leaders] are truly committed to liberation, their action and reflection cannot proceed without the action and reflection of [the people].’ Leaders must be followers, and followers must be leaders; similarly with teachers and learners, thinkers and doers, those who donate funds and those who receive the funds. We must act together through dialogue, and avoid the dichotomies in language and living that reflect the prescriptive methods of the dominant elites. These ideas helped shape our projects, and my thinking ever after.

Downstairs we opened a store for fair-trade crafts (though we called them something else then), a lending library, free books and pamphlets on development (vital resources before the internet) and some books and magazines for sale. Our idea was to educate the public; find outlets and fair prices for crafts produced in co-ops around the world; encourage the public to drop in and learn about us and our work; attract volunteers, and bring in some income to help sustain our Oxfam Centre at 382 Duckworth St. Financially I don’t think the Oxfam shop was ever very successful, but it made us visible in the city: a welcoming space where people could drop in to learn more about Oxfam and 'third-world' countries, and where any activist groups without a home could meet.

Throughout my years on various St. John's Oxfam Committee boards and committees we had amazing, inspirational, well-informed, dedicated staff. First we hired Rich Fuchs and Anne Manuel, recent graduates of Memorial, to do administration, outreach and education, and shortly after that Sean McCutcheon to research the illnesses of miners in St. Lawrence. And then we brought in (after much letter-writing and red tape) Juan Ruz, a refugee from Chile who fled for his life after Allende’s assassination. We provided room and board for Juan and very modest salaries for Juan and the other three staff members.

We were a mixed group: students, professors, retirees, artists, unemployed, some from this province and some from elsewhere, old and young, a few with a lifelong record of social activism and others with little or no experience of this kind. We came from differing cultural, religious, political, economic and ethnic backgrounds. Of the active members from my earliest days, the movers, shakers and visionaries who made things happen, the first to come to mind are Rosemary and John Williams and David Thompson, and shortly after that Frances Ennis, Lorraine Michael, Dorothy Inglis, Lois Saunders, Tony Berger, Rod Singaraya and Keith Storey. We partnered with schools, university, community groups, unions and more; we invited guest lectures, organized workshops, and protested with placards in front of banks with investments in South Africa; we boycotted South African wine and we invited a South African friend living in St. John’s to report on his impressions of life under Apartheid when he returned from a family visit to South Africa.

We elected representatives from the St. John’s Oxfam Committee to sit on Oxfam Canada’s Regional and National boards, and to travel to the UK for training in building emergency shelters for disaster relief. We had heated debates on funding priorities, ways of increasing awareness of injustice in the world, and ways of addressing these injustices, of contradictions between the principles we believed in and the ways we raised our children and conducted our lives.

We were always short of money but we had enough determined, hardworking, optimistic volunteers and staff to keep the centre alive as a vibrant force in the community. And we debated everything. Was it ethical for Oxfam Canada to use the funds it raised, in part from impecunious Newfoundlanders, to pay what seemed to us exorbitant consulting fees to Mel Watkins to help negotiate land claims for the Dene Nation? Should we accept the offer of a local author of bestselling booklets of Newfoundland humour to organize a fundraising drive for us? (We liked him but had mixed reactions to his sense of humour). How could those of us who taught in schools and universities engage students in a Freirian dialogue about inequities around us without engaging in ‘the prescriptive methods of the dominant elites'? I believe the debates and dialogue did much to keep the organization alive and growing over the decades.

We also plotted, planned, lobbied, and did whatever had to be done, from meetings at the Centre that extended late into the night, to the hard physical labour of operating the Centre and programs. We learned to think globally as we as tried to act locally. And we had fun. We cooked and ate together, played soccer, took care of each other's kids, worked on a quilt one winter (though I’m not sure we ever finished it). In short we developed a community that is still strong. . . and growing.

Of course individuals have come and gone. I am less active in Oxfam now than I used to be. But many of my close friendships date from that Oxfam group of the 70s. Although all my biological family live elsewhere, I decided to retire here in part because of the Oxfam community that provides opportunities to live and work and dialogue with people who share so much of my history and so many of my values. I continue to participate in many of Oxfam's public meetings, celebrations, and fundraising events, and am always made to feel welcome, a part of this extraordinary community. I have been a substantial monthly donor to Oxfam Shareplan (or its predecessor) for over thirty years, I contribute to special fundraising events conducted by Oxfam at other times, and most of my Christmas gifts are now from Oxfam's Gifts Unwrapped. I have willed a portion of my estate to Oxfam.

For decades the extraordinarily dedicated, brilliant team of Linda Ross and Bill Hynd led the way at the St. John's Oxfam Centre, keeping oldtimers informed and involved, while opening doors to new volunteers and new projects here and overseas, providing opportunities for the community to get together to raise funds, celebrate, mourn, demonstrate, and act in a thousand ways to promote social justice at home and abroad. Then Linda moved on and Bill seemed to take on the double load without missing a step. I will never know where he finds the energy, efficiency, compassion, intelligence, insight and unflappable good humour to accomplish all he does. But I will be forever grateful to him for carrying on, in spite of what seems to me callous and most undialogic, undemocratic treatment from the National Board and staff at Oxfam Canada. He is an inspiration to all of us.

It is unthinkable that the St. John's Oxfam Centre, which we bought and developed, with our own bucks and blood, should be sold summarily, and Bill Hynd fired, without consultation with local staff, board or community.

It is also unthinkable that anyone in this province who has supported Oxfam in the past will ever do so again if this threat is carried out.