Welcome new Oxfam Action Corps Lead Organizers!

Greetings SF Bay Area Oxfam Action Corps! This is Jessica Shao, one of the two lead organizers for  OAC 2012. I am so thrilled to lead this year's Oxfam Action Corps along with Amy. We both just returned from an amazing four day training with OAC in D.C. along with 30 other organizers representing 15 other cities. We learned in depth about Oxfam's Grow Campaign, strategies to plan and organize activities in our areas to support Oxfam's ongoing campaigns this year.

We met with many Oxfam staff who work in the  D.C. office and are deeply committed to Oxfam's mission to create lasting solutions to end poverty, hunger, and injustice. We learned about Oxfam's 4R program which is designed to build local resilience of smallholder farmers around the world by providing them with access to credit, savings, and insurance. These are key tools and assets that will allow small holder farmers in times of natural disasters or economic shocks. It is clear that with 18 million people currently suffering from hunger in the Sahel region of West Africa, it demands us to act now in order to prevent another famine.

We acted on the fourth day of the training by making 4 lobbying visits in the hill! Amy and I, accompanied by an Oxfam staff met with legislative staff from Boxer, Feinstein, Pelosi and Speier's office in the capitol hill. We spoke to legislative staff about the need for food aid reform by purchasing local and regional food and ending the practice of using food as a  "fundraising tool" for international NGOs, who need to get food as a commodity and then sell it for cash to fund their programs. Food aid is part of the farm bill which is currently being discussed in the house committee right now. By June there will be important decisions made about the farm bill, so that means the time to act is NOW!

 I am so excited to bring back what I've learned from the training to our volunteer group in the Bay Area. Amy and I are energized to organize a kick ass year with tons of fun activities, beginning with a bon fire to kick start our year on June 9th. Stay tuned for more fun this summer!

Send a message to G8 leaders

Before the upcoming NATO Summit in Chicago, the G8 leaders are meeting at Camp David. They are scheduled to discuss food security on the second day of their May 18-19 summit.

Now is the time to raise our voices and tell President Obama and world leaders that we want them to fight hunger and poverty. We want expansion of previous G8 commitments and partnership with poor nations through country-led investments to achieve global food security.

Most of the world's poor and hungry do not have a say in these decisions - now is the time to use your voice to bring awareness to food security issues by taking action here.

Fun and successful Coldplay concerts

Thank you to all our great Action Corps volunteers who collected signatures at two Coldplay concerts in San Jose this past weekend. We're waiting to hear a final count, but our volunteers collected around 1200 signatures. Way to go team!

If you're interested in getting involved, feel free to contact us by email and like us on Facebook.

Constituent visits and petition signature deliveries

Last week we visited Senator Feinstein's office in San Francisco and Senator Boxer's office in Oakland. We delivered petition signatures from across California asking to fix food aid in the Farm Bill. Since 32% of food aid is wasted to special interests, we brought along 68% of a pie to represent the fraction of the well-intentioned gift of food aid that is wasted. For more details on what should be modernized in our current food aid programs, check out this very informative blog post by Oxfam America senior policy advisor, Eric Munoz.