Oxfam – ‘Be Humankind’

drd — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:20:36 +0000

My attention has been grabbed on my commute to work recently by the colourful posters on the London Underground for Oxfam’s new ‘Be Humankind’ campaign. These eye-catching posters carry simple but arresting messages, designed to challenge people’s apathy and offer a new angle on the kind of problems Oxfam tries to tackle. One that caught my eye reads “Amazing. Human heart pumps water out of ground.” The new branding and the new campaign are much in evidence on Oxfam’s own website: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/. The message in the Oxfam campaign that I find most interesting is the poster reading: “Get rich quick. Give.” I don’t think that I’ve seen before a charity making this explicit connection between wealth-accumulation and the ability to give. It is a very obvious fact that you need to have money before you can give it away, and the more you have the more you can afford to give, so why don’t more charities make this connection explicit? Perhaps because, very generally speaking, capitalism has been seen to be the problem to which NGOs and charities are the solution. In other words, many people who give to charities may do so on the basis that they are doing their bit to help repair the damage done by multinational corporations. This way of looking at things is quite a recent one, and Oxfam’s slogan “Get rich quick. Give” echoes the more Victorian idea that the virtuous individual (and the good Christian) would follow John Wesley’s motto “Make all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can.” This unashamed connection between self-improvement, financial providence, and charitable giving is one that has generally been forgotten, but which it seems Oxfam is tentatively trying to revive. Although I am not an advocate of a return to Victorian values, the parallels are interesting, and have been discussed by the American historian Gertrude Himmelfarb in her books, The De-Moralization of Society and Poverty and Compassion.

Dr D

Oxfam – ‘Be Humankind’