Oxfam America’s Music Outreach team joined music fans from all over the world at the recent Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. In our fifth consecutive year at Bonnaroo, this year’s team featured Oxfam staff members and volunteers from New York, Wyoming, Indiana, New Jersey, and Vermont. We were there to talk with attendees about Oxfam’s GROW campaign for food justice and to raise awareness about the food crisis in the Sahel region of West Africa. Oxfam’s team of 10 had literally thousands of conversations over the four days, and over 3,000 people signed a pledge to join our efforts.

As one of the yearly highlights of Oxfam’s festival outreach season, Bonnaroo has also become a place for music artists who support Oxfam’s work to do so in front of tens of thousands of fans. Oxfam-supporting artists like Radiohead, Flogging Molly, Fitz & The Tantrums, Aziz Ansari, and tUnE-yArDs all happened to be in the festival lineup, which allowed us to talk about the intersection of music and social justice in truly tangible ways.

A personal highlight for me was being invited to introduce a special screening of the incredible documentary The Island President in Bonnaroo’s Cinema Tent.  The award-winning movie is about the efforts of former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed to tackle climate change before it literally causes oceans to swallow his country’s land whole, and the introduction gave me a chance to talk about Oxfam’s ongoing climate justice work.

Here are a few photographic memories of Oxfam’s Bonnaroo adventures this year:

Aziz Ansari

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Aziz Ansari (from NBC's Parks and Recreation) shows his support for Oxfam and the GROW campaign just before taking the stage at the Bonnaroo comedy tent. Photo: Bob Ferguson/Oxfam America

We’re excited about the global premiere of “One Day on Earth” at the United Nations this Sunday. The movie records the human experience over a 24-hour period using material crowd-sourced from all over the world.

Oxfam contributed footage to “One Day on Earth” film. We asked our affiliates and partners working in 99 countries across the world to reflect on the specific issues of health and education — and why these are fundamental rights — and then to seek out images and interviews on the subject.

Watch the trailer for the film (it gave me goose bumps…the good kind) and then share with your friends.

One Day on Earth – Global Screening Trailer from One Day on Earth on Vimeo.

Here’s a sample Tweet to get you going:

Oxfam contributed to the unique @onedayonearth documentary (all filmed on 10/10/10). Attend free screening this Sunday! http://ow.ly/aq53H

My colleague, Megan, put it best in her Facebook post: “Proud to work here and proud of my colleagues who figured out how to condense Oxfam’s complicated work into a minute-long video.”

That’s exactly how I felt when we completed what we affectionately call Oxfam America’s “What we do” video. Proud to work here. And proud we figured out a way to quickly describe our work.

Four months ago, the idea seemed simple enough. Let’s create a video for OxfamAmerica.org that explains our mission. The goal was to teach people who come to our site for the first time about the three big buckets of our work– providing humanitarian aid, working with local partner organizations in developing countries, and fighting for social justice. Some people know us for one aspect of what we do; most don’t know everything.

And then we started to work on the video. And realized that it is really, really hard to explain Oxfam’s approach to fighting poverty in a cool, hip way that abides by our very strong brand of using imagery of the communities we work with, where they have dignity, strength, and power. An example, an animated illustration that may look really fabulous might also obscure the face of the subject in the photograph, which relegates them to the background and, in turn, diminishes their importance.

In the end, with Superhumanoids‘ “Hey Big Bang” and the cosmopolitan mix of voices of my office mates playing over and over again in our heads, we pulled it off. Normally I’m not one to hand out compliments easily…but fighting poverty is complicated. And my colleagues managed to embrace that reality, and turn it on its head, showing how fighting poverty is really about changing the world, and that we can all do so with a lot of “warmth and positivity.”

But enough about what I think about the video. Tell us what you think about the video.

Yesterday I read a great blog post by Alexis Okeowo of the New Yorker: “The Ten Biggest Positive Africa Stories of 2011.” With drought and conflict affecting many of Africa’s fifty-plus countries, no one can say this has been an easy year. But “with all the gloom and doom,” writes Okeowo, “it’s easy to forget the strides the continent’s residents make every day in business, art, technology, and politics.” From the independence of South Sudan to Liberian women winning the Nobel Peace Prize, it’s refreshing to hear about some of Africa’s triumphs instead of its tragedies.

Inspired Okeowo’s blog, here are three more positive stories from Africa in 2011—worth a mention even if they’re not necessarily the kind that make headlines.

Ethiopian farmers embracing change. Hit hard by drought, 1,981 Ethiopian farmers in Tigray who bought weather insurance through an innovative program received a payout this November—the first in the project’s history. Launched by Oxfam America and a host of partners, the risk management initiative now has more than 13,000 participants and is set to expand into three new countries.

And in southern Ethiopia, where drought is making it difficult for herding families to earn a living from their livestock, some took a risk and tried a new approach: irrigated farming. As noted in the video below, true change takes time. But families now tapping the Dawa River for water are working hard to transform their lives for the long term:

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Oxfam America CHANGE Leader Paul Gallegos recently traveled around the eastern US with the Reverb Campus Consciousness Tour, which aims to “inspire and activate students in an electric atmosphere while leaving a positive impact on each community the tour visits.”  This particular tour featured international sensation Janelle Monae and indie-popsters fun. Check out some of Paul’s highlights and his comments below:

Photo: Bob Ferguson/Oxfam America

At Cornell University, above, our second stop on the tour, about 200 people signed our petition asking Congress not to cut life-saving aid.

Photo: Josh Glasheen/Reverb

Our table was never short on information to give to inquisitive students, like these two new Oxfam supporters at the University of Maine.

Photo: Pretty Polly Productions

Janelle Monae took time out of her hectic post-show schedule to meet with a couple of Oxfam volunteers during our tour stop at Dickinson College.

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Longtime supporters of Oxfam know that there is a lengthy and storied history of music artists working with us to raise money for, and the profile of, our work around the globe. The most recent example of such artistic kindness comes by way of the new album Kinshasa One Two by DRC Music, a collective of producers organized by Damon Albarn (Gorillaz, Blur) and recorded last month in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with contemporary Congolese musicians and local performers. 

Profits from the album’s sales will support Oxfam’s work in the DRC, which focuses on improving access to clean water and sanitation as well as promoting human rights and an end to conflict. “Not only will DRC Music shine a light on the incredible musical talent coming out of the country, it will raise much needed funds for Oxfam’s invaluable work here and focus the world’s attention on Congo once again, seeing it as a place of inspiration, creativity and hope,” said Oxfam’s DRC country director Pauline Ballaman.

Albarn, though best known for radio hits with his multi-platinum-selling bands, is also familiar to fans of the loose genre known as “world music” because of his album Mali Music, recorded during a trip to Mali in support of Oxfam in 2000. On this trip to Congo, he enlisted a traveling team of producers consisting of T-E-E-D (Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs), Dan The Automator, Jneiro Jarel, Richard Russell, Actress, Marc Antoine, Alwest, Remi Kabaka, Rodaidh McDonald, and Kwes. The group recorded the sessions using only laptops and iPads.

The result is an album that I like more and more each time I play it. To get a feel for the unique sound, listen to the track “Hallo” (featuring Tout Pouissant Mukalo and Nelly Liyemge):

Kinshasa One Two is available to pre-order now at www.drcmusic.org, with digital delivery on October 3, and a CD and vinyl release on November 7. Take a moment and check out the trailer video for the album below.

When I visited Sudan a few months ago, one of the highlights of my trip was attending a block party thrown by and for members of Khartoum’s community of Nuba people. For those unfamiliar, the Nuba region is a very remote and mountainous land in Southern Kordofan.

The party featured a band composed mostly of percussive instruments, and featured a guitar-like instrument that resembled more of an electric tennis racket than the traditional Stratocaster or Les Paul models that I’m used to seeing. The music itself was a hypnotic and throbbing kind of polyrhythmic dance-rock—the type of sound that inspired albums like the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. A dance troupe outfitted in wonderfully colorful and ornate clothing performed several dances, some imitating fight-battles, and others with obvious courtship overtones. Perhaps the most joyous dance of the night was the line dance, which turned out to be the Nuba version of a conga-line, and ended up involving a few hundred locals all snaking and dancing their way around the large, dusty block.

One of the party’s organizers who invited me and my Oxfam colleagues to the celebration explained, “It’s important for us to create events like this to make sure the Nuba culture is remembered, and relearned, and passed down to the next generation. The Nuba people are from a hidden place, and it’s easy to forget they are there. That’s why we like to make this loud noise. To let you know we exist and are important.”

It is those words I keep reflecting on as I read of the current situation in the Nuba Mountains, where violence against the Nuba people continues seemingly unchecked. Long-suffering as a result of Sudan’s 22 year-long civil war, the Nuba people will remain tied to Khartoum government as the regions adjacent secede to the new Southern Sudan state. I keep reading how the situation in South Kordofan might turn into “the next Darfur.” Having recently seen Darfur with my own eyes, I pray that this is not the case.

Here’s a video clip from that night at the block party in Khartoum…the night I learned without a shadow of a doubt that the Nuba people “exist and are important.”

Take action now to help fund our work in Sudan.

Oxfam supporters at a flash-mob march for social justice at Bonnaroo. Photo: Oxfam America

For the fourth consecutive year, Oxfam America hosted a booth at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. Held in Manchester, Tennessee last weekend, and widely regarded as one of the world’s premier (and greenest) music festivals, Bonnaroo draws approximately 80,000 people from around the world. This year it featured performances by more than 175 artists.

Bolstered by Oxfam-supporting artists on the festival’s bill like Arcade Fire, Explosions In The Sky, G. Love & Special Sauce, Ben Sollee, Mavis Staples, Nicole Atkins, The Decemberists, Deer Tick and Amos Lee, our team of 10 music outreach reps generated support for Oxfam’s new GROW campaign to fix a broken food system.

Iconic gospel singer Mavis Staples. Photo: Bob Ferguson / Oxfam America

We even created a fully-set-for-dinner “Table For Nine Billion” in Planet Roo, the area set aside on the concert grounds for non-profits, to allow people to visualize how we can sustainably feed a growing population—complete with menus that served up Oxfam’s five-point plan to respond to the emerging food crisis. By the time the sun set on the last evening of the festival, more than 3,600 people had signed on as Oxfam supporters.

Photo: Clara Herrero / Oxfam America

All of it set the stage for the rest of our concert outreach season this summer, where you’ll find Oxfam volunteers at shows by Fitz & The Tantrums, Flogging Molly, Maroon 5, Dave Matthews Band, Ben Sollee, Guster, Ra Ra Riot, and with our music ambassador DJ Shadow on the IDentity Festival Tour.

Photo: Clara Herrero / Oxfam America

If you weren’t able to attend Bonnaroo this year but would like to feel part of it all, we can help in a few ways:

• Watch this space soon for video of Ben Sollee’s performance at the Oxfam booth at Bonnaroo.
• Join thousands of music fans and pledge to take action for a future where no one goes hungry.
• Volunteer at a concert with Oxfam this summer. Apply here to be notified of concert volunteering opportunities in your city.

Somewhere in Grand Isle, Louisiana, on a road so remote that our GPS thought we were now in a boat on the Gulf of Mexico, it started raining. And then it rained some more. It rained so hard that our small Oxfam film crew of myself, Shannon Hart-Reed, Sarah Livingston, and Michael Prince had to pull over. After several days and hundreds of miles shooting footage for a music video Oxfam was doing in partnership with The New Pornographers, all of us were ready to go home. We were exhausted, drenched, and hungry with nowhere to go – literally. The road ahead of us was flooded, and the road to our right was closed, by British Petroleum, which created the largest environmental disaster in US history, bungled the clean-up process, and somehow managed to dispossess the authorities of the power to manage their own beaches as evidenced by their hand-drawn cardboard “Beach Closed” sign tacked to the telephone pole behind us.

That forced pit stop was a long way from the Saturday night party where Oxfam received an Emmy for the music video. When our music outreach specialist Bob Ferguson stood up to say a few words of thanks after receiving the award he said what I think we all felt in that car in the middle of the rainstorm – and throughout the filming: the video, the award, the music and the work are all part of our effort to “raise awareness that the situation in the Gulf is far from over,” and make sure the people of the Gulf Coast, and in particular those most affected by the oil spill and Hurricane Katrina, are heard.

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Oxfam America music artist relations coordinator Bob Ferguson recently returned from his first visit to Oxfam’s programs in Darfur, Sudan.

In the second of two multimedia blogs featuring photos by Liz Lucas, Bob talks about getting a closer look at the fuel-efficient Darfur Stoves­—a project supported by music fans and artists like State Radio—and learns how they’re changing women’s lives.

Watch Part 1.