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

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.

If you’re a fan of Oxfam America on Facebook, you might have seen our album of recent photos from the 2010 Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, TN.

Over 80,000 people attended Bonnaroo this year, and our dedicated group of Oxfam volunteers and staffers set out to reach as many of those concert-goers as possible. Together, we collected 3,000 signatures for a petition calling on our leaders to take action on climate change; screened Oxfam films in the video tent; canvassed during shows by Oxfam supporting artists LCD Soundsystem, Aziz Ansari, OK Go, and more; and organized group activities, like our famous water bucket carrying contest, to raise awareness of poverty and hunger issues.  At the end, we celebrated with a dip in the infamous “hippie fountain” (don’t ask).

Here’s a quick look at three photos that I think best capture the spirit of our efforts:

Photo: Bob Ferguson/Oxfam America

Members of our crew—left to right: Oxfam Action Corps volunteer Mark Fangmeier of Minnesota; Oxfam Boston staffer Katie Stuart; former Oxfam America CHANGE Leader Paul Gallegos of Wyoming; and Oxfam’s Clara Herrero—get ready to go out and start another day of canvassing. Read on for more photos…

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For me, the tentative approach of spring here in the Northeast always means one thing—more concerts, especially at outdoor venues. In fact, this week our Oxfam Action Corps and CHANGE Leaders will be leading outreach teams at our first shows on new tours by Spoon, Nada Surf, and Devendra Banhart.

In the months ahead, you’ll probably see our Oxfam tables at all types of shows, of all kinds of genres, in venues large and small (and you can find our latest tour dates here). But perhaps the largest venue we’ve ever worked is the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, TN, which accommodates approximately 80,000 music fans each June. Bonnaroo gives us the chance to work side-by-side with a host of other organizations doing important work with environmental and social justice issues.

One of those organizations is HeadCount, whose mission is to register voters and inspire participation in democracy through the power of music. Oxfam and HeadCount worked together on a voter’s guide for the 2008 election, where we enlisted the voices of artists like The Decemberists, O.A.R., and Bob Weir of Ratdog and The Grateful Dead to help educate new and young voters on issues of poverty and injustice.

Last month HeadCount invited Oxfam America to participate in Music for Action, an initiative that offers fans a full album’s worth of live tracks recorded at Bonnaroo by some of music’s biggest artists. When fans download the album, they’re given the opportunity to take action on climate change by sending a letter or email to their legislators.

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Photo: Lisa East / Oxfam America

Is it a popular artist’s responsibility to speak out about important issues?

That’s the question that was posed to us last Sunday at the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. As part of Oxfam America’s presence at the festival, I had the pleasure of being a panelist at a discussion about the intersection of activism and music. The panel took place on the Solar Stage, an earth-friendly performance area.

The panelist to my right happened to be Will Sheff from Okkervil River, a band I admire greatly. Before the panel, Sheff and I killed a little time in the “Green Room” tent adjacent to the stage by talking about his band’s efforts to “green” their own tours and to encourage fans to ride bikes to their gigs to slash gig-related carbon footprints. Sheff mentioned that they didn’t start those initiatives because of any particular movement or campaign, but rather because they personally just felt that the by-products of touring were wasteful. (Performer Ben Sollee may be one of the few musicians to complete a full tour on a bike, when he pedaled 330 miles to Bonnaroo with his cello.)

That’s why I wasn’t surprised to hear Sheff’s response to the panel’s question. He said, in essence: “I don’t think it’s an artist’s responsibility to do the right thing; I think it’s a human’s responsibility to do the right thing.” Who could argue with that?

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Ben and the tour's filmmaker, Marty Benson, stretching it out this morning in Frankfort, KY, before setting off to tonight's show in Danville, KY. Photo: Katie Benson

Remember Ben Sollee, the cellist and Oxfam supporter who gave me a very unstable lift on the back of his bike during the South by Southwest festival? Well, he’s just embarked on his official bike ride to the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival next week, with his Oxfam America cello case and 60 pounds of equipment in tow. Regrettably, I won’t be joining him on this particular ride.

Ben’s 300-mile journey passes through his native Kentucky en route to the festival grounds in Tennessee, all with the purpose of spreading the word about Oxfam’s work.

“We’re going to be riding through the heart of these towns and people will have questions. Conversations will take seed,” Ben told the Huffington Post this week. “In the end, the music will bridge any gaps in vernacular and we’ll have a great show. It’s important for me to remember that I’m going to these places on an invitation from the community. Booking agents didn’t book this tour. Rather, the community found places to host us.”

If you live in the area, make sure to check out Ben’s live dates, or you can watch video dispatches from the ride at his blog Pedaling Against Poverty.