and to people who don t remember, just to remind them, the allegations, which indeed your own internal investigations concluded were well founded, involved staff members of oxfam abusing their position, routinely using prostitutes, some of them using underage girls while on a mission of emergency relief in haiti after the 2010 earthquake. and it took years for 0xfam to publicly acknowledge what had happened. when i started in 2019, 0xfam was already undergoing a deep reflection about these failings, coming to the realisation that doing harm in the name of doing good was not good enough, that we have to focus on preventing and minimising the abuse of power within our organisations if we are to be taken credibly across the world. and so a lot of the transformation, the culture
and we were founded in the dark days of world war ii in oxford as the committee for famine relief, by eight ordinary individuals who were outraged by the fact that famine was allowed to be happening in nazi occupied greece, and set about doing two things, importantly. one, to raise resources to provide food relief for people in greece, and secondly importantly to speak truth to power, to campaign against the uk government s and the allied governments policy of blockading nazi occupied greece. all through the last 80 years, 0xfam has been at the vanguard of various social justice issues. yes, of course, taking action to save lives, change lives, but also speaking truth to power speaking out. but the point is, you need to work with governments, and if you are to get this completely revamped, much more effective multilateral system of aid to work, governments have to be involved. and yet, you seem to spend a whole lot of your time
strikes was always problematic. it s increasingly nonsensical. we need a new way of pre positioning resources, particularly in the face of climate breakdown, for governments and societies and ngos to be able to respond or, betterstill, build resilience in societies to minimise the damage being done by humanitarian disasters. we need to reimagine the entire system. well, i ll bring you back to the entire system and the big picture in a moment, but i do want to get deep into your responsibilities, which is for running 0xfam gb, being a key member of the oxfam international network. when you took yourjob four years ago or so, you said, i promise you, the 0xfam of tomorrow is going to be unrecognisable. you talked about reimagining the way big ngos do aid. have you delivered? i think we are delivering. 0xfam today already looks very different than it did four years ago, and very different to different periods of our 80 year history.
$1,000,000 a year as the leader of a humanitarian organisation. do you think that weakens the case of humanitarians, when they re on that kind of money? it s up to the board of international rescue committee, or any organisation, to set its own. of course it is, but what s your opinion? so my opinion comes back to the lessons of the last few years for organisations like ours, which is that it s really important that we walk the talk that if we re to be taken credibly and seriously, then we also need to strive to be a more inclusive organisation. so, for example in 0xfam, yes, i m lucky enough to be paid a good salary, and importantly, we re committing to reducing inequality within our own organisation, so we publish the pay ratio between my pay and that of the lowest paid, or median members of median pay in our own organisations, and are ambitious about making our own organisation more equitable so that our arguments to make the world fairer and more equitable are taken more seriousl
donors don t appear to be so confident. if one looks at the revenues you get, they re still actually significantly below the level they were at before the haiti scandal broke. so, two things, i think. 0ne, no organisation can ever say it s free from misconduct or harassment, but what we can, and i can say, is that we have put in place systems, processes, and a process of culture change that reduces the risk of misconduct and, importantly, where misconduct is identified, that we take action. 0n the other hand, if you look at our supporter base and our accounts at the moment, many of our international institutional donors and many, many of our individual supporters, have continued to support 0xfam, because when i meet supporters or volunteers, they see that we are an organisation that s taking these issues seriously. they also tell me that we re an organisation that is taking