Grappling With Globalization, Partnership, and Learning: A Look Inside Oxfam America

This article explores some of the current challenges facing Oxfam America, a Boston-based international development and relief organization. Looking outward, Oxfam America is faced with an increasingly competitive private fundraising market, tensions and opportunities posed by its affiliation with the global Oxfam International structure, the need to revitalize its partnership concept, unprecedented opportunities to link local realities and global policy formulation through advocacy, and the need to respond to changing programming contexts with new funding arrangements and strategic alliances. From an internal perspective, the organization is grappling with building a learning organization, creating more constructive labor-management relations, creating more flexible and entrepreneurial conditions of employment, institutionalizing strategic thinking and planning, and embracing diversity as a transformative management principle. Through creative yet pragmatic responses to these challenges, Oxfam America is striving to position itself as one of the most effective, forward-looking NGOs of the next century.