Ex-BINGO workers write.Your BINGO! edition (NI 383) yanked me back 35 years to my days as Oxfam Canada's education director. Before I fled the scene to devote my development energies to my home environment, I suffered some serious compromises of my beliefs. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When we were invited to send a handful of youth delegates to the Second World Food Congress in Holland, we scrounged free seats from Canadian Pacific Airlines Canadian Pacific Airlines, also called CP Air, was a Canadian airline that operated from 1942 to 1987. Based at Vancouver International Airport, it served Canadian and international routes until it was purchased and absorbed into Canadian Airlines. ; their President sat (nominally) on our Board of Directors. I learned then that airlines don't give away their mainstay asset, economy seats. So, our delegates disembarked at the site of an international conference on poverty from the front of the aircraft, in company with the national boss of the Canadian Council Canadian Council may refer to: In aviation:
The activists I hung around with took to calling the whole international development conference network, the 'Hunger Jet Set'. I fought hard to separate my education programme from the fundraising images adopted by the national office. I managed to pull the education function away from Oxfam into a new agency, the Development Education Center. Even then, our links to the pervasive charity image were intolerable, so I left. John Olsen For the Australian artist John Olsen, see John Olsen (artist). John Wayne Olsen, AO was Premier of South Australia between November 28, 1996 and October 22, 2001. John Olsen was a member of the Liberal Party and Member of Parliament for more than 20 years. Errington, Canada I worked in a voluntary capacity for Greenpeace UK from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s and saw the change from placards to filofaxes. The term yuppie was popular then and many career NGO NGO abbr. nongovernmental organization Noun 1. NGO - an organization that is not part of the local or state or federal government nongovernmental organization workers typified this style and appeared more interested in career development than campaigning issues. A few of us saw that the 'fur coat' of the environmentally friendly Environmentally friendly, also referred to as nature friendly, is a term used to refer to goods and services considered to inflict minimal harm on the environment.[1] British HQ concealed the 'no knickers' of internal air flights and car usage, meetings rather than phone calls, and waste in the procurement and distribution of information and campaign materials. Our efforts to change this were not welcome. Then the end to effective campaigning came when Greenpeace backed off from an action at Sellafield under threat of asset sequestration sequestration In law, a writ authorizing a law-enforcement official to take into custody the property of a defendant in order to enforce a judgment or to preserve the property until a judgment is rendered. : it valued its money higher than the environment--just like a multinational. Things may have improved since then, but it seems unlikely. Peter Easter Hastings, England The New Internationalist New Internationalist is a magazine from New Internationalist Publications, a co-operative-run publisher based in Oxford, England. It has editorial and sales offices in Toronto, Canada; Adelaide, Australia; Christchurch, New Zealand; and Lewiston, USA. welcomes your letters. But please keep them short. They may be edited for purposes of space or clarity. Letters should be sent to letters@newint.org or to your local NI office. Please remember to include a town and country for your address. |
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