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Raymond Offenheiser

Humanitarian Response - Disasters, Conflicts | Food Security and Hunger | Aid Effectiveness and Reform | Fundraising and Corporate Relations | Haiti | Agriculture

Offenheiser has been president of Oxfam America for over 15 years. He is a member of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), a coalition of development leaders who advocate for more effective foreign assistance through a new strategy, mandate, legislation, and structure to guide US international assistance efforts. He has also positioned Oxfam America as a leading actor in the field of corporate social responsibility by creating the Private Sector division at the organization. Under his leadership, Oxfam has initiated a variety of innovative partnerships with Fortune 500 corporations. In addition, the organization has increased its annual budget fivefold to $75 million during his tenure and substantially increased its donor base.

Offenheiser has over 30 years of international experience as a field programmer, grant maker and professional manager in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the US. Before joining Oxfam, he served for five years as the Ford Foundation representative in Bangladesh, and prior to that, in the Andean and southern regions of South America. Offenheiser has also directed programs for the Inter-American Foundation in both Brazil and Colombia and worked for the Save the Children Federation in Mexico.

He has worked for government and non-profits across a diverse array of fields including human rights, rural development, environment, democracy, public policy, culture, international relations, corporate social responsibility and philanthropy. He has had hands-on experience working at the local, national and global level with some of the world’s most pioneering and innovative non-governmental organizations from indigenous peoples’ organizations in the Amazon Basin to emergent human rights and public policy groups across Latin America, Africa and Asia, to the now famous Grameen Bank and Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) in Bangladesh.

Offenheiser is also a founder of the ONE Campaign and has served on boards and advisory councils for organizations including: the Council of Foreign Relations, the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, the World Economic Forum, Wetlands International and InterAction.

Offenheiser earned an MA in development sociology, and he speaks Spanish and Portuguese fluently. He is a frequent commentator in the media on such issues as foreign aid, international debt, human rights, humanitarian crises, and global trade policies. He has appeared in programs on all major US news networks as well as on the BBC and CNN International, and has been a quoted source in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and various other major American newspapers.