Senior staff

Raymond C. Offenheiser

President

Raymond C. Offenheiser is the president of Oxfam America, a nonprofit international development and relief agency and the US affiliate of Oxfam International. Oxfam works to end global poverty through saving lives, strengthening communities, and campaigning for change. Since Offenheiser joined Boston-based Oxfam America in 1995, the organization has grown more than fourfold in size and has positioned itself as an expert on international development and global trade.

Offenheiser, who has worked his entire career in the nonprofit sector, is a recognized leader on issues such as poverty alleviation, human rights, foreign assistance, and international development. Before joining Oxfam America, he served for five years as the Ford Foundation representative in Bangladesh and, prior to that, in the Andean and Southern Cone regions of South America. He has also directed programs for the Inter-American Foundation in both Brazil and Colombia and worked for Save the Children Federation in Mexico.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Global Interdependence Initiative at the Aspen Institute, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Inter-American Dialogue. Offenheiser has served as an adviser for the Harvard University's Asia Center, the Hesburgh Center for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Offenheiser is a frequent commentator in the media on such issues as foreign aid, international debt, human rights, and global trade policies. He has appeared in programs on CNN, NPR, and the BBC, and he has been a quoted source in The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, and other major American newspapers.

Offenheiser holds a masters degree in development sociology from Cornell University and earned his bachelors degree from the University of Notre Dame. He speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese.

Jim Daniell

Chief Operating Officer

Jim Daniell became the COO of Oxfam America in 2009 where he oversees all day-to-day operations.

Daniell works in close partnership with the President, who is the agency’s principal public spokesperson for its values, mission, and brand. Together, they are recruiting and building an “Ox-family” where employees thrive as a team of passionate professionals committed to blazing a new trail in the field of international development focused on global poverty and injustice.

Daniell’s approach to operations emphasizes strategic planning, systems management, operations, and innovation.  He is deeply versed in the world of communications technology in all its dimensions and applying those tools for an entrepreneurial global workforce.

Daniell has an entrepreneurial background having worked with both venture funds and angel investment groups. He is presently a Trustee with the Mass Technology Leadership Council and the Museum of Science. Prior to joining Oxfam, Jim was the CEO of several technology firms as well as an executive at AT&T.  Daniell’s other non-profit experience includes leadership position with the Episcopal Diocese of Boston. He holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Stephanie Kurzina

Vice President for Development and Communications

Stephanie Kurzina joined Oxfam America in 1996 to lead the organization's fund-raising programs. During her tenure, annual revenues have more than quadrupled from $12 million to approximately $50 million per year. Kurzina also led the organization through its first major, multi-year fund-raising campaign for program growth, successfully completed in 2008. The campaign exceeded the $50 million goal, raising over $63 million. In 2009 Stephanie became Vice President for Development and Communications, expanding her role beyond fund-raising to include marketing, media, outreach, and digital communications. In her new capacity, Kurzina helps the organization more effectively involve and engage constituents in our campaigns and issues; she believes that a key factor to overcoming global poverty is the involvement of more US donors and activists to increase Oxfam America's influence. Kurzina also serves as president of the Oxfam America Advocacy Fund, founded in 2004.

Prior to joining Oxfam, Kurzina was an associate director at the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, director of development at New England Aquarium in Boston, and director of major gifts at the Joslin Diabetes Center, where she directed a $45 million capital campaign. She has a bachelor's degree in art history from the University of Pennsylvania, where she began her fund-raising career in the University's New York Regional Development Office.

John Ambler

Senior Vice President for Programs

John Ambler is the senior vice president of programs at Oxfam America. He guides all humanitarian preparedness and response work worldwide, as well as all Oxfam’s long-term development programs globally. The latter includes programs agriculture, water management, extractive industries, gender-based violence, community finance, education, worker rights, and other rural livelihoods activities. Oxfam maintains overseas offices in San Salvador, Lima, Addis Ababa, Khartoum, Dakar, and Phnom Penh. He also manages the Learning, Evaluation, and Accountability Department which leads on evaluation and quality control agency-wide, and which guides the organization’s rights-based approach.

Prior to this role, Ambler was the regional director for Asia at CARE USA, based in Bangkok. He supervised and set strategic direction for CARE's relief and development operations for Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Tajikistan. He oversaw the largest budget in the CARE system and the work of over 5,000 CARE staff in Asia. Ambler provided strategic and conceptual direction for CARE's programs in rural development, development finance, urban poverty, HIV/AIDS, health, education, and nutrition. He also played a central role in that organization's effort to adopt a rights-based approach to development.

Before joining CARE, Ambler had spent nearly ten years with the Ford Foundation, as a program officer in Indonesia (programming in water management), as the deputy representative of the office for India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, and as the representative for Vietnam and Thailand. He also opened Ford's first office in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Prior to his tenure with Ford, he spent many years working in Indonesia on issues related to the organization of water management, a field in which he is a world-class specialist. He speaks fluent Indonesian as well as some Vietnamese, Burmese and German. Ambler received his B.A. from Stanford University, his M.A. from the Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, and his Ph.D. in development sociology from Cornell University.

Mark F. Kripp

Chief Financial Officer

Mark Kripp is the chief financial officer for Oxfam America. He joined Oxfam in July of 2005 after working most recently as the vice president of finance for Spryance Inc., a socially progressive organization in India. Prior to that Kripp was the founder and principal of EJE Associates Consulting. In this capacity he directed financial activities of multiple organizations, including corporations, foundations, and the Hospital Albert Schweitzer in Haiti. Kripp has over 25 years of extensive and varied experience with all aspects of finance, and has brought the weight of that experience to bear in Oxfam America's operations department. In addition, Kripp has served on the Board of Directors and various Board Committees of the Grant Foundation/Hospital Albert Schweitzer, American Leprosy Missions (Greenville, SC), and is currently treasurer of the Benjamin Franklin Classical Charter Public School (Franklin, MA).

Paul O'Brien

Vice President of Policy and Advocacy

Paul O'Brien was previously the director of the aid effectiveness team. He came to Oxfam after spending five years in Afghanistan, where he advised the senior economic adviser to the president and two ministers of finance on aid coordination, development planning, and policy reform. He was the senior international adviser to the Afghan government in the creation of the Afghanistan National Development Strategy (interim) and the Afghanistan Compact. Prior to that, he worked for CARE International as their Afghanistan advocacy coordinator and Africa policy adviser. Previously, O’Brien was the president of Echoing Green, which uses venture philanthropy principles to support social entrepreneurs, and a litigator in New York for Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. He is the co-founder of the Legal Resources Foundation in Kenya and the founder of the Human Rights Research and Advocacy Consortium in Afghanistan. O’Brien has a juris doctorate from Harvard Law School and has published on humanitarian policy, human rights, and emerging trends in development.