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
Bio available soon.
Stephanie Kurzina
Vice President for Resource Development
Stephanie Kurzina joined Oxfam America in 1996 to lead the organization's fund-raising programs and was promoted to vice president in 2003. During her tenure, annual revenues have more than tripled from $12 million to over $45 million per year. Her major focus is to strengthen the Institutional Support and Individual Major and Planned Giving Programs, and to further enhance methods—including the Internet—of recruiting a broader base of members, donors, and supporters. Kurzina believes that a key factor to overcoming global poverty is the involvement of more US donors and supporters to increase Oxfam America's influence. Kurzina has led the planning and launch of Oxfam America's first major capital campaign for program growth and 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 bachelors 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.
