My colleague and pal Jeremy Hobbs, who has died aged 64 from most cancers, was instrumental within the creation of Oxfam Worldwide – at present a confederation of 21 member organisations – and served as its govt director from 2001 to 2013.
In 1995, as director of the Australian charity Neighborhood Support Overseas, Jeremy negotiated with seven different organisations to create a single union below the Oxfam banner, together with his charity changing into Oxfam Australia. He hosted the confederation’s first assembly in Melbourne.
Jeremy had enormous vitality for these sorts of processes as a result of he understood that to be organised was to be highly effective, and believed that a collaboration of Oxfams might obtain change better than the sum of their components.
Corralling variations was not at all times simple however Jeremy might disarm with humour (“like herding cats!”) whereas making sticky points disappear as “artistic ambiguities” and “principled pragmatisms”. He saved everybody’s concentrate on the larger targets.
In 2001 he moved together with his household to the UK to take up the directorship of Oxfam Worldwide, then primarily based in Oxford. A cussed and artistic advocate, he pushed Oxfam to maintain tackling the foundation causes of poverty and struggling – debt, local weather change, inequality, discrimination, company land grabbing and monopolies – fairly than simply their results.
He nurtured a technology of Oxfam activists to be fearless towards highly effective pursuits, telling them, “it’s all smoke and mirrors” and “we punch above our weight”. He is perhaps in a go well with and tie within the morning, lobbying the World Commerce Organisation for fairer commerce guidelines for creating international locations, and within the afternoon in his swimsuit below one of many “Huge Heads” caricatures of G7 leaders for a photo-stunt.
Born in Perth, Western Australia, to Marie (nee Guinand), a social employee, and Michael Hobbs, a doctor, Jeremy was educated first within the UK at Josca’s college (now Abingdon prep) in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, whereas his father was doing a PhD at Oxford, after which at Christ Church grammar, again in Perth. He accomplished a level in arts on the College of Western Australia after which one other in social work.
His first job was within the West Australian workplace of Neighborhood Support Overseas, and in 1990 he moved to Victoria to turn into CAA’s director of Australian operations after which, in 1992, govt director.
In 1991 he married Jen Martin, whom he had met when she labored within the Aboriginal Entry Unit for the technical and additional training sector in Perth, and so they had three youngsters, Ben, Celie and Mia.
Jeremy championed Oxfam groups within the world south – he felt a powerful crucial to proper the wrongs of colonialism and oppression. Within the Nineteen Nineties he was a part of the Sea of Fingers motion to assist native title for First Australians and he chartered the aircraft that wrote “sorry” above Sydney harbour bridge in 2000, after the prime minister John Howard refused to apologise to First Nation youngsters taken from their households.
He returned to Australia in 2013, the place he and Jen arrange a consultancy advising native and worldwide NGOs and Oxfam businesses all through the world. He was a eager and completed musician.
Jeremy is survived by Jen, Ben, Celie and Mia, by his mother and father and by his siblings, Julie, Peter, David and Sam.
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