Ockenden International announces major prize for work with displaced people
Wed, 8 Feb 2012 12:15 GMT
A new award worth £50,000 will launch this year to recognise and reward innovative work with displaced people around the world.
The annual Ockenden International Prize will seek particularly to honour projects that help people through self-reliance, the hallmark of the prize-giver since its pioneering roots in 1951.
Announcing the creation of the award last night (7 February) to an invited audience at Oxford University, BBC journalist and news presenter Michael Buerk said submissions in the inaugural year of the prize would be invited solely from organisations registered as UK charities, though they could elect to nominate a project by a partner or affiliate organisation based abroad, rather than their own work, if they wished. There would be no geographical limitations on the locations of submitted projects but the judges would be looking for work initiated no earlier than 2010 and for evidence of properly measured and evaluated outcomes.
The objectives of the award included highlighting the challenges faced by displaced people, raising awareness of their range of needs, and providing reward and recognition for those giving inspirational support.
The call for submissions will be made later this year, with all details carried on Ockenden International’s website - http://www.ockenden.org.uk/ - and the winner and shortlisted contenders will be honoured at a ceremony in February 2013.
In addition to the cash prize of £50,000 for the winning organisation, Ockenden International also aims to develop additional forms of support and recognition for worthy projects identified by the judges. These underscore its new focus on reinforcing the work of others helping refugees and the displaced, rather than directly running programmes itself.
Addressing an audience gathered at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to celebrate another Ockenden International initiative, the creation of a junior research fellowship studying refugees and forced migration, Mr Buerk spoke of his experiences reporting the famine in Korem, Ethiopia, in 1984 – coverage that had enormous international impact and led to Band Aid and other worldwide fundraising drives towards relieving the starvation.
But “money and goodwill are not enough”, he said. “There’s a need for more cleverness in the way we do these things, for the kind of projects that work enthusiastically towards the goal of making themselves redundant, by making the people they help able to take care of themselves, as Ockenden International has done with its programmes.”
The announcement was made in the presence of the Chancellor of Oxford University, The Rt. Hon. The Lord Patten of Barnes CH, Fellows and students of LMH and past and present supporters of Ockenden International.
Note for editors:
The organisation’s roots lie in the work of three British schoolteachers, led by Joyce Pearce, who created the Ockenden Venture in 1951. Their aim was to receive in Britain young East Europeans from homeless persons’ camps in Germany and to provide for their maintenance, education and welfare. This work later extended to projects in India, north Africa and south-east Asia. The venture’s expertise and skills in helping people help themselves was so well recognised by 1979 that the British government asked Ockenden to be one of the three charities tasked with helping Vietnamese ‘boat people’ resettle in the United Kingdom.
After Joyce Pearce, the driving visionary of the organisation, died in 1985, the charity took stock of its work and by 1999, as Ockenden International, had concentrated nearly all its work overseas. In 2007 the trustees decided that continuing to be an operational charity was no longer sustainable and that it could work more effectively by becoming a grant-maker and promoting awareness of the challenges facing displaced people.
Contact for media queries:
Stephen Claypole, trustee, Ockenden International
+ 44 (0) 208 563 1718
NGO queries in first instance to:
www.ockenden.org.uk
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