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Graham Adutt, the Director of Challenge to Change, is a development manager who sees climate change as the result of humankind’s historic failure to solve global inequality combined with the failure to sustainably manage global natural resources. Graham has managed international charity work in Asia and Africa since 1991, with Caritas, CIDSE, the International Rescue Committee, the American Refugee Committee, and International Social Service. He is now convinced that charitable relief and development work must be complemented by advocacy – challenging government authorities and private enterprises to recognise their roles in the causes of poverty and natural disaster, and persuading them to change. “Only then can our charitable work be successful in the longer term” says Graham. “We can provide practical assistance to poor communities effected by climate change. But without appropriate backup from government policies and programmes, our work will be a drop in the bucket, and might not last into the next generation. Governments must be persuaded to maintain suitable policy frameworks which protect local environments and the support the livelihoods of the poor. So we need to work from several angles simultaneously, to have a lasting impact.” Graham’s interest in development work began when he worked in southern and eastern Turkey in the mid-1980s. In 1990 he studied Development Studies at Leeds University, UK, and he began campaigning against climate change in 2007.
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| Phuong Dang (Dang Thu Phuong), Programme Coordinator of Challenge to Change, is a highly-regarded community development specialist and a committed anti-poverty campaigner, from Vietnam. She gained outstanding academic qualifications from the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand in 2001 for her work in Rural Development Planning and in Gender. She has worked with international and Vietnamese charities, and also with the Embassy of Finland in Hanoi, Vietnam, in the fields of community development, environment, grassroots democracy and human rights. In 2007 her concern for the victims of climate change led her to join Challenge to Change. She now travels regularly between Vietnam and the UK, to link the practical assistance of Challenge to Change to communities in Vietnam with development education work in the UK. |
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Phuong (second from left) in Trieu Phong District of Quang Tri Province. The livelihood of this household is increasingly threatened by landslides and soil erosion. |
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Challenge to Change is a charitable trust, supervised by its Trustees:
Mr Stephen Boyle (Chair), Whitstable, England
Dr Sheelagh O’Reilly, Argyll & Bute, Scotland
Dr Alan Taylor, Cambridge, England
Mr Koos Neefjes, Hanoi, Vietnam
Ms Hoang Hoa Anh, Sydney, Australia |
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