Oxfam is household name, offering humanitarian aid in over ninety countries; however this display of compassion and kindness begins here at home, in over 650 Oxfam shops each day.

Tracey, the manager at the Steyning branch, has become accustomed to the daily goings on of an Oxfam shop. “I volunteered [in the shop] for a year and I’ve probably been manager for about eighteen months.”  

Tracey chose Oxfam as a permanent career due to her enlightening experiences volunteering at the shop. “You don’t realise, until you actually get involved as a volunteer, that you get to see what Oxfam is all about and the work that they do. Which is important!” This “important” work is being performed as I write this, with Oxfam currently responding to the Rohingya crisis, a task made possible by the work of Tracey and her peers.

Steyning sees a steady flow of donations, from both the young and old. You can find a vast array of goods, ranging from literature classics, to limited edition vinyl by the ‘Manic Street Preachers’ (worth over £100). On the day of this interview, one volunteer sold a Ted Baker garment for upwards of £80. “Oxfam supply us with fairtrade goods, which is everything from the food that we sell to the greetings cards. Everything else is donated. We get a lot through Steyning.”

The volume of donations is fantastic; from where I stand I can see shelves packed full with various items, as well as a further storage area out the back. “We will store as much as we can - we have a certain amount of storage. But if we have way too much, what I call ‘overstock’, then it’s cascaded to another shop. We usually supply Crawley.”

This transfer of goods between stores, to see if it can be sold at another location, is just one way Oxfam avoids wastage. This devotion to conservation is one of the features which drew Tracey to the organisation. “I just like the fact that nothing goes to waste. So anything that we can’t do anything with, for example if it’s completely unsellable - we can’t pass it on to another shop -  everything goes to ‘Wastesavers’ where it is all resorted again, and if they find anything that has been overlooked they’ll sell it on. But right at the end of the re-sorting process, less than 3% of our recycling is incinerated - and even that is incinerated greenly.”

However the people of the store appear to be its most appealing quality. Tracey declares that “one of the highlights for me is the diversity of the volunteers. I’ve got about thirty-five plus people.” She chuckles as she admits “I quite like the characters that I work with.”

A turnover of over £54,000 last year suggests that these volunteers are clearly an asset to the Oxfam community. Perhaps this figure also suggests the philanthropic conscience of Steyning as a community, willing to donate to the greater good.

Sam Lazenby

Steyning Grammar School