Tara Gingerich

Humanitarian Director

Email:

[email protected]

Tara R. Gingerich is the Humanitarian Director of Oxfam America, where she oversees work on Local Humanitarian Leadership (LHL), Disaster Risk Reduction and resilience, humanitarian policy, and support to Oxfam’s emergency responses. She has served in a number of leadership positions in the Oxfam America humanitarian team since 2018. For the 2018-19 academic year she was also an Arthur Vining Davis Visiting Fellow in Religious Literacy and the Professions at the Harvard University Divinity School. From 2008-2018, Tara was a humanitarian researcher with Oxfam, focusing primarily on the need for the global humanitarian system to shift to a system featuring more locally led humanitarian action, better partnerships, and more capacity strengthening of local actors. She was the lead researcher and author of Oxfam’s foundational Turning the Humanitarian System on its Head report, published in July 2015, and co-author of the shorter policy report Righting the Wrong. Prior to that she focused on human rights and humanitarian issues, as an independent consultant and at Harvard University. Tara is a lawyer and practiced international trade law at a private firm in Washington, DC. She has a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. and M.A. from American University.