Buy Nothing Day 1998:
Report from Norway

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Jan. 7, 1999

"The Future in our Hands" and "Changemaker" have the main responsibility for BND in Norway. This year we cooperated with the following other organisations: The youth fractions of the Labour Party, the Socialist Party, The Christ Democrats and the Center Party along with two other solidarity and organisations (Press/Redd Barna and Miljoheimevernet).

Together with these organisations we passes a nationwide net- work. This we
used to distribute flyers and campaign material. It worked quite well. We saw articles in the newspapers afterwards with pictures of people we had never seen in untold places with our posters and flyers. The result: We had stands in Oslo, Bergen, Trondhjem, Bodø and Kristiansand; five major cities in Norway. In addition there were quite a few other events in smaller places throughout the country. The cooperation worked well and gave us added strength compared to 1997.

On the actual stands we did many things. It was important to us not to give people a bad conscience, but rather make them aware that they had a choice wether they wanted or needed to buy or not. Therefore we did not aim to do anything really aggressive. In Oslo (The Capital) the stand on the main avenue included the following activities:

• Offering Max Haavelaar (fair trade) coffee and home-made ginger biscuits.
• Street theatre (in three spots!) portraying typical fast-talking salesmen. They "tried" to sell things like: a perfect childhood, clean air and various untranslatable Norwegian
• cliches.
• Live music: We had an african drummer, who became very popular with the crowd.
• Handing out of "flyers" with information about NBD, overconsumption, North/South-issues, "peaceful Christmas" and so on... We are happy to tell that all in all we were able to hand out some 2000 or more flyers.
• Giving bypassers ideas about "sustainable" Christmas gifts.

As for media coverage we are quite satisfied. It was not as extensive as in 1997, probably because that was BNDs first time in Norway. Still, we got on the evening news, radio interviews and some major newspapers and quite a few small ones. An accep- table result.

All in all we are pleased with the day. We had a lot of fun with the people involved and the feedback from the passing crowd was good. It seems that people are more open to the idea of less consumption than we thought. How long they remember their encounter with us on the street. Well - that is a matter for speculation.

Yours optimistically,

Carin Leffler and Kjetil G. Abildsnes

Kjetil G. Abildsnes
The Future in our Hands"
PO Box 4743 Sofienberg
0506 Oslo - Norway
Phone: +47 22 20 10 45 (work) +47 22 20 06 09 (private)
Fax: +47 22 20 47 88 e-mail:
Check out or webpages at: http://www.ngo.grida.no/ngo/fivh

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