TVIND ALERT

Humana back in Belgium

Recently, a new second hand textile shop (Vintage) was opened in Ghent (Ajuinlei 15), under the name of  “HUMANA / BALTIC TEXTILE TRADING”.

A quick investigation learned that “Baltic Textile Trading” (Ltd) was established in Belgium since 2007, by “Humana People to People Baltic” (society of public interest) in Vilnius, Lithuania. Since then, direction and official address changed several times.

The Belgian company, employing more than 10 people, is not making profit (this is not a surprise).

Humana People-to-People




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Story about Humana Austria in Datum magazine, September 2010


Clothes make the man
In Austria, they are part of the street scene: the containers of Humana. For a good cause. Humana claims to be a charity. But the club is everything: commercial and non-transparent. Only a fraction of the donations end up in Africa.
Kleider machen Leute
In Österreich gehören sie zum Straßenbild: die Container von Humana. In ihnen landen Kleiderspenden. Für den guten Zweck. Humana gibt vor, eine Hilfsorganisation zu sein. Doch der Verein ist mehr: kommerziell und undurchsichtig. Nur ein Bruchteil der Spenden landet in Afrika.



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Unsuccessful legal action


Some years ago Humana Austria threatened legal action against an Austrian cult expert of calling it a ‘cult’.   Humana dropped the action after some months.


We have information from Austrian volunteers on file.



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If you have up to date information on Humana Austria please send it to us

Last revised: 1st October 2010

World charity group under investigation

Toronto organization denies ties to four indicted Danes

National Post, Canada, April 27, 2002

by Brian Hutchinson

Chris Bolin, National Post

ELLEN SHIFRIN: “The money had basically been thrown away.”

Ellen Shifrin just wanted to help people. A retired Toronto school teacher with a lifetime interest in overseas volunteer work, she thought she had found her dream assignment: a six-month stint in rural India, helping improve the lives of impoverished and disease-stricken villagers.

But there was a catch. The organization that offered the program — something called the Institute for International Co-operation and Development (IICD) — required Shifrin to spend US$5,300 on a five-month “training program” in southwestern Michigan. Only after she had completed the program would IICD send her to India. She agreed.

This, she now says, was a big mistake.

In August, 2000, Shifrin arrived in the small town of Dowagiac, Mich., population 6,500. She was assigned a room in an old college dormitory run by IICD, and was introduced to 15 other volunteers, most of whom were in their early twenties. Dubbed “development instructors,” they had all paid the same US$5,300 training fee.

Shifrin was prepared for a rigorous program, including Hindi language instruction. Instead, the group spent almost half its time travelling by van across Michigan, sleeping in shelters and soliciting donations door-to-door in such places as Kalamazoo, Anne Arbor and Lansing. They also travelled to California, where they spent a month raising money in the streets of Santa Cruz.

“We each had to raise another US$6,000 to offset our expenses once we got to India,” Shifrin says. “That was the goal we had to reach before we could go to India.”

Living conditions were miserable, she recalls. In order to save money, IICD allowed its “volunteer” development instructors a daily food allowance of just US$3. “We had to buy the cheapest food available,” Shifrin says. “I spent a lot of my time cooking for the others.”

Some of the development instructors began to refer to their dormitory in Dowagiac as “the holding tank,” and spent most of their time smoking, drinking and watching television.

Supervising them was a young Norwegian woman named Line Henriksen, who, Shifrin eventually learned, was a member of the Teachers Group, a controversial Danish organization that runs IICD and dozens of other humanitarian and fundraising organizations around the planet.

These organizations include Humana People to People, a far-reaching, international aid organization based in Zimbabwe.

They also include a Toronto-based charity called Planet Aid Canada, which collects used clothing from 200 yellow donation boxes placed across the Toronto area.

The clothing is then sorted and sold from Planet Aid’s three retail stores in the city’s downtown core.

Planet Aid’s president is Carsten Hansen, a tall, Danish-born member of the Teachers Group. He says the charity funnels all of its surplus revenues to Humana and that it also helps recruit volunteers for its programs overseas.

“Humana does amazing things all over the world,” Hansen told the National Post. “It’s an excellent organization and it takes its role and responsibilities in the developing world very seriously. All of the development instructors are well-prepared ahead of time.”

On the contrary, says Shifrin. “We weren’t prepared for India at all. I’ve been there five times and I knew that we needed to be able to communicate in Hindi. But there was this incredible arrogance. Line [Henriksen] knew what was best, although she’d never even been to India.”

In January, 2001, after raising the additional US$6,000, Shifrin arrived in India with several of her fellow trainees. They were assigned to a small village, where they were introduced to some local people recruited by the Teachers Group.

“We were all supposed to be working for Humana but Humana gave us no support, no resources, nothing,” says Shifrin. “We were just kind of left there.”

Shifrin spent one month in the village before being posted to Humana’s office and residence in Jaipur, where she helped plan a conference on poverty.

In Jaipur, her living conditions improved dramatically. “It was extravagance,” she says, “nothing that ordinary Indians would experience. We had someone to clean after us, and another person to cook for us.”

But her frustration grew with each passing day. Shifrin became convinced Humana was a sham. “There was no accountability. There were doctored reports. One fellow wrote that we’d built all these latrines. It wasn’t true. There was an incredible amount of inertia surrounding everything. I didn’t see much being done for the Indian people.”

In April, she heard the news that four high-ranking members of the Teachers Group had been charged with fraud. Danish police accused them of “misappropriating funds and donations earmarked for humanitarian purposes.”

The four — including Teachers Group founder Mogens Amdi Petersen — were accused of embezzlement and tax fraud involving $35-million, money supposedly directed to several of the group’s charitable organizations between 1987 and 2000.

Shifrin was appalled; incredibly, the news didn’t faze her co-workers. A month later, she decided she’d had enough. She returned to Canada after only five months with Humana in India.

“When I got back, I wrote letters to newspapers in every city where I’d raised money. I apologized for collecting money for IICD and Humana, and I said that the money had basically been thrown away.”

She also contacted Toronto Star columnist Michele Landsberg, whose husband, Stephen Lewis, is the United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. Shifrin thought Landsberg might be interested to hear a true tale of negligence in the development industry. “She told me to write down my story and send it to her,” says Shifrin. “I did, but I never heard back from her.”

No one seemed interested in her experience, so Shifrin decided to put it behind her. She turned to substitute teaching in Toronto and got on with her life, a little wiser, a little poorer.

And then everything changed.

- – -

Two months ago, on Feb. 17, Mogens Amdi Petersen, the Teachers Group’s alleged mastermind, was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport. He was, reportedly, attempting to travel to Zimbabwe, where Humana, the Teachers Group’s key development and fundraising arm, is based.

Petersen, 63, is being held without bail in a Los Angeles area prison, awaiting an extradition hearing; Danish authorities are keen to have him return to Denmark to face fraud charges. He has hired Robert Shapiro as his defence lawyer who, seven years ago, successfully helped O.J. Simpson beat murder charges.

Petersen’s arrest caused a sensation in Denmark, where the Teachers Group — also known as Tvind — has for years been synonymous with scandal and greed.

Established in the early 1970s by Petersen and several other teachers, the group offered free, alternative-style education to troubled Danish youths. Its methods — which included taking students on long, unstructured trips around the world — became popular, and the Teachers Group soon obtained large amounts of funding from governments in Denmark and other European countries. Approximately 50 schools were established across Europe. Teachers within the group were given room, board and a small amount of money; as much as 85% of their government-subsidized salaries were deposited into the group’s main coffers.

In 1979, amid criticism the Teachers Group and its agencies were engaged in deceptive practices and mired in self-interest, Petersen vanished from Denmark. However, Danish investigators believed he continued to direct Tvind’s activities from a remote location.

Last November, Danish reporters found Petersen living under an assumed name in a $10-million condominium on Fisher Island, one of Miami’s wealthiest enclaves. In order to house his two Leonhand dogs comfortably, Petersen was reported to have bought a second condo in the same exclusive complex. He also kept two late-model Mercedes Benz SUVs on-hand.

How could Petersen afford such a luxurious lifestyle? According to documents released by Denmark’s Public Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime, the condos were purchased by a Tvind subsidiary, one of its many “holding companies placed in typical tax haven countries…. The police estimate that today the Tvind Group controls assets (cash, properties, etc.) amounting to several thousand million” Danish kroner, approximately $500-million in Canadian funds.

The Teachers Group has “expanded far beyond pure school activities,” and now consists of “more than 100 companies and foundations,” including Third World fruit plantations, shoe factories, sawmills, recycling companies and, of course, relief agencies such as Humana People to People and Planet Aid Canada.

But according to Planet Aid’s Hansen, his charity has no ties to either Petersen or the three other Teachers Group honchos charged by Danish authorities with fraud.

“It is messy, and it’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t have anything to do with us,” insists Hansen, sitting in a small meeting room inside Planet Aid’s modest headquarters on Yonge Street, downtown Toronto.

“Nobody charged or arrested in that matter has anything to do with Planet Aid,” he says.

Hansen, however, is himself a member of the Teachers Group, and a veteran Humana worker. He admits he has encountered Petersen on several “social occasions” since the Tvind founder went into hiding in 1979. He isn’t bothered by accounts of Petersen’s luxurious Fisher Island hideaway. “The guy must have made some money. So what? He’s a very serious, hard-working person.”

Improbably, Hansen adds that Planet Aid is “completely independent” from Humana, as well. “We are a federally registered Canadian charity,” Mr. Hansen says. “The law says that we can’t be directed by anyone outside of Canada.” That, he says, “would be illegal.”

And yet Hansen says he established Planet Aid five years ago with Humana’s blessing. Last year, he says, Planet Aid donated all of its surplus revenues — approximately $30,000 — to Humana. (According to documents it filed with the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, Planet Aid had revenues of $1.7-million between 1998 and 2000, yet claims to have run an operating deficit in those years and therefore did not forward any surpluses to Humana). Hansen hopes to contribute $60,000 to Humana this year.

Planet Aid also helps in the effort to recruit Development Instructors for Humana. Its three Toronto stores are plastered with Humana posters and pamphlets challenging people to become involved in its overseas projects, and extolling the benefits of working in the developing world.

“It is a human obligation,” reads one brochure. “Humana People to People is good at mobilizing people, organizing things on grass root level [sic], liberating the forces of the many, making things happen and getting plans off the ground. These and many more sides are brilliant and unique strengths of Humana People to People.”

Nowhere is it mentioned what Humana does for the people it claims to serve, or how it spends its resources. “I suggest you contact Humana people in Zimbabwe” to find out, Hansen says.

He goes on to defend the fee Humana subsidiary IICD charges its Development Instructors for its five-week training and fundraising program. “It’s not a lot of money for the living expenses and the travel involved,” he says. “You have to have good in your heart and really want to make a difference. Unfortunately, there are always some people who will complain about anything.”

- – -

That, says Maureen Ross-Smith, is “absolute bullshit.”

A retired corrections officer from Brampton, she hooked up with Planet Aid last year, pulling several volunteer shifts in its Yonge St. retail outlet before sending IICD its fee and moving into its dormitory in Dowagiac, Mich. “I was about to retire, and I’d been looking to volunteer with something. I went to an IICD meeting in Toronto and the next thing I knew, I was going to go to Guatemala and help street women, or so I thought. I thought the program sounded great.”

What she found was something rather less. “All we did was cook, clean, and plan our fundraising,” she says. “There was no development training. We were offered three Spanish classes in the seven weeks that I was there.”

Her worst experience, she says, came on a fundraising expedition to St. Paul, Minn. “A group of us were sent off in this really unsafe van. It was dangerous. The transmission kept slipping and I was terrified. Then we stayed for two-and-a-half weeks in the basement of someone’s house in St. Paul. There were 10 of us sleeping on the floor of this small room. The carpet was covered in cat pee. For dinner, we ate stale bagels that someone got from the bagel store.”

Ross-Smith wanted to leave, but was persuaded to stay and go door-knocking. One day, she says, she raised $140, but quickly realized she’d have trouble collecting the extra US$6,000 required for her volunteer work in Guatemala.

“I couldn’t bring myself to beg any longer for this disgusting outfit” she says. “So they asked me to go around to universities and colleges and put up Humana posters. I felt like a sneak, going into these places without permission and sticking these posters inside bathrooms. I hope no one saw them.”

Last fall, she decided to return home after completing less than half of the training program. IICD promised to refund the balance of her fee, but she’s still waiting.

Charity collected $1.7M, gave $0

Planet Aid claimed $350,000 in losses from 1998 to 2000

Toronto Star, Friday 26th April 2002

by Robert Cribb, Staff Reporter

A non-profit organization that pledges to support overseas development didn’t direct a cent of the first $1.7 million it raised toward humanitarian efforts.

Planet Aid Canada, a Toronto-based charitable clothing operation with three stores and nearly 200 donation bins across the GTA, received the money and donations between 1998 and 2000, largely from people who believed they were helping clothe the poor in places such as India and Africa.

Yet none of that money left Canada. In those three years, the charity claimed total net losses of nearly $350,000.

“We couldn’t (contribute to overseas development projects),” said Carsten Hansen, president of Planet Aid Canada, whose stated purpose is “defeating poverty by undertaking development projects in the Third World.”

“Our charity is not funded by big corporations or government funding. We’re working in plain market conditions. You don’t get anything for free in this world. Nobody expects to make anything significant in the first couple of years. After that, we thought we’d have enough going for us, but it wasn’t possible.”

According to its charity filings with the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, Planet Aid Canada declared the losses as a result of expenses including management, administration and the cost of acquiring its used clothing.

In 2001, for which no official filing has been made, Hansen said his charity turned a profit and gave $30,000 to two development projects in Zambia.

“We decided to keep on struggling and get back up and we have done that. We still have debt, but we’re getting over it.”

Carl Juneau, director of policy and communications with the federal government’s Charities Directorate, said generally speaking, deficit figures such as those filed by Planet Aid raise questions about how well a charity is run.

“It speaks to how efficiently the organization is operating,” he said. “A charity operating at that kind of deficit is probably in fairly serious trouble in terms of its operating capabilities.”

Questions about Planet Aid’s finances in Canada mirror similar questions being asked about the organization’s affiliates around the world.

Planet Aid is part of a complicated international organization of schools, factories, plantations, farms and other clothing recycling operations informally dubbed Tvind after the Dutch area where its founders first came together in the early ’70s.

Tvind’s vast array of non-profit organizations prompted police and governments in Europe to investigate how its charitable revenue is collected and spent. These probes recently led to the arrest and detainment of the organization’s leader, Morgens Amdi Petersen, on charges of tax fraud and embezzlement of millions of dollars.

The Tvind movement comprises dozens of organizations in 55 countries producing millions of dollars in profit, according to a Danish police report on Tvind released last year.

The report alleged tax fraud and said the organization has been “misappropriating funds earmarked for public utility (humanitarian) purposes.” Tvind is a “hierarchically built association with clear political aims,” “has made no allocations to (humanitarian) purposes,” and has enjoyed tax-privileged contributions based on “incorrect, incomplete or misleading information” provided to tax authorities in Denmark, the report reads.

Some Torontonians who went overseas to work on humanitarian projects run by Tvind’s Humana People to People network, which includes Planet Aid Canada, say there’s little evidence that used clothing sales are helping the world’s poor.

“I didn’t really feel like I helped people,” says Ellen Shifrin, a Toronto teacher who spent six months doing development work in India. “They take a group of young people who want to do something good, who are enthusiastic, creative and energetic and turn them into disillusioned, cynical people.”

Nick Moss Gillespie, a Torontonian who spent a year training and working in a Tvind development project in Angola in 1996, says it took him two years after he got home to recover from the guilt of failing to help Africans.

“We invested a year of our lives and a lot of energy and significant personal risk to accomplish something and we were severely underutilized,” he says.

“Our money and the money of the project and money from any funders was not being put to good use at all. The money for a project to build 124 latrines didn’t come through until just six weeks before the end of my stay. The reality is, this isn’t a charity, it’s an international business. It exists to perpetuate itself rather than to have an impact on the local people in Angola.”

Volunteers say there should be no shortage of money for development projects considering the amounts they provide themselves.

Before going overseas, volunteers on Humana projects first spent about 5 1/2five months training in schools run by the Institute for International Co-operation and Development, which supplies volunteers for Humana projects.

Trainees pay $3,300 (U.S.) in tuition and are then expected to raise another $5,600 (U.S.) by soliciting donations door to door, on university campuses or on the streets of U.S. cities.

“I’ve researched dozens of volunteer programs and if you look at the training students are receiving in IICD schools, it’s a scam,” says Zahara Heckscher, co-author of How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas and one of the first volunteers to travel to Africa with the institute in 1987.

“My estimate is that they’re skimming off $3,000 to $5,000 per volunteer above and beyond the real cost of the program. It doesn’t add up for the service they’re offering.”

Line Henricksen, director of the institute’s Michigan facility, said tuition costs and money earned by volunteers through fundraising are “reasonable.”

“If you sat down and made a reasonable budget, you’d see that it’s not overly a big amount of money.”

Sara Somerset, a 22-year-old Torontonian, who recently spent three months at the institute’s Michigan school, said she doesn’t understand why she had to raise $5,600 considering she received no real training.

“They had this self-study program, but everyone stopped doing it after a week and a half because it was bogus…. And they said there was this big database of information, but nobody ever saw it. The language training was terrible. People just e-mailed all day and watched TV.”

Volunteers such as Somerset say school leaders told them money they raise through solicitation goes to fund the organization’s training schools, not overseas projects. Her work as a fundraiser left her feeling increasingly guilty about her involvement with the organization.

“I thought the money was going to the projects … I hadn’t realized it was all going to the school. I would go door to door and canvass on campuses. I emptied out so many students’ wallets … I was taking these people’s money and I just didn’t want to do it any more. I was crying because I didn’t want anyone to give me money any more. I felt really horrible.”

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/

Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1019772202262






19th February 2010
WGAM-TV, Illinois – U’SAgain red donation boxes meet resistance

US broadcaster covering Tri-State parts of Illinois, Missouri and Indiana reports. The City of Quincy almost immediately banned the red collection boxes due to a city ordinance violation.





Key offshore holding company, based in Jersey and  Belize.

Owns thousands of acres of land and property and major companies including U’SAgain.

Founding directors all Teachers Group leaders

Links have been restored

Corrected 15th March 2010

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Fairbank, Cooper and Lyle (or FCL) is an absolutely key offshore company at the heart of the Teachers Group money machine.    It is the ultimate owner of almost all the main sources of income:  many of the plantations, including enormous estates in central America, Brazil, Malaysia and the Caribbean; the colleges; and several of the commercial used clothes companies including U’SAgain.

The commercial plantations supply mangos, bananas, oranges and other produce for large profits on world markets.   There is a listing of Teachers Group plantations here.

The Fairbank, Cooper and Lyle website is here.

WHAT DOES FCL GROUP LTD DO?

Fairbank Cooper and Lyle, or FCL Group Ltd, is an offshore holding company, registered for tax purposes  in Jersey and run from Belize, where the Teachers Group has large plantations.



FCL portfolio

• FCL owns Teachers Group plantations in Brazil, Belize, Ecuador, the Cayman Islands , St. Lucia and Fiji
• It owns Fazenda Jatobà ranch in Brazil, the $12m property at the heart of the 2003-6 fraud prosecution against the Teachers Group.
• It owns U’SAgain
• It also probably owns Garson and Shaw, a commercial used-clothes broker “selling clothes to big customers in USA, Latin America, Europe and Africa’”
• It is a majority shareholder in “four American companies, engaged in collecting recycled clothes in nine states, for resale in USA and world wide.” [We think those companies are: U'SAgain, dormant subsidiaries U'SAgain 2000, U'SAgain 3000, and perhaps  TS Recycling.]
• It may own Argyll Smith and Company Ltd, the Jersey-registered offshore company that owns most Teachers Group schools. (This was stated to be so by Danish police in 2001.)
• Through Argyll Smith, it is therefore ultimate owner of the mysterious compound in the Mexican desert.
• Until 2005 it was owner of another key Jersey-registered holding company, Kirchheiner Bros. (Police said so in 2001, stating that Kirchheiner was ‘centrally placed in the Tvind group’, and directly controlled by KLAP [Kirsten Larsen and Amdi Petersen].) Kirchheiner is now dissolved.
• It may own forestry companies or loggingt concessions on Malaysia.  This was cited in the 2001 police report.




Who runs FCL Group Ltd?

FCL was formed by the merger of three separate offshore companies (Fairbank Limited, Cooper Investments Ltd and Lyle Enterprises Ltd) all of which were originally registered in Jersey in 1991. The companies merged after 1995.

There were then six directors, all of them Teachers Group.  They were all identified by police as top managers of the secret ‘Tvind economy’ and are on our list of the top thirty Teachers Group financial wizards. Of those six, one, Kirsten Larsen, is on a Danish police want list because they would like to charge her with financial crimes.  She is believed to be a fugitive in Mexico or Zimbabwe.    The others are running various Teachers Group enterprises around the world. They are: Else Jensen, Birgitte Krohn, Anne Hansen, Svend Sorensen, and Joep Nagel.



Dirty money?

Danish police say Fairbank Ltd, Cooper Investments and Lyle Enterprises were all key Teachers Group ‘operating companies’ in the years after 1991.   They and their successor FCL Group Ltd have a long history of ‘hot money’ transactions, according to the 2001 Danish police report.

The main police allegation is that Fairbank, Cooper and Lyle was used to mount an illegal operation to covertly channel funds from a ‘humanitarian’ Teachers Group charity into property and land for commercial purposes. The money, they say, was secretly transferred through FCL subsidiary companies with false identities.   This was the charge at the heart of the 2003-2006 fraud charge against the Teachers Group.

One network of FCL-owned companies in the USA and the Cayman Islands was allegedly used to buy a properties in Miami and a ranch in Brazil. Another nest of subsidiary companies was based in Jersey and Hong Kong. A third revolved around a fake ‘environmental project’ in Malaysia and a fourth was run through an FCL-owned investment company in Miami.

The ultimate object, say police, was to move enough money to buy the Fazenda Jatoba ranch in Brazil for $12m.  The contract for this sale was signed on 8th August 1994 by Anne Hansen and Kirsten Fuglsbjerg.  Fuglsbjerg, who also goes by the name Christie Pipps, is among those wanted for questioning by Danish police.  This ranch is still in the hands of the Teachers Group.   The money transfers through shell companies also helped buy apartments at the Sterling, Miami in 1992 (now sold).



What plantations does FCL Group own?

The Cayman Islands – Furtherland Farm

St Lucia – Park Estate Ltd, River Doree Holding Ltd, Mt Lezard Estate Ltd?

Belize – at least 13 companies including Belize Gold Bananas, Cowpen Farms Ltd, Monkey River Estate, Toledo Citrus Company Ltd and Toledo Fish Farming Ltd

Brazil – Floresta Jatoba.

Ecuador – Ecpomartes SA, Frioport SA, Grupo Danés and Jokay SA?

Fiji – Pacific Farming, Pacific Produce Ltd?




There is a list of Teachers Group Plantations here



Sources: FCL Group website and 2001 Danish police prosecution evidence



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Do you have information about a Teachers Group company?    Tell us

Last updated: 15th March 2010

Mission Control

From Boston Magazine, October 2000

by Jay Cheshes

In 1970, a group of Danish hippies set out on a mission to save the world. Thirty years later, some of the young acolytes they recruited claim the group has become a cult, amassing riches in the hundreds of millions of dollars under the direction of an elusive and mysterious founder. Now, with recruiting efforts reaching into the United States, ex-members say the mission is no longer to save the world but to conquer it. North American headquarters? Massachusetts.

A LOW CLOUD CLINGS to the perfect pastures of the Institute for International Cooperation and Development, a tiny offbeat institution hidden deep in the wooded foothills of the Berkshires outside Williamstown. It’s just before lunchtime, and the campus is abuzz with activity. A young woman from New Zealand coaxes an oversized lawn mower along the hillside at the base of the main lodge, which was renovated by an earlier group of students and christened Bella Vista for its impressive mountain views. Inside the brand-new state-of-the-art video editing suite, a freckle-faced 20-year-old from Indiana just back from six months in Angola is putting the finishing touches on a presentation about her experiences in that war-ravaged southern African nation. In the kitchen, a group is whipping up a quick vegetarian lunch of humus, pita bread, and three-bean salad. Other students are glued to computers, Web surfing to learn more about the Third World countries where they’ll soon be planting trees, building schools, or digging latrines. They are mostly 18, 19, or 20 years old, and are as wide-eyed and well-intentioned a group as you’re likely to find. Some of them are practicing their Spanish or Portuguese, others are on the phone tracking down visas, or huddled together working out the details of fundraising excursions to Burlington, Boston, or Amherst. Although they’ve shelled out $5,000 each to be here, before they go overseas they are expected to raise far more than that, mostly by soliciting handouts from strangers in college towns or affluent suburbs across New England. They are a tight-knit group, drawn together by hard work and communal living, and are not much younger than the teachers charged with preparing them for the harsh realities of Third World life.

Those teachers were students here once too. It was only two or three years ago that many of them first contacted the school after noticing flyers stapled to kiosks or to dormitory walls offering opportunities to “volunteer, live, and learn” in southern Africa or Central America. Some of them had traveled together to Nicaragua, where they lived sparely in the mountains among the coffee growers and built a medical clinic for the region’s lone doctor. When they returned to Williamstown, exhausted but empowered, they were invited to stay on. They signed over their salaries, their time, and their labor and entered the ranks of an international brotherhood of like-minded souls known as the Teachers Group. In return for their commitment to the group, they get room and board, free travel, and a new family of friends. They live together and work together and in their collective strength believe they’ll accomplish great things for the poorest, most destitute of their Third World brethren.

But there’s a catch. Former members, government investigators and journalists who have studied the Teachers Group in Europe say it’s a cult. Beneath the warm exterior lurks a dystopia revolving around skewed ideas about helping the developing world. Among the core leadership, there is a seemingly voracious appetite for money and influence. A social movement founded 30 years ago in a rural farmhouse in the village of Tvind in eastern Denmark, the group has been described as a cult in government reports in Belgium and France and in books and articles by European journalists and longtime members from Scandinavia. Two years ago Steen Thomsen, who had been the headmaster of a Teachers Group school outside London, left after 16 years and published an exhaustive personal account he submitted to the Danish Ministry of Education. “What I for so many years regarded as a peacemaking organization, working for the oppressed and poor,” he wrote, “has turned out to be a cult with all of its important characteristics.”

SOMETHING ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF DENMARK: Thirty years ago, Danish high school teacher Amdi Petersen launched a social movement that many contend has since become a cult. Petersen has not been captured on film since 1979, when this picture was taken. The group he started now runs dozens of schools in Scandinavia and countless development projects in southern Africa.

Despite the financial prowess of the Teachers Group – journalists and government investigators in Europe speculate that the combined value of its holdings is in the hundreds of mil lions of dollars – its public face has always been that of an impoverished grassroots organization. Even its own members rarely have much knowledge of the true scope of the group, whose most senior devotees direct non-profit humanitarian organizations structured to obscure all signs that they are under common control.

At the center is a former high school teacher named Mogens Amdi Petersen, who started the group in 1970 when he led a small band of hippies on a cross-continental odyssey, traveling by bus across Europe and the Middle East and into India. Petersen went underground 20 years ago and, beside one brief encounter with a journalist in the Cayman Islands in the early ‘90s, has not been spotted by reporters since 1979. From locations in Denmark, Florida, and the Caribbean, he is said to direct a world wide empire that over the years has reportedly included not only schools and development projects, but also office buildings, commercial plantations in Latin America, beachfront property in Miami and the Cayman Islands, a satellite television network, computer and lumber companies in China, a clothing factory in Morocco, a shipping company in Florida and the Caribbean, and used-clothing stores all across Europe.

And Massachusetts is its North American headquarters.

A LITTLE MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, after being hounded in Europe by the press and by government investigators, the Teachers Group, sometimes known as Tvind for the Danish hamlet where it began, decided to expand to the untarnished frontier across the Atlantic. With little fanfare and scant scrutiny, it arrived in this country with a bold plan to swell its ranks, and its coffers, by exploiting the good intentions and public-minded volunteer spirit of many young Americans. From an old 4-H camp near Northampton, it created the Institute for International Cooperation and Development, which, in turn, spawned spinoffs in Michigan and California. Three years ago it started collecting and selling used clothing under the name Planet Aid, a non-profit branch set up near Boston that now has four stores and more than 1,200 familiar bright-yellow collection boxes and last year generated more than $2 million in sales, mostly as unsorted bulk sold to commercial wholesalers.

School in Scandinavia

The Teachers Group has big plans for the United States, plans being put into motion through a complex network of foundations, holding companies, and non-profit organizations. It is preparing to recruit more students and more teachers, and open new schools. As Planet Aid, it hopes to gain the name recognition, if not the scope, of such used-clothing concerns as Goodwill or the Salvation Army. In parts of Europe, where Teachers Group affiliates have more than 100 stores and thousands of bins, it has already reached that status – although in the last few years its operations have been largely shut down in Great Britain and France because of tax law violations. If all goes well, sometime in the next five years its American arm will operate thousands more of those clothing collection bins in shopping centers and on street corners, and as many as 25 used-clothing stores, including one already planned for Harvard Square. Flyers advertising its overseas programs will blanket the walls on every college campus, and it will be flush with cash raised from tuition, the sale of used clothing, and generous grants solicited from a new corporate office on Wall Street.

ALL OF THIS CAPITALIST FLASH BELIES THE ORIGINS OF THE TEACHERS Group in the counterculture of the late 1960s. In the beginning, the young Scandinavians who founded the group were driven by a genuine desire to combat injustice, inequality, and the suffering of the poor. But as in so many other revolutionary movements, things quickly changed. The good works began with schools in northern Europe that, once they became money making enterprises, paid the way for expansion into southern Africa, where the fight against apartheid became a focus. In many circles the conventional wisdom was that strengthening South Africa’s neighbors, known as the frontline states, was one of the best ways to help topple the apartheid regime. The Teachers Group put its energies behind the rebel leader Robert Mugabe, who was fighting a brutal war for independence against the white government of Rhodesia. It supplied food and clothing to the war refugees pouring into neighboring Mozambique, and informed Mugabe that, following victory, it would help him build a new country. Mugabe has now been president of Zimbabwe for 20 years, and for all that time the Teachers Group has been his friend. It has built schools, clinics, and Teachers Group teacher-training colleges, and has recruited veterans of the war into the Teachers Group. In return, it has reaped considerable influence in Zimbabwe, where two years ago it inaugurated a new multimillion-dollar headquarters at a ceremony attended by Mugabe and other government officials. The Teachers Group also has a significant presence in Angola and Mozambique.

In these countries, and in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Teachers Group’s nonprofits appear to be legitimate humanitarian organizations. While there have been benefits to this work, however, there have also been many problems – so many, in fact, that some critics in the development community wonder if the group is doing far more harm than good. Rather than working with locals in Mozambique and Guinea Bissau to develop their own plots of land, for example, the Teachers Group owns enormous cashew plantations that employ hundreds of local farmers as part of a program that teaches them commercial agriculture techniques. Critics say the plantations pay the same comparatively low wages as any other commercial enterprise, and funnel the profits back into the Teachers Group.

Working on the principle that if you believe in something, you can accomplish it, the school in Massachusetts sends young untrained volunteers to work on complex projects such as implement ing health education programs or training experienced farmers in new growing techniques, often providing little or no guidance. “I met a couple of 18-year-old girls who were trying to teach 40- and 50-year-old farmers how to farm,” says an aid worker who ran into Teachers Group volunteers in Zimbabwe. “They had no background for this work, not to mention the language barrier.” In Mozambique, one former volunteer says he was instructed to plant a whole grove of fruit trees, even though it wasn’t the right season. “We planted thousands of seeds,” he recalls. “I heard that a few weeks after it was all done, everything died.” Another aid worker, also based in Mozambique, says Teachers Group volunteers built a school in his area two years ago without government authorization. Since that time, the building has remained empty. “It’s like these people are from another planet,” he says. “I don’t understand what they are really doing.” Zahara Heckscher, whose upcoming book on international volunteer programs warns people away from Teachers Group programs in a section about the Institute for International Cooperation and Development, cites the school’s cult affiliation and many examples of mismanaged development projects. While conducting her research, Heckscher traveled to Zimbabwe, where she interviewed confused young Americans who seemed to have no idea what they were supposed to be doing. “When I arrived, I was in culture shock city,” one woman told her. “There was no one here telling me what to do. The two people I am here with were completely unsupportive.”

Ten years ago Cara Siano, Laura Chomentowski, and Stanley Gildersleeve paid out $7,700 to join a volunteer travel program in Central America, and soon found themselves hitchhiking through Mexico, living on $2 a day for food, with virtually no budget for lodging. The Teachers Group runs all its schools under a strict philosophy of self-reliance, which is why the trips are often poorly planned and students get so little guidance from the largely untrained staff. Overseas programs run by the Teachers Group are like a cross between the Peace Corps and the television show Survivor. The group contends that adversity builds character, and that the best way to understand the poor is to not only live among them, but to live just like them. Problem is, many students have never even been overseas, let alone to a Third World country overrun by war, starvation, and disease. A letter one group leader sent back to the school in Williamstown gives a good idea of just how bad things can get. “We have hit some hard times here in Angola,” the teacher wrote. “Most of us have had malaria now, some worse than others. [Naomi] is scared and wants to go home. [Hillary] has been severely depressed and homesick for over a month now. She has just had malaria for the second time.”

Over the years there have been many reports like this, from schools in Europe and the United States. Students have gotten malaria, typhus, and worms in their intestines. They’ve been robbed, assaulted, even shot at. Despite all these trials, many still say the ordeal was worthwhile. Even Siano, whose group filed a lengthy complaint with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, says she had “a great experience despite the problems.” Mikael Norling, the director of the school at the time that complaint was filed, wrote a letter to the attorney general, dismissing the students’ allegations that the school had lured them in with false advertising, then put their lives at risk. “They had been explained very clearly what the program was all about,” Norling says today. “It’s not kindergarten. These are adults who come to us on a volunteer basis.” The attorney general has never taken action against the school.

For many students, surviving life-threatening situations in Third World countries draws them together. Those most energized by the experience are likely to be recruited by the Teachers Group. Even the most senior members have spent time fighting off disease, hitchhiking through the desert, or sleeping in the dirt. When they speak of their travels, they sound like proud veterans telling war stones. “You learn about things you never thought you could do,” says Fred Olsson, head of Planet Aid in Massachusetts, who many years ago rode with a group on a bus through India. “I hopped on that bus and I’ve been on it ever since.”

ERIC NEWMAN, A PROGRESSIVE AND affluent young Californian, was recruited to the Teachers Group in the early 1980s, when he was still a student at Hampshire College in Amherst. In those days, the group’s only project in North America was a small school for juvenile delinquents in a rural backwater in central Virginia. It had lined up contracts with local authorities to take in criminal youth no one else could handle. As in Denmark, where the Teachers Group still runs many similar institutions, all teacher salaries were collectivized and funneled toward the growth of the organization, helping set up new companies or new programs in southern Africa.

Eric Newman worked at that Virginia school, a place where students regularly assaulted members of the staff. One young criminal once set off a pipe bomb that exploded in his own hand. Newman felt he was doing good work, and the young “comrade,” as Teachers Group members often refer to each other, took to it with dedication and zeal. Later, Newman traveled to the group’s head quarters in Denmark, and when he returned home, he recruited Ted Lewis, another young American, to help lead the struggle for expansion into the United States. In 1986, the year after the Virginia school closed following decertification by the Department of Corrections for failing to meet state standards, Newman and Lewis launched the first incarnation of the Institute for International Cooperation and Development at the old 4-H camp near Northampton.

It was a ragtag facility with a skeletal staff, but Newman and Lewis were running the show and loving every minute of it. They were revolutionaries recruiting among their peers and, together, they believed they just might change the world. In 1988 the growing band of American teachers detailed their plans in along letter to Bodil Ross Sørensen, a stern doctrinaire who, to this day, remains part of the inner sanctum around the group’s reputed guru, Amdi Petersen.

They wrote of exploring the “thousands of ways that diligent efforts can make money in this country,” of expanding “our travel/solidarity courses as soon as possible,” and of seeking out interns on college campuses – “bright, committed people” whom they might introduce “gently yet powerfully to the Teachers Group.” In another letter they wrote of the potential benefits of uprooting the school from “liberal, complacent New England” and described a “15-year plan that would have us organizing whole industries and even towns according to the principles of the Teachers Group.”

Back in Denmark, the leaders of the group were unimpressed. They felt that, unsupervised, the American teachers were getting out of hand and needed to be reined in. They dispatched Bodil Ross Sørensen and another veteran teacher, Mikael Norling, to restore order. ‘Ted had introduced the idea of becoming independent from the Teachers Group in Denmark,” recalls Tom Heineman, another early recruit in the U.S. “We banged the idea around for a while and then sent a fax to the headquarters in Denmark. Within 24 hours there was a Danish woman named Bodil at our door.”

Cults maintain control of their members by restricting freedom of thought and independence of movement. In the Teachers Group there has always been the illusion of free will, former members charge, but not much more than that. They say many of the teachers in Massachusetts wanted to break away from the Danes and from their strict dehumanizing ideology. The Teachers Group does not believe in amassing personal wealth, for instance, and discourages anything that distracts from the Work at hand – including family commitments, leisure, or love. American members give power of attorney over their income to an organization known in English as the Society of Petty Savers, which reinvests the money into countless profitable ventures the members rarely hear anything about.

Somerville-based cult counselor and author Steven Hassan first ran into the group five years ago, when he noticed pairs of young volunteers soliciting donations in the middle of Harvard Square. “They talked just like young moonies,” says Hassan, who was once a member of the Unification Church, an enormous and wealthy organization with eerie parallels to the Teachers Group. “Even though they appear to be doing good works,” he says, “the bottom line is that they’re helping themselves.” In what Hassan calls a classic model of mind control, the Teachers Group directs virtually every aspect of its newest teachers’ lives, including their time, which is consumed by meetings, travel, and manual labor; their personal endeavors, which take a back seat to “the work”; and their money, restricted to a small monthly stipend for snacks, clothing, and other personal expenses, sacrifices outlined in internal documents and on the Web site for the group’s new school in California.

The group’s most powerful tool has always been guilt: guilt about not working hard enough, not raising enough money, not giving 110 percent. ‘They always made me feel terrible about myself,” recalls one former member. “I was chastised beyond belief.” Personal letters show that Bodil Sørensen once scolded a member who had been secretly carrying on a relation ship with a woman outside the Teachers Group, questioning his commitment to the cause and attacking him for neglecting “the work.” Although the young teacher’s girlfriend wound up joining too, the stress of trying to juggle a relationship with the demands of “the work” quickly took its toll, and the union collapsed.

Along with avoiding romantic entanglements, former members, say the group, like many cults, urges detachment from close family and friends. In a letter sent to the leadership, one former teacher wrote of the need to “define me and my life as separate from my parents” so that “I can be away for a long time.” “I am making many separations at once,” she wrote. “If I do not take care of this main obstacle of my family, it will come up again more strongly in the future.”

In 1989 the Danes took control of the Northampton institute from Ted Lewis, who had been the director of the school. Under pressure to resign, he left the Teachers Group and moved to California. “I found that some aspects of the ideology were not supportive of my humanity,” says Lewis, who now runs more main stream overseas programs through a non profit organization called Global Exchange. “I’ve always felt a little responsible for being the cultural decoder of the whole thing, for helping them make sense of what they were saying to young Americans.” With Lewis gone, Mikael Norling took over as director, and the following year moved the school from the 4-H camp to its current location on the site of a former transcendental meditation center outside Williamstown.

IN EUROPE, THE TEACHERS GROUP HAS been successful at soliciting government handouts and manipulating tax laws, thanks to a battalion of lawyers, accountants, and financial wizards. It made its first millions reinvesting the collectivized salaries paid out to its schools by the Danish government, which subsidized private schools until recently, when the laws were specifically changed to under cut the group.

In Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and now the United States, the Teachers Group has played what appears to be a complicated shell game, in which money is shuffled around from non-profit organization to for-profit corporation and back again. As long ago as 1984, the Danish government estimated the value of the group’s assets in Denmark alone at more than $40 million. Although the true extent of its global financial empire remains a mystery, in parts of Europe reporters have devoted years to tracking the complex links between the various for-profit and non-profit arms of the Teachers Group. There are articles, books, documentaries, a master’s thesis, and, in Britain, an extensive Web site maintained by British journalist Michael Durham, who has devoted enormous amounts of his own time and money to unmasking the group.

While the Teachers Group itself is not a legal incorporated entity, it appears from interviews with current and former members and from letters and internal documents that it is a structured hierarchical organization whose members are account able to a core leadership based in Denmark, Zimbabwe, and other locations around the world. As Mikael Norling explains it, although companies are registered under the names of individual teachers, they are, in fact, part of the larger collective. “If you are in the Teachers Group, everything belongs to the Teachers Group,” Norling says. “The me-and-you distinction is not there.” Put simply, that means that all the independent schools, companies, and charities fall under the umbrella of the Teachers Group collective, a group whose non-profit corporations have increasingly come under fire.

An investigation into its used-clothing operation in France led the government to conclude that, while the group had been registered as a nonprofit for 10 years, it was, in fact, a profit-making enterprise. After the government demanded a decade’s worth of back taxes, operations in France were shuttered and the Teachers Group member directing them was reassigned to the United States, where he now runs the New England branch of Planet Aid.

In Britain, the group has run into considerably more trouble. Following an investigation by the British newspaper the Guardian, its used-clothing business, operating under the name Humana, was closed down by the British Charity Commission. It reopened in 1998 under the new name Planet Aid. In that same year, two of its schools for emotionally disturbed children were shut down by the government after inspectors voiced concern about health, safety, and education standards. Over the years there have been numerous other allegations of impropriety, including an investigation in Sweden in 1990 that found that only 2 percent of the proceeds from the non-profit used-clothing operation in that country actually went to charitable uses.

When the Teachers Group bought the Williamstown campus for $550,000 in 1990, it wasn’t through the non-profit school that would be operating there, but through an off shore holding company called Argyll Smith, based in the British tax haven of Jersey and run by several members of the Teachers Group. The group makes every effort to keep its money in the family. The Williamstown school pays rent to a corporation owned by members of the Teachers Group, which reinvests that money in other projects run by the group. Other related companies donate or loan out money to non-profits also connected to the Teachers Group, then take the tax write-offs at the end of the year.

THE PLANET AID OFFICE ON WALL Street is down by the East River, just past the J. P. Morgan Building. The Teachers Group moved into the spare unadorned space about a year ago, after Mikael Norling left the Institute for International Cooperation and Development to become the full-time president of Planet Aid in North America. Norling, essentially the most senior teacher in the U.S., is a tall gaunt man with sunken cheeks and intense bulbous eyes. He is a real “soldier,” according to former colleagues, fully dedicated to ensuring the financial well-being of the cause. “New York is a good location for raising money from the largest donors,” he says. “We’re reaching out to pharmaceutical companies, the United Nations, big foundations. So far we’ve only gotten smaller grants. Landing the big money is not something you do overnight.”

Norling has been in the Teachers Group since its very beginning and is most notorious for publicly espousing rather unorthodox political views. Although he dismisses press reports in Europe that have characterized the Teachers Group as a Maoist organization, he acknowledges the group has had ties to China, Cambodia, and North Korea.

Mikael Norling

Norling has been to all three countries, and once hosted a party in Denmark commemorating the birthday of North Korea’s founding father, Kim 11 Sung. In addition, he has given numerous speeches defending as misunderstood the former Cambodian strongman Pol Pot, widely recognized as being responsible for the deaths of more than a million of his countrymen. “Just because the press worldwide says that he’s the mean guy, it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the fact,” he says. “I think there has been a lot of misrepresentation of the whole scene.”

Norling is a true believer and a tireless worker. He embraces a Teachers Group ideology that is an odd combination of socialism and capitalism. While many longtime Teachers Group members live spare communal lives, their devotion to making money for the group sometimes borders on the fanatical. They are perpetual students of business strategy, corporate law, and great capitalist pioneers. Recently some of them have been reading a new biography of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, whose phenomenally successful retail model they’re thinking of applying to their used-clothing stores, including the one they’re planning to open in Harvard Square this fall.

In New York, Mikael Norling knows that the best way to round up the financial support he needs to get more stores and more development projects off the ground is to work the conference and cocktail party circuits. “If you know nobody, you are nobody,” he says. In the last year, he continues, he’s spoken briefly with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and a few months ago another Teachers Group leader made an even more high-powered contact, when she led Ted Turner, whose UN Foundation supports development projects, on a tour of an installation in Mozambique. Although the tycoon has yet to pledge a dime, Norling says the most important thing is that “he knows us personally.”

While Norling and his peers focus on lending an air of legitimacy to Teachers Group operations world-wide, Amdi Petersen, the presumed guru, has yet to show his face. If any of the stories about him are to be believed, this mysterious charismatic figure lives extravagantly somewhere in Europe, Africa, or even the United States. In an e-mail to British journalist Michael Durham, one former teacher described Petersen’s home as a compound in Zimbabwe, where he has a fleet of Mercedes Benzes and his own collection of wild zebras. Other reports have placed him behind a barbed-wire fence in Denmark, in a luxurious villa that’s guarded by rottweilers.

Mikael Norling, who describes Petersen as little more than an “advisor,” dismisses these tales as part of a European smear campaign against the group. ‘What’s important to us is that the actual work is accomplishing what we want,” says Norling. “If you dare to start something that has the ambition of becoming big, you will attract people who like you and people who think you are crazy.”

The Chicago Tribune

The green bins of Gaia

Gaia’s convenient clothing collection business flourishes in Chicago, but its promises to promote the environment are questionable. Meanwhile, the international organization’s leaders are under criminal investigation.

By David Jackson and Monica Eng, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff writer Courtney Flynn contributed to this report

February 12, 2004

On a rainy June morning in 2000, a bright green bin landed on a Wrigleyville street corner.

Looking like an oversize chartreuse mailbox, it bore a strange poster that made a big promise: You feed in your old clothes, and our charity will sell them to finance environmental projects around the globe.

“We hire rangers,” the box said, for “the protection of the living earth.”

The projects ranged from the logical, like saving barrier reefs, to the puzzling — “acting as partners in the solidary humanism.” And although there was something peculiar about the language and the charity’s uber-greenie name — Gaia-Movement Living Earth Green World Action Inc. — the box worked.

Within a week, Gaia’s first container was brimming with old clothes.

By November 2003, the success of that single box at Clark Street and Newport Avenue had spawned more than 550 clones, an army of green clothing collection bins that seemed to rise overnight in parking lots and strip malls from Hazel Crest to Highland Park.

Gaia, the registered charity that places the bins, said in tax reports that from 1999 to the end of 2002, it reaped more than $2 million selling the donated clothes.

But despite what the boxes say, the group spent little if any of those earnings on environmental projects, records and interviews show.

Instead, the ubiquitous green bins finance a shadowy international organization known as “Tvind,” sometimes called “the Teachers Group.”

Started in 1970 by a collective of teachers who ran a countercultural high school in Denmark, Tvind slowly morphed into a $100 million labyrinth of commercial ventures and charities spread across some 35 countries, U.S. and Danish government records show.

In Denmark, prosecutors have charged Tvind founder Mogens Amdi Pedersen and seven top aides with a multimillion-dollar embezzlement and criminal tax evasion scheme. Pedersen and his inner circle siphoned humanitarian funds into profitmaking sawmills and swank Miami apartments, prosecutors say.

Authorities in Belgium have indicted Pedersen and six Tvind leaders for money laundering.

Former Tvind members and European authorities have called the group a secular cult. Pedersen was a fugitive when FBI agents arrested him between international flights at Los Angeles International Airport in February 2002. A federal judge extradited the lanky, silver-haired guru to Denmark on an arrest warrant issued by the international police agency Interpol.

Pleading innocence, Pedersen said in Los Angeles federal court papers that Tvind is not a cult, but a group of dedicated humanists who live collectively and work to benefit the planet and the poor. Pedersen said he was being persecuted for political reasons.

But though Tvind leaders face criminal trial and front-page headlines in Europe, the group flourishes in the U.S.

In addition to several multimillion-dollar clothes collection businesses, Tvind has established three U.S. “institutes” in Michigan, Massachusetts and California that recruit volunteers to labor in Tvind-run development projects overseas.

Tvind’s Chicago-area operations demonstrate how the international collective sustains itself by generous clothing donations, idealistic volunteers and the determination of middle managers who live in Spartan conditions for the sake of a revolutionary creed.

At the center are Gaia’s green bins. They stand 6 1/2 feet tall and weigh 500 pounds when empty. In an America where the average person recycles or donates to charity less than a quarter of the 68 pounds of textiles he or she tosses out every year, the Gaia bins offer what people seem to want: painless altruism, cleaner closets and utter convenience.

“People want to feel good that they’re donating clothes to a worthwhile place, but the first priority is to get it out of the closet,” said Bernard Brill of the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association. “Convenience is the No. 1 item with disposal.”

Starting at first in affluent neighborhoods such as Wrigleyville, Gaia’s 57-year-old director Eva Nielsen began scouting Chicago box locations by bicycle in 1999. She placed the first box outside Einstein Bros. Bagels at 3455 N. Clark St. It filled up quickly. “I had the feeling that they had been waiting for us to come,” Nielsen said in an interview.

To place the bins in the parking lots of gas stations and grocery stores, Nielsen said, Gaia needs only the permission of the business owners. Nielsen used to keep a binder full of signed consent forms, but as the number of boxes in the Chicago area grew, she says she began relying on verbal permission. To encourage business owners from Chicago to Wisconsin to host Gaia boxes, Nielsen gathers and hands out letters of endorsement from local government officials. In some cities such as Madison, Wis., authorities were skeptical and declined to write the letters. Madison recycling coordinator George Dreckmann said he examined Gaia’s program and turned her down for a letter of support in the spring of 2002.

“I just really wasn’t comfortable with their whole operation,” Dreckmann said. “It sounds like employment for their folks as opposed to sending a lot of money toward the work they claim to be doing.”

Supportive officials

But in Chicago, officials were more enthusiastic.

“I am most certainly supportive of the fine work of the Gaia Movement with respect to their efforts regarding environmental issues and the preservation of National Forest Preserves worldwide,” Ald. Burton Natarus (42nd) wrote in a 2001 letter supporting the group.

City environmental commissioner N. Marcia Jimenez wrote a letter saying, “We encourage businesses in Chicago [to] consider allowing the Gaia Movement to place a collection box in front of the business, supporting local and global environmental protection.”

Natarus wouldn’t comment on his letter endorsing Gaia. Jimenez said through a spokesman that “we felt this was something very positive.” Informed of the Danish indictment of Tvind leaders, her spokesman Mark Farina said Gaia is now “something we would look closely at.”

Nielsen collected similar letters from the chief deputy Cook County Recorder of Deeds, and Aldermen Helen Shiller, Joseph A. Moore and Walter Burnett Jr. Of those four, only Moore would comment. “Knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have written the letter,” he said.

Though Gaia has installed and maintains hundreds of collection boxes around Chicago, interviews show the bins aren’t always properly located or welcome. A Gaia box sits on the sidewalk outside 1449 N. Ashland Ave., for example, despite Chicago ordinances prohibiting collection bins on public sidewalks and streets.

Store manager Welton Creyton said he has had no success persuading Gaia to take away its bin from the Food Basket grocery store parking lot at 368 E. 87th St. “We called to have it removed, but they haven’t responded,” Creyton said. It “can’t go a week without getting overfilled.”

On Chicago’s South Side, Gaia’s dark, low-slung warehouse at 8918 S. Green St. is stuffed nearly to its sloping wooden roof with smashed bundles of clothes.

Work pants tangle with gossamer bl9ouse sleeves. Loose stockings clot ragged grocery bags. With mechanical heaves, a giant baler packs unwashed and unsorted loads into half-ton bricks that will be slipped into container trucks for shipment to central Europe and Africa.

And people give more than clothing. In the open warehouse, long tables groan with the detritus of American generosity: encyclopedias, children’s toys and small appliances.

Through companies such as Gaia, Tvind has captured a sizable chunk of an improbably lucrative international market: ragpicking.

“You can see we’ve been quite busy,” said Gaia director Nielsen, who joined Tvind in 1971 as a student in one of the group’s first “Traveling Folk High Schools” in Denmark.

Tvind is accomplishing great things “because we’ve been sticking together and helping each other,” Nielsen said.

Chicago-area charities including the Salvation Army and Marklund Children resale shops say they have noticed a dip in donations since the Tvind clothing collection operations took hold. Although it can’t be quantified, “they do have an impact, no doubt about it. It does affect us,” said Cheryl Lightholder, who runs Goodwill clothes collections in Chicago and the surrounding region.

“The average person doesn’t necessarily realize who they’re giving to,” Lightholder said. “They want convenience.”

Goodwill and other established Chicago-area charities have been phasing out street-corner clothes collection boxes because they can be an inefficient way of raising philanthropic dollars.

Clothes stuffed into metal bins become worthless when they get wet or when people toss in garbage or paint. If they aren’t maintained, collection boxes can overflow, harbor rats and become community eyesores. But a not-for-profit operation can find it a costly burden to gas up the trucks and insure and pay the drivers needed to keep the bins emptied.

Controlling costs

Thanks to decades of experience in the rag trade, Tvind has figured out how to make clothing collection pay by controlling costs at every step. Gaia’s hired workers are not unionized or offered health insurance — though Nielsen calls such benefits “a human right.” The Tvind clothing operations also use students who have signed up to participate in overseas development projects. They are asked to scout for new bin sites and perform other tasks as part of their training.

Besides Gaia, Tvind executives run two other U.S.-based clothing collection charities — called Planet Aid and Planet Aid-Philadelphia — that operate in 11 East Coast states and reported earning a total of nearly $18 million from 1999 through the end of 2002.

Tvind members also run an Elgin-based, for-profit clothes collection business called U’SAgain, with branches in seven Midwest and Western states. U’SAgain’s Swedish-born director Mattias Wallander said in an interview that the company’s profits were “none of your business.”

“There is no relationship between U’SAgain and Gaia,” Wallander said. But records and interviews show U’SAgain has baled and shipped Gaia’s clothing; two of Gaia’s eight officers have served on U’SAgain’s board; and the two companies made a handshake agreement not to compete in certain Chicago-area locations.

Whether for profit or for charity, the Tvind clothing collection companies arrange their overseas sales through a Tvind broker in Atlanta called Garson & Shaw. Gaia paid at least $30,000 to Garson & Shaw in 2002, according to Gaia director Nielsen.

Former Tvind members have alleged that used clothing is exchanged among Tvind companies to inflate its value. “It is sold gross to private companies at symbolic prices and then resold to other companies or the public,” former Tvind leader Steen Thomsen wrote in a 1998 report to Danish authorities.

Chicago’s Gaia was launched with funds from one of Tvind’s central treasuries, according to Tvind memos obtained by Danish police. In May 2000, Tvind’s indicted leaders transferred $60,000 to buy Gaia containers and start the Chicago operation, according to the Tvind memos.

Gaia declared to the IRS that it received $60,000. But Gaia claimed — and Nielsen insists today — that the money was an unsecured loan from the Massachusetts-based Tvind clothes collection charity named Planet Aid.

The posters on Gaia green collection bins indicate the group generates $2 worth of nature programs from every dollar of donated clothing. But that pledge should not be taken literally, Nielsen said.

“It doesn’t make sense if you take it concrete,” she said. “It’s like a symbol.”

Gaia declares in tax filings that virtually all of the $2 million it reaped from 1999 through 2002 was spent on environmental programs. But the tax reports show more than 96 percent of Gaia’s income went to running the clothing resale business, paying for things like bins, workers and Garson & Shaw commissions.

Nielsen says those were legitimate charitable program expenses because Gaia’s resale business diverted textile from overtaxed landfills, thus providing an environmental benefit.

The group reported it gave $69,900 in “charitable donations to environmental causes” from 1999 through 2002 — less than 4 percent of its total revenues.

As part of a typical pattern of money movement among Tvind ventures, the entire $69,900 was transferred to another, closely related Tvind charity, also called Gaia-Movement, but based in Switzerland.

Four of the Chicago Gaia directors — including Nielsen — have served on the board of the Swiss charity. And the Swiss outfit gave Gaia Chicago a $121,625 start-up grant in 1999. As part of an agreement between the two Gaias, the Chicago outfit will, in return, donate $135,000 to the Swiss Gaia or projects it designates, before funding any other environmental programs, records and interviews show.

In December 2003, following Tribune inquiries, the Chicago Gaia donated an additional $60,000 to the Swiss trust.

A gift or repayment?

At worst, the Chicago Gaia’s grants might be viewed as Tvind’s gift to itself; at best, repayment on a loan.

But that’s only the beginning. When you try to follow the $69,900 dispersed so far out of Switzerland, it seems to evaporate in a stream of promises.

As of November 2003, the Swiss Gaia had used only $25,000 of the $69,900, records and interviews show. The $25,000 was divided evenly between two African environmental projects.

One is a $12,500 effort to preserve the Miombo Woodlands inside the Quirimbas National Park in Northern Mozambique.

There, Gaia says, its workers teach farmers methods of sustainable agriculture and grow crops in areas still home to wild animals.

Records and interviews show only half of the $12,500 has actually been spent on the project.

Agronomist Lebreton Saah Nyambe, who was responsible for the project until September 2003, said the effort was beset by bad weather and local skepticism about Gaia’s farming methods. Far from convincing farmers to quit slash-and-burn techniques, Gaia’s method of packing holes with manure led to significantly lower crop yields than farmers normally experienced. “It is painful to dig these holes and then get nothing,” Saah Nyambe said. “Right now the farmers need food.”

To ward off wild animals, Gaia taught the farmers techniques that failed — burning caustic packets of chili pepper and elephant dung, and soaking guard ropes in oil and chili. “Animal destruction was worse than ever,” Saah said.

This fall, Saah left the project and was replaced by a Mozambican administrator who has no agricultural experience.

But while Gaia’s clothing operation is booming in Chicago, the story is different in Mozambique, Nielsen concedes.

There, where the group claims to be conducting environmental projects, “it’s not going smooth,” she said.

———-

Tvind sought troubled kids to employ

Tvind leaders hit on a novel strategy to make the most of the bright green clothing-collection bins that dot Chicago-area streets: They attempted to enlist foster children and juvenile delinquents to help gather and sort the clothes.

Since it gained a foothold in the U.S. in the 1980s, the Danish organization known as Tvind has tried without success to operate schools and residential treatment programs for troubled youth.

Tvind’s first effort was a small boarding school in rural Virginia. But state officials there revoked the school’s license in 1985 after finding violations, including sexual abuse of young girls.

When Tvind officials in Dowagiac, Mich., tried again in 2002, they advanced an unusual teaching method: As part of their schooling, youths in the program would work in the Chicago clothes-collection operation, sorting textiles donated to the green boxes of Tvind’s Gaia charity.

Tvind leaders applied to the Dowagiac planning commission for a permit to operate a 15-bed boarding school for state wards with drug problems, behavior disorders and criminal backgrounds.

The curriculum calendar attached to Tvind’s “Junior Department” application said the youths would spend time in Chicago to “help the Gaia-Movement . . . with practical work.”

For their lessons, the wards would “help the truck driver to collect clothes from Gaia’s used-clothes containers or help in one of the shops or repair and upgrade some of their used-clothes containers. It’s good to do good!”

Backing the Tvind youth facility were local officials such as Van Buren County, Mich., Family Court Director Joseph Leary, who said in a Tribune interview that he had not read the Tvind packet of curriculum plans and so was unaware that they proposed sending troubled youth to Chicago to assist in the clothes recycling operation.

Some 119 Dowagiac residents signed a petition of protest, saying a school for delinquent wards could have a deleterious impact on the property values and character of the surrounding neighborhoods.

In February 2003, the Dowagiac Planning Commission denied Tvind’s application. The Tvind institute sued the city in Cass County Circuit Court, and won a rehearing, but the Dowagiac Planning Commission again turned down the permit application.

Tvind leaders say the project is on ice for now. But Eva Nielsen, who directs Chicago’s Gaia clothes collection operation, says the troubled youths would benefit from working in the Chicago clothing operation. The delinquent and emotionally disturbed youths “have to be busy all the time or they make trouble,” she said. “And they have to learn about different aspects of life.” At Gaia, they will learn about “environmental things,” Nielsen said. “It would be good for them.”

– David Jackson

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

Blurred vision

Mogens Pedersen founded Tvind as a teachers’ collective in Denmark and then took it worldwide — including Chicago’s used-clothing charity, Gaia. Now he faces trial for embezzling and other charges.

By Monica Eng and David Jackson
Tribune staff reporters

Published February 13, 2004

Ted Lewis was summoned to Denmark to meet the guru.

An idealistic 30-year-old who wanted to work with the poor around the world, Lewis played a minor role in the multinational charity known as Tvind. He ran a small Massachusetts school that trained volunteers to work in overseas development projects.

The year was 1988, and Lewis didn’t know then what prosecutors allege today: that Tvind was slowly morphing from a countercultural teachers collective into a criminal enterprise.

Tvind’s charismatic founder — a lanky, long-haired Dane named Mogens Amdi Pedersen — preached solidarity with the poor as he established schools, overseas development projects and profitmaking businesses in some 35 countries.

Making international news in 1978, one of Pedersen’s “traveling folk high schools” built the world’s tallest windmill as a class project. His academies for troubled youth won funding and support from government agencies in Virginia, England and war-torn Africa.

To fuel his expanding empire, Pedersen set his sights on the United States, a wellspring of charitable dollars and volunteer workers.

Lewis recalls Pedersen arriving at the spare, Tvind meeting room in Denmark that day in 1988. He was “like an Oz, really grandiose,” Lewis says today. “He was the man with great vision who gets you thinking about the big possibility.”

The Tvind leader spread a U.S. map before them, Lewis recalls.

“Let’s dream,” Pedersen said.

In the 16 years since that meeting, Pedersen brought an astonishing vision to reality: America is now stitched from coast to coast with Tvind schools, charities and businesses. Tvind’s multimillion-dollar U.S. empire is growing even as Pedersen faces criminal charges in Europe. Danish officials have charged Pedersen and seven top aides with embezzling $9 million from Tvind’s main charity and illegally evading $11 million in taxes. In Belgium, a separate trial is under way in which Pedersen and five Tvind leaders face money laundering charges.

Chicago is dotted with the red-and-white-checkered clothing collection bins of Tvind’s Elgin-based for-profit U’SAgain and the green boxes of the Chicago charity named Gaia, which promises environmental projects that have yet to materialize.

Sharing directors and funds with the clothing businesses are three U.S. “institutes” whose students labor in Tvind-run development projects overseas. Registered as charities, they took in a total of more than $3 million from 1999 through 2002. But in Tribune interviews, a dozen former students said their training was paltry.

Lewis quickly grew disenchanted with Tvind and quit the group within a year of meeting Pedersen. Today, he directs programs for the Global Exchange human rights organization. He is among the disillusioned former members whose stories show how Pedersen set out to harvest this country’s wealth and generosity.

Pedersen did not respond to an interview request made through his Danish attorney. But from conversations with former members, a portrait emerges of Tvind’s multifaceted leader: Radical hippie teacher. Hard-charging CEO and master franchiser. Trusted friend. Paranoid, controlling father figure.

Pedersen found ways to infiltrate the hearts of his followers and exert his control. Sometimes he decided whether and when Tvind members might marry and have children. Sometimes he separated couples for the supposed good of the group.

In 1979, amid Danish press reports that Tvind was engaged in deceptive practices, Pedersen went into hiding, telling followers that right-wing operatives had attacked him with guns. He continued to oversee Tvind while shuttling among secret locations around the world.

FBI agents arrested him between international flights at Los Angeles International Airport in 2002, and began the process of extraditing him to Denmark to face trial. Scribbling his signature on a Los Angeles federal court affidavit, Pedersen requested a public defender because he had only $2,000 to his name. As “part of a communal group,” he said he owned no property, bank accounts or stocks.

But to fight his extradition, Pedersen somehow found the cash to hire Robert Shapiro, the swashbuckling Hollywood attorney who defended O.J. Simpson.

At a February 2002 federal court hearing in Los Angeles, Shapiro told the judge that “there is no doubt in my mind that [Pedersen] is an honorable man. He is a humanitarian.”

Shapiro said: “This is, in fact, one of the most humanitarian organizations in the world.” Nearly a million African people depend on the group “on a daily basis for shelter, for education and for AIDS awareness and prevention.”

If Pedersen were locked up, Tvind development projects might wither, Shapiro warned. “Millions of people around the world who are on the poverty level, who are depending on this for education, will indeed be cut off.”

Despite Shapiro’s pleas, Los Angeles federal magistrate judge Stephen J. Hillman extradited Pedersen to Denmark, where his trial is scheduled to begin later this year and last through 2005.

A long, strange trip

In a Danish police photograph, the 64-year-old fugitive wore a metal-studded motorcycle jacket. With blue-gray eyes and thin snowy hair above his high forehead, he smiled wanly at the camera.

It has been a long, strange trip for the rebel teacher who captured the imagination of the Danish public in the 1970s.

Born in a small Danish town to a middle-class family — his father worked as a school headmaster — Pedersen (whose name is sometimes spelled Petersen or Pederson) became a high school teacher at 23, in the Danish city of Odense. According to Tvind lore, he was fired for wearing long hair in 1969. Pedersen bounced back, founding his first “traveling folk high school” in 1970.

With horn-rimmed glasses and an infectious grin, the 30-year-old attracted a cadre of dedicated educators who embraced his pedagogical method: Teach youngsters how the world works by taking them deep into it. In ramshackle buses and reconditioned sailboats, Pedersen’s students made monthslong journeys to Africa and the Far East.

“It was all these young people singing into the night,” recalled former member Hans la Cour.

Pedersen lectured against drugs and casual sex as he built wide support for the collective he called “Tvind” — the name of the small farming village where he first gathered them — or sometimes “the Teachers Group.”

He initially won the backing of the Danish government, which provided grants and teacher salaries. Tvind schools sought out troubled youth. Returning pupils became teachers to the new followers. Over time, some 300 to 500 Scandinavians pledged their time and money to the collective, along with an unknown number of others in Europe, Africa and the Americas, prosecutors in Denmark and the U.S. say.

With little success, they experimented with novel sewer technologies, energy-efficient cars and machines that convert waste into energy. Tvind constructed schools with relentless zeal, enlisting students as brick-and-mortar laborers.

Pedersen “was always the first one up in the morning and the last to go to bed. He was the one with the ideas,” la Cour said. Tvind “set out to conquer the world. Their original ambition was world revolution.”

Although Pedersen’s collective seemed from the outside to be loose and democratic, he asserted growing control over Tvind’s treasury and the lives of its members, according to prosecutors in Denmark and the U.S.

Us-against-them mentality

When Pedersen went underground, “the nature of the beast started showing,” la Cour said. “As Amdi became more isolated from the real world, he wanted to create this feeling of us against everybody else — `Look, they’re after us.’”

Pedersen instructed some members to go to their family homes and burn old photos and letters so that nobody could trace them if they also went underground. “His followers say farewell to their history,” former Tvind member Steen Thomsen wrote in a 1998 report to the Danish Ministry of Education.

Following Maoist principles of `constructive self-criticism,’ followers who balked at Tvind directives were subjected to relentless, hourslong rounds of group criticism. “Anybody who dared stand up would get worked on,” la Cour said.

La Cour quit the group in 1990, walking off a Tvind sailboat when it docked in New Zealand. He had fallen in love with an American crewmember, and Pedersen had forced them to separate.

Pedersen felt “the relationship would divert attention from what I was there to do,” la Cour says today. “He was grooming me to be a leader and said I had to sacrifice.”

In America, Pedersen had initially given free rein to Ted Lewis and his friends to launch Tvind’s first U.S. institute in 1987 to train students for overseas development projects.

But Lewis said Tvind leaders asserted control over the finances and the Americans’ personal lives.

“That’s when the whole thing started to fall apart,” he said. “They started to do things that very quickly crossed my line,” when they “started to tinker with people’s destinies.”

When the Americans demanded greater autonomy, Tvind sent over a top official — the now-indicted Bodil Sorenson — who “effectively split the group,” Lewis said. “We decided to leave without trashing it or tearing them down. We turned over the keys.”

All four of the institute’s founding board members eventually quit Tvind.

Over the 1990s, Pedersen dropped any pretense of living a Spartan life. A Tvind-run company called Chilton Intervest began purchasing luxury condos on exclusive Fisher Island in Florida, for Pedersen and his top aides, Miami-Dade County land records show.

Blending charities and businesses

While Pedersen remained out of sight, Tvind’s expanding U.S. operations skillfully blended charities and profit-taking businesses into a flourishing operation.

The Tvind members who manage the group’s American operations say they have no connection to the criminal allegations in Denmark. But court and corporate records reveal ties.

In one example, Tvind’s U.S. institutes to train development volunteers have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent to a for-profit Tvind company called AS Properties Ltd., land and tax records show. That company’s vice president, Tvind attorney Kirsten Fuglsbjerg, has been indicted in Denmark. She uses the alias “Christie Pipps” in U.S. land transactions, records filed by the Danish prosecutor show.

Pedersen scrupulously kept his name off all Tvind documents. But from behind the scenes, Assistant U.S. Atty. Matthew E. Sloan wrote in court papers, he became “the undisputed leader of an organization that controls well over $100 million in assets worldwide and had gross income of over $100 million as recently as 1995.”

Building the type of capitalist empire he once railed against, Pedersen used humanitarian funds to transform Tvind’s Malaysian rain forest conservation project into a commercial sawmill, U.S. and Danish prosecutors say in court papers.

“It seems to me that they started out in the early days with an aim to create some very good things,” Danish prosecutor Poul Gade told the Tribune. “But perhaps it got out of hand — power corrupts, and it is more fun to be a CEO of a multimillion-dollar company and to live in Miami than to do hard labor to help the poor.”

Meanwhile, Tvind’s clothing operations continue to flourish in the United States, while Pedersen is free on bond preparing for the two criminal trials in Denmark and Belgium.

When Pedersen was arrested, “the newspapers were quick to say that Tvind would be shut down,” la Cour said. “I said, Forget it. They are going to be stronger than ever. It is a misunderstanding that all of this is driven by Amdi alone.”

La Cour said: “Those foot soldiers are out there thinking they are doing a good job. They’re living Spartan lives and working long hours. They’re not grabbing money.

“This is the reason the whole empire still exists, I think,” la Cour said. “You can’t really shut down things that people believe in.”

- – -

Gaia is only one of Tvind’s U.S. operations

The Denmark-based organization known as Tvind runs schools, charities and for-profit businesses in more than 35 countries around the world. In the U.S., Tvind runs several linked clothing collection businesses, as well as three schools. The operations share officers and funds with each other.

GAIA: A Chicago-based charity that reported earning a total of $2 million, 1999-2002.

PLANET AID: A charity that resells castaway clothing and donates the profits to humanitarian projects mostly run by other Tvind companies. Active on the East Coast, Ohio and Michigan, it has reported total earnings of $15.6 million, 1999-2002.

PLANET AID PHILADELPHIA: A charity that reported earning a total of $2.1 million, 1999-2002.

U’SAGAIN: The for-profit firm has registered offices in several states, including Illinois, Georgia, Minnesota, Texas, New York and Washington. Its finances are not public.

GARSON & SHAW: This Atlantabased for-profit clothing broker takes commissions from the charities and U’SAgain to market their clothes overseas. Its finances are not public.

INSTITUTES: In addition to its clothes collection businesses, Tvind runs three U.S. “institutes” in Michigan, Massachusetts and California that recruit volunteers to labor in Tvind-run development projects overseas. The institutes took in a total of more than $3 million, 1999-2002.

(Maps showing the states in which Tvind runs schools, charities and for-profit businesses.)

Source: IRS; Tribune research

Kicked out of Queensland years ago.     Former Tvind chief accountant is now an academic at an Australian university.  Butterfly McQueen luxury yacht seen here.

We have several stories on file about the experience of volunteers for Humana in India.     Humana operates a college known as DRH Sikkim.

Sponsorship from Tata steel.



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Revised:  1st March 2010