Wisconsin

 

Wisconsin State Journal, Sunday, April 7, 2002

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by George Hesselberg    ghesselberg@madison.com.

Eva Nielsen sat in the coldest corner of a McDonald's restaurant on West Washington Avenue one afternoon last week and confessed she was stunned.

All she wants to do, the native of Denmark said, was place 60 big green metal boxes around the city of Madison, in the parking lots of gasoline stations and convenience stores. The people of Madison could fill those boxes with old clothes. Then her group would empty the boxes, weekly at least, and sort the clothes in Chicago.

Some would be sold at one of the group's two used-clothing stores in that city. The rest would be packaged and sent overseas, probably to a sorting plant in Tunisia. The money from the operation would go to pay for environmental projects in Africa and India.  

Nielsen, 55, knows what she is doing. She has done this in Honduras, in Armenia. She has taught in her group's "nontraditional" schools for troubled youth in Denmark, where she started as a student herself in the 1970s. She has even been headmaster at her group's schools. She has led students to help in Africa and India.

Madison seemed like the perfect place to expand to from Chicago.

"I think 60 boxes would be possible for what I think can be done here," said Nielsen, who figures a population of 4,000 for each box

She has, however, just come from a visit with George Dreckmann, the city of Madison's recycling coordinator. He was cordial and interested, she said, but also skeptical about the group's background.    Promotional help from the city would go a long way to filling the group's clothes boxes in Madison.

The group is Gaia Movement Living Earth Green World Action USA. It is connected -- loosely, spiritually, probably financially -- with a much larger group, Planet Aid. And, beyond that, it's connected to a group known as "Tvind," or "The Teachers Group," which was started in Denmark in the 1970s by a charismatic, reclusive and now jailed leader, Mogens Amdi Petersen. It has since grown to include schools, businesses and plantations and, at the center, the Teachers Group. That group pools its money and resources under many names.

There are numerous Web sites devoted to debunking Tvind and tracing a seemingly endless web of tax havens, phony projects and front business, and the other side has Web sites devoted to explaining the various environmental projects supported by Tvind. A couple of large British newspapers, the Guardian and the Independent, have published investigative stories critical of the |movement, claiming the money raised is not used for charitable or environmental works.

Nielsen sighs at all this and claims she just wants to collect old clothes to raise money that supports her nonprofit group's worldwide environmental projects. 

In three years, however, no money has gone to charitable or environmental projects. Nielsen said the stores barely break even and money from selling the surplus clothes overseas has been used to pay for  donation boxes. A modest $24,000 has been raised in two years. She said she needs a minimum of $50,000 to support just one project.

It probably did not help her cause's effort in Madison that one of the group's supporters in Chicago, Elton Davis, sent an e-mail to "Sustain Dane," a respected area environmental group, announcing that Gaia would be in Madison next week with six volunteers looking for donation box sites. Sustain Dane did some research and passed along some of the critical newspaper articles to its membership.

Said Per Kielland-Lund, of Sustain Dane: "If they could prove that they are doing good work and a significant portion of their profits go to good projects, then we could consider working with them. As it is now, we will not."

Nielsen said she "cannot understand the negative hits" on the group to which she has devoted her life, and said the bad publicity was "a lie."

"I don't care" about the publicity, she said. "I try to do something good and not pay attention to this. I try to be honest and hard-working."

Her group is not a religion, not a political party and is not asking for money.

"I am a member of a group of people who have decided to share all their time and money. We are not a cult. We are the opposite of a cult."

In Los Angeles, however, Nielsen's leader, Petersen, is jailed on Danish charges of tax fraud -- all those environmental and educational projects were either hoaxes or for profit, the government charges -- and embezzlement of about $10 million.

Petersen has been living "in secret in a $10 million condominium on Fisher Island, a private retreat off the South Florida coast," the Los Angeles Times reports. The paper also reports Petersen has recently applied for citizenship in Zimbabwe and Brazil, which do not have extradition treaties with Denmark

Back in Madison, Dreckmann at the city recycling office would like to help Nielsen with some promotion, but is waiting to hear about those charitable projects.

Anything that will increase recycling in the city is good, he said, and he is not the police, but there are certain red flags waving above this organization.

Meanwhile, Nielsen surely must have heard some of this before. She believes she is just collecting clothes for her green boxes, but acknowledges a near lifelong devotion to Petersen's causes and organization. Her group, which is properly registered in Illinois, is not registered to collect anything in Wisconsin, yet, she said.

"It would be a waste of money to put our boxes here if opinion is against us," she said.