WITNESS
Collections manager, Planet Aid Philadelphia, 2006-7
Thank you very much for your work on this site. My experience with Tvind came through my employment with Planet Aid in the role of Collections Manager in Philadelphia from May, 2006 to June, 2007. What I experienced with Tvind/Planet Aid mirrors much of what this website has already espoused.
Aside from my issues with the cultish nature of the organization and obvious money tracking issues, the most disheartening detail of my experience was with the way they treated the live-in workers that my managers housed. During my employment we had a worker from Africa come to learn the roles of managing and to develop skills for later on. The outcome, in my opinion, was exactly the opposite.
For all intents and purposes she was a slave. She was not allowed to leave their house, disappointing to me because I was anxious to show her how great a city that Philadelphia is and to get her to see the history of the city in relation to America (i.e. the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, etc.). Just simple trips that everyone who visits Philadelphia for a day should make, let alone someone who lives there for over six months.
She was often forced to work unpaid overtime, beings that they would not allow her to get her drivers license in order to provide her own transportation to work. She was at their mercy to come and leave the office when they did. Often times she would arrive at 8:00 am and stay in the office till 7:00 pm or later with them. The difference being that she was actually doing hard, laborious work while they stayed huddled in an isolated office and played video games and Skyped other Tvind members. She would also work long hours on Saturdays, without extra compensation to my knowledge. The managers, as well as other people in TG, were very good at convincing themselves that they were contributing to something and being productive when they are actually having no impact. This applies from the top on down, from the projects in foreign other countries to actually running the “fundraising” businesses in the US. The “Managers” (2) had no formal training and were often too inept to handle the most simple of managerial tasks. Often times they would pass along the duties to other workers and at the same time demand more their employees. Their inexperience became more apparent during stressful times when tempers would often be lost, leading to one-sided screaming matches to be followed a few hours later by empty apologies.
From a financial aspect, they withheld her pay to contribute to the “Common Fund”, the benefit to her contribution being unclear, and would threaten her by taking away what limited privileges she did have. They also made her pay an exorbitant amount for rent, considering three of them lived together and she had to pay $800/month in a house that cost $1600/month (it should have been split to $535 per person). They also required her to pay $200 per month for food, which only included dinners. I have personally verified this information. She would often be very upset cause her family could not understand why she was unable to send more money back to them in Africa, further heightening the amount of stress she was enduring.
They were extremely hard on her and the work she was doing considering the hours that she worked and the fact that their afore mentioned inept managing skills often placed us in difficult positions from an operational standpoint. This worked effectively on her, as she was intimidated and understandably hesitant to speak out. It did not work on another woman we had from Africa who successfully lobbied to be moved to another office after only three weeks of being at our location.
Overall her experience in Philadelphia was a miserable one. It often weighed on my how an organization whose goal was “Solidary Humanism” could allow someone to be treated so poorly. Already wavering due to the cultish rumors and the nefarious network of companies, my faith was completely lost in the organization after her repeated attempts to be transferred to another office were ignored by the upper management (she emailed Ester Nelrup and Fred Olsen directly multiple times). Finally she was moved to another office and her spirits have changed, as evident in the nature of recent communications, however the damage has been done.
Of course the argument can be made that this was an isolated case in a single location, however I do think that it is deeper than that. I have also seen the same attitudes of superiority and practices reflected at the schools in Michigan and Massachusetts, both of which I visited numerous times. This was also troublesome, considering they were exploiting the well intentioned, however undereducated youth (I myself have a Masters from a top-tier university) who were quite impressionable and were not being effectively educated on the processes of development.
Personally, I now value the experience I had. But this is not due to some altruistic feeling or sense of accomplishment in the field of international development. But rather by gaining the knowledge to examine organizations for the truth in fulfilling their goals and the personal aspects of how to behave in the workplace as well as the managerial skills that I was forced to develop which are helping me in my new career.
Thanks again for your great work,
Michael Lehr
