📚 Historical Archive Notice
This content is from the original TvindAlert.com (2001-2022), preserved for historical and research purposes. Some images or documents may be unavailable.
Tvind is everywhere.
From Angola to Zimbabwe, via plenty of other countries in between, Tvind has a presence, either collecting money, stashing it away, recruiting 'Development Workers', farming, trading or manufacturing.
In Europe, Tvind runs schools, colleges and teacher training colleges as well as UFF and Humana shops and clothes recycling banks, all of which earn it a small fortune. There are more than 30 schools in Denmark, a 'hotel' in the Norwegian Alps, and dozens of shops.
Humana People-to-People logo
Solidarity workers come from all over the world - Europe, the United States, even Russia, China and Japan. Some 'train' in Denmark, others in Norway or the UK. All these volunteers pay money in advance for their 'training', and are required to spend weeks raising yet more money
A similar pattern has been established in the United States, where Tvind's main outposts are the 'Institute of International Co-operation and Development' (IICD) in Massachusetts and Michigan, and Planet Aid (all over the place).
Planet Aid is the US version of Humana or UFF, collecting and trading in old clothes. (It also collects straight cash) It began in the state of Massachusetts in 1997 and has since expanded into at least 16 states. Planet Aid has also set up shop in Canada, with those familiar shops and recycling bins in Toronto.
But there is more to Tvind in the US than publicly acknowledged. In Miami, Florida, there is a large beachside administrative block and a seagoing yacht, which you don't read about in the brochures.. This is believed to be the headquarters of a significant new south American operation.
In developing countries, like Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique, Tvind is a 'development charity', running 'aid projects' where the money raised in Europe and the United States is supposedly spent. It has recently begun to expand into Central America, India and Borneo.
Most of the projects are called by the DAPP, ADPP or Humana People-to-People names. Some are bush schools, training colleges, agricultural schemes or projects with names like 'Child Aid' and 'Children's Town', and there is also a 'Hope' Aids charity.
But behind the scenes - and you don't read about this on the web sites - Tvind also owns thousands of acres of plantations and farms in Third World countries where crops are commercially grown and profitably sold on world markets. Tvind is the landlord and employer as well as the 'aid giver', and has sometimes been accused of 'neo-colonialism'.
In Zimbabwe, Tvind has built a new world headquarters which is so big that Mogens Amdi Petersen is once said to have boasted 'you could see it from the moon.'
Humana People-to-People world headquarters, Zimbabawe
There are other plantations, too, in places like St Lucia and Brazil, which have nothing to do with 'development' and do not feature in the brochures. The best guess is that they just make a lot of money.
It has a clothes factory in Morocco, and owns scores of boats.
Tvind has been doing so well lately that it is reported to have set up - in one form or another - in a host of new countries. With the collapse of communism, it has found new trading outlets for old clothes in the former Eastern Europe and is attracting recruits from Poland, Romania, Czech and Slovakia.
It has also been spotted or set up shop in such diverse countries as Ireland, Israel, Hong Kong, Portugal and Fiji, wheeling and dealing - buying plantations, collecting old clothes, trading, and making new recruits - but mostly raising money.
With all that money washing about, Tvind has got to put it somewhere. So it has companies and offshore bank accounts in all kinds of places, many of them tax havens such as Guernsey, Jersey, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar and the Dutch Antilles.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that some of its most desirable and unadvertised properties have been in some of the sunniest parts of the world - such as the Cayman Islands, where it has a beachside villa. It's still there.