Oscocio reports that The Dutch organisation Humana has new campaign that is meant to be a visualization of the organization’s good work. What isn’t reported is the scandal that has dogged Humana for years.

Humana is a development aid organisation focussing on education, health and economic help.  Second hand cloths are valuable and for years Humana has collected them saying that proceeds go to initiatives in clean water, education, medical health and agriculture apparatus. 

Humana Charitable Giving Fishy Bookkeeping Controversy

The American Institute of Philanthropy (AIP) gave the charity an “F” grade in its December 2006 “Watchdog Report.”

A charity may even count its primary solicitation activity as a charitable program. For instance, Planet Aid, a nonprofit group famous for its yellow outdoor collection boxes, calls the cost of collecting worn clothes, which it later sells, a program service expense. Its tax form states that its purpose is “To support development projects … and protection of natural habitat through the recycling of used clothing.” It would be like Wal-Mart claiming that its main purpose is to help low-income people have a higher standard of living by selling them less expensive merchandise. Planet Aid raises almost all of its funds by selling the donated items, rather than giving them to needy people. It only distributed $8,000 of donated goods of the $8.7 million it spent in 2004, according to its most recently available tax form. Planet Aid’s 2004 audit reports two program service expenses: $6.6 million of “Clothing collection” and $2 million of “International Aid.” AIP believes the cost to collect used goods for later sale is a fundraising expense and considers any possible benefit to the environment to be incidental. Planet Aid reports a 94% program ratio, whereas AIP believes the ratio earns the group an F grade at 23%.

Humana Alert, a watchdog with a website describing itself as “an investigation into Humana People-to-People, the Teachers Group and the international Tvind movement,“ chronicles the organization’s various business enterprises and legal and financial misfortunes.

Tvind’ is a name more or less interchangeable with ‘The Teachers Group’ and is just another name for the same organisation, commonly used to describe its more public face. The site was named Tvind Alert because that was the term we knew in 1999. Tvind is a place near Ulfborg in western Denmark and the Tvind School Centre there is one of the organisation’s bases. ‘Tvind’ in Danish means ’small stream’.

Here is one set of specifics sited:

USED CLOTHES

Holland House Ltd

Holland House is one of several similarly-named companies in Gibraltar that we believe have for years been laundering the proceeds of charity clothes collections in Europe for private gain. We have for instance documentary evidence of many transactions between Green World Recycling in the UK and Holland House Ltd at 24 College Road, Gibraltar; our sources tell us there may be four TG offshore companies operating from this one building. (Company names may have changed.)

We believe TG has devised a system to cream off large private profits from public charity donations: the TG-controlled offshore companies buy the clothes at artifically low prices from the TG charities (Humana, Planet Aid, Gaia, DAPP, UFF, College Aid and Green World in Europe), and then sell them on at normal or even much inflated prices, thus ensuring most profits end up in offshore companies and not with the ‘Humana’ charities. This is a standard tax evasion and money laundering technique called ‘transfer mispricing’.

Advertising Industry and Campaign Deets

The recent feel-good campaign (had my 18-month-old twins immediately bopping to the music) is made by Lowe/Draftfcb.
“Laat je 2e handskleding de 3e wereld helpen.” 
“Let your second hand cloths help the third world.”

01.08.08 Seven Days » Planet Aid: Help to the Poor or a Charitable Pandora’s Box?

10.20.04 Baltimore City Paper » Adventures in the Rag Trade