Will Allen conducting
a tour in 2004

Today my email mailbox was full of request for last minute end of the year donations. One of them was from Will Allen of Growing Power. Will was a real inspiration for me in starting my Home Model Growing Power Gardens and, in an indirect way, for the beginning of this web site. He gave me a lot of advice in the early days about building my home gardens, even at one time visiting our house.

Over the years as Will has become a bigger and bigger player in the world of growing affordable and healthy food in urban farms I do not see him much except on TV, press releases or appeals. Nowadays Growing Power charges lots of money for anything, even the free tours which I used to always go on and ask questions now cost $10.

Will has received many major donations, grants and honors for his work on urban growing, millions of dollars and even invitations from the White House. However, in today’s appeal I got wind of a million dollar donation Will has accepted from Wal-Mart Corporation. To many of us Wal-Mart, the largest corporation in the world is a symbol of greed and exploitation of workers, the opposite of what Growing Power stands for.

In an email sent to Will tonight I wrote: “I am sure you are aware of how much Wal-Mart takes from taxpayers to support the exploration of the poor, how poor Wal-Mart does in paying health insurance and decent wager to employees, how Wal-Mart is profitable built on slave labor in China and the Florida tomato growers (Coalition of Immokalee Workers), and how the wealth of Wal-Mart family is 90 billion dollar which they do not share with those in need.

But your idealistic argument on your web site really disturbs me: “We can no longer be so idealistic that we hurt the very people we’re trying to help. Keeping groups that have the money and the power to be a significant part of the solution away from the Good Food Revolution will not serve us.

This is the same argument used by those who oppose boycott of buying from sweat shops or those who opposed the boycott of apartheid South Africa used. Will, “the end never justifies the means” and you are hurting the poor by such thinking, as Bishop Tutu of South Africa will tell you and the poor of Haiti and Latin America sadly know.”

I doubt if I will hear from him but one of three or four Growing Power board members may respond. Another hero has fallen and perhaps he can justify accepting the million dollars but I cannot.

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