While I wholeheartedly support the idea of community gardens, as well as the Salvation Army's disaster relief efforts, there are a few things that I find disagreeable with that organization that prevent me from supporting it:
1. When representatives from the church were asked at a neighborhood meeting why the Suriya Montessori School's lease was not being renewed, they gave an incomplete answer: "They were jittery about signing a new lease." The reality is, the Suriya family was forced into early retirement because the church tripled their lease from $800 to $2400 a month. Very charitable indeed.
2. The Salvation Army is a right-wing religious organization that lobbied in support of George W. Bush's Faith Based initiatives.
3. The Salvation Army is a billion-dollar a year business that gets tax-exemptions because of their charity designation and has come under the suspicions of Charity Navigator, a non-profit charity fraud-policing organization.
4. The Salvation Army openly discriminates against gay and transgendered people in their hiring practices. In 2004, New York City proposed a law that would have required all businesses, including non-profits, to provide equal benefits to unmarried domestic partners... The Salvation Army responded by threatening to close all of its soup kitchens in that city.
I think it's fine if anybody wants to participate in this endeveour, I just thought it would be good to know what kind of organization you will be dealing with beforehand. For me, the reasons above are enough to not want to participate in this.
Scott
