50 Years of Plenty
Here at Plenty’s headquarters on the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee we’re celebrating a milestone anniversary in 2024—50 years!
Reflecting on the past 50 years
by Peter Schweizer
Plenty International™ started out as what one national news magazine called “the Hippie Peace Corps.” It was founded in 1974 by around 500 members of a rural Tennessee intentional community called the Farm. We created the Farm based on a shared vision of peace and love, nonviolence — the classic hippie credo. We were mostly city or suburban kids learning to survive in the woods. This was before the Internet, and the Farm had one 9-inch black and white TV in the one house with electricity. Most homes used kerosene lamps and wood stoves. We were living on about a dollar a day per person.
Nevertheless, we felt relatively strong enough and yes, wealthy enough to look for ways to be of help in the world. We built Plenty to extend the community’s reach. We had no money, but we did have a community of hundreds of potential volunteers learning critical life-supporting skills from construction to midwifery and primary health care, to nutrition and soyfoods processing, village scale potable water and sanitation, and radio communications. Sharing those skills to aid others in achieving a degree of ecological, economic, and cultural self-sufficiency became Plenty’s “alternative” development approach, with a focus on being grassroots, personal, and hands-on. In the aftermath of Vietnam, we embraced a concept of alternative foreign policy, which meant building people-to-people connections for village-scale development as an alternative to government aid programs.
We look at endemic poverty as a wheel that rolls over the backs of the poor. Spokes in the wheel include political marginalization, racism, and an absence of infrastructure essentials like accessible, clean running water, primary health care, and a reliable healthy diet. After 50 years of projects in 22 countries we’ve learned that small budget efforts can bring big improvements in people’s lives. In turn, our lives are dramatically enriched just by knowing these good people who are dealing with the challenges they were born into.
When Plenty was founded some of our earliest inspiration came from organizations like Food First and its founder, Francis Moore Lappé, author of “Diet for a Small Planet” (1971), which argued that the real causes of world hunger are not related to shortages of food, but rather the way access to food is controlled by the food industry. We read “Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered” (1973) in which the author, E.F. Schumacher, wrote, “Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.” Plenty’s efforts have always sought to uphold that wisdom.
Over the years Plenty has gained the support of hundreds of dedicated contributors including individuals and small family foundations and other nonprofit agencies that share Plenty’s goals and mission. We discovered that if you commit to finding ways to be of help, others will support your efforts. Everything Plenty has been able to do was made possible by our supporters along with dedicated project staff. It’s always been a team effort involving a certain amount of luck and coincidence, but commitment is the key element. As the Taoist saying goes “perseverance furthers.” If you have supported Plenty over the years, you are part of this commitment, and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
Milo Yellow Hair (pictured with onion sets) is the Field Manager of the Slim Buttes Agriculture Development Program on the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Reflecting on the past 50 years
by Lisa Wartinger
When I first came to The Farm community in 1975, Plenty was less than a year old. “Plenty” was the name chosen for the community’s charitable outreach, and it reflected our view that “there’s enough for everyone’s need, not for everyone’s greed” (a saying attributed to Gandhi). That concept was perfectly in synch with our efforts to take care of each other on The Farm, and whoever else we could include. In reality the original purpose in Plenty’s 1974 founding charter cast the widest possible global net: “to help protect and share the world’s abundance and knowledge for the benefit of all.”
As part of Plenty’s first large scale international relief effort, my late husband Tom and I were sent to Guatemala in 1977 with our two-year old daughter. (This was our second run — on our first date in 1976, we drove a truckload of relief supplies to a tornado-stricken area of Alabama.)
In Guatemala we lived with a few dozen other volunteer families at the edge of a cornfield outside of San Andreas Itzapa, a town hard hit by a devastating earthquake. Tom was a paramedic and I had taken Emergency Medical Technician training, and we joined Plenty’s small medical crew. The crew staffed a tiny free clinic that served local people at the volunteer camp, trained village health workers, and provided them CB radios to stay connected with us. The team also made house calls and hospital runs for the town and surrounding villages that dotted the highlands. Several families including ours adopted orphans, for us a 7-year-old Mayan boy.
That experience was profoundly life changing, to say the least. Now, decades later, I’m still a volunteer with Plenty, but at a desk!
A few thoughts about Plenty’s 50 years
We’ve found that there’s a little magic that can occur when a first step to help is taken at just the right time. Sometimes, you know what that time is, and sometimes it just appears, but in either case that step in time can spark some real, life changing synergy.
So much has changed in the global playing field since Plenty began in 1974, bringing new and persistent challenges. At that time the concept of “climate change” was nowhere in mainstream consciousness, let alone its effects.
While poverty and political instability have always existed, the good news is that globally, extreme poverty has decreased, through persistent efforts. Yet the number of global refugees and internally displaced people fleeing political, social, and economic insecurity is now at a peak of 120 million, with no end in sight.
Now through ever more advanced communications reaching farther and deeper into the human population, knowledge and resources to further the global good are instantly available. Unfortunately, so is disinformation. Only time will tell how the course of history follows.
My sense now is that different generations take different shifts on the planet. The challenges that are in front of you may not be the same as what our sixties generation faced, but I believe that the human part — building relationships with empathy and trust, remains a constant that makes change possible.
Another constant? You can live a life of service and figure out interesting, creative ways to make a difference and even so, despite your best plans, you’ll never know exactly where the road will take you. And it can be a fine adventure either way.
Lisa Wartinger, board member