The collapse of Greensgrow, Philly’s nonprofit farm, exposes years of worker allegations

On July 6, a group of workers at Greensgrow, a beloved urban farm and garden center with a 25-year legacy in Philadelphia’s Kensington section, decided it was now or never.

With signed union cards in hand, about 10 of them piled into the executive director’s office with a list of demands to improve working conditions.

According to the nonprofit’s executive director, Erin Mooney, their timing could not have been worse.

That morning, she said, she’d learned Greensgrow had been the target of a check fraud scheme that siphoned more than $32,000 from the farm. Four bogus checks, written to strangers in four cities from New York to Baltimore, had drained about a third of Greensgrow’s cash.

The setback imperiled the organization’s already-tenuous finances. Over the last two years, Greensgrow had floundered. Turnover in leadership and staff had led to operational breakdowns from animal care to facility maintenance to inventory. In turn, sluggish sales caused the board to close the flagship store in Kensington in early July and lay off all but a handful of workers.

Mooney said she saw only one option: Cease all operations and lay off the remaining staff while planning a new path forward for the agricultural hub.

“There’s no future when you have no money in your bank account,” said Mooney, a veteran PR professional who joined Greensgrow in March. “I can’t, as an executive director, feel at all comfortable living in a margin where I can’t pay anyone.”

It’s a startling outcome for a nonprofit that, a few years before the pandemic, exceeded $1 million in annual revenue, had expanded to a second location in West Philadelphia, and was touted as a national model for sustainable urban farming.

Greensgrow’s sudden closure has also exposed more than a decade of simmering problems belied by the nonprofit’s benevolent image, including serious workplace dangers, labor unrest, major accounting blunders, and food-safety failures.

Workers, the union, and Greensgrow’s leadership voice differing accounts of what happened, what’s next, and whether the firings amounted to union busting.

Alex Riccio, an organizer with the Philadelphia Joint Board Workers United, which represented the unit, said it’s understandable if, as he was told, the “financial situation of the company is so bleak that they have to permanently close their doors in less than two weeks.”

While management at first indicated the future of the organization was unclear, Mooney later said both sites will return in 2023.

The former workers say the nonprofit’s tactics amounted to retaliation.

“I thought that it was classic union busting,” said farm assistant Alé Lamonte, a seasonal worker who was laid off along with farm manager Olivia Gamber, a full-time, year-round employee. “Just a week prior, I had sat down with the executive director, a board member, and multiple coworkers, and they had assured me, despite there being financial stress on the organization, that my job and the farm manager’s job would be safe.”

Founded in 1997 on a former Superfund site by chef and farmer Mary Seton Corboy, Greensgrow grew over its first 15 years from a do-it-yourself farmstand to a $2 million operation.

Corboy repurposed materials from construction sites to build garden beds and inherited hydroponic systems seized in police drug raids to build a greenhouse, according to Donna Cooper, a longtime board member.

Greensgrow’s community-supported agriculture program, sourced from area farms, introduced the concept to hundreds of Philadelphians and brought in more than $400,000 a year. So did retail sales from the farmstand and garden center. And grants and loans supported expanding efforts that included food access and nutrition education for low-income families, and a community kitchen in a nearby church.

But after Corboy died of cancer in 2016, Cooper said, much of the institutional knowledge was lost.

Her successors — five directors in the last six years — struggled to keep Corboy’s brainchild relevant amid expanding competition.

“Like many nonprofits, Greensgrow has had to overcome ‘founder syndrome,’ where somebody built the organization from seed, and so much of the knowledge was never institutionalized,” Cooper said.

After Corboy’s death, long-ignored problems that threatened the garden’s future began surfacing.

For decades, Greensgrow had failed to charge taxes on its garden center sales, racking up at least $200,000 in state debt, according to a lawsuit against its accounting firm, John E. McGovern & Associates, which Greensgrow accused of missing the error. (That lawsuit was settled, according to the board, for $110,000. McGovern did not respond to a request for comment.)

Financial statements filed in that lawsuit show an $18,700 loan to support farm boxes for SNAP users was forgiven after the program “never materialized.”

On her first day on the job in March, Mooney found a stack of subpoena papers on her desk from a lawsuit over a forklift accident from a few years back. According to then-staffer Sammy Sirois, an employee was working on a forklift tire when it exploded, resulting in a traumatic brain injury and a broken elbow. Cooper said staff received training after the incident.

But staff were not trained and certified in forklift operating until 2021 after employees banded together to demand the training, four former workers said in interviews. “It ended up with a lot of deliveries coming and we said no, we cannot receive this because no one is qualified to drive the forklift,” said Jen Cortese, then the retail supervisor.

Cortese said workers also began demanding overtime pay, which former workers at Greensgrow said they had incorrectly been told they did not qualify for due to farm exemptions. Greensgrow reviewed available payroll data and immediately cut checks for more than $1,500 to reimburse three shorted employees. Mooney said no other workers have come forward to seek missing pay.

“For somebody who wasn’t paid overtime, it was horrible,” said Cooper, who added that in 2022 Greensgrow raised its hourly minimum wage to $15. “Even though we didn’t have any money, we gotta pay them.”

And, last year, Cortese filed an OSHA complaint over precariously dangling live electrical wires and improper handling of chemicals. Greensgrow agreed to pay $5,967 in penalties. Mooney said the nonprofit sank more than $30,000 into repairs.

Behind the scenes, the organization’s finances were in shambles. Revenues declined by nearly two-thirds over five years, before plummeting during the pandemic in 2020, tax filings show.

Going into 2022, the plan was still to run a farmstand, selling the produce grown on site as well as local eggs and yogurt. As recently as March, the organization was hiring, reportedly to keep up with soaring retail demand. But the farmstand also racked up health code violations this spring. Mooney closed it, citing a dearth of both produce and customers.

Several former staff also raised concerns about animal neglect, attributed to the constant turnover of staff. The space was not adequate for the 12 chickens and the farm’s pet pig, Milkshake, said Lamonte, the farm assistant.

Megan Smith, who worked at Greensgrow until this spring, discovered that the farm’s turtles had serious, advanced illnesses. Ultimately, all six were euthanized. Mooney said she had never seen the turtles but agreed the organization had been in need of numerous reforms.

Mooney does see a path forward for Greensgrow. She expects to recoup the stolen funds, even as scammers continued targeting the nonprofit’s account this week. She and the board will use the off season to focus on fund-raising and a business plan, which she anticipates will focus more on programming and events. (Milkshake and the other animals have been delivered to new homes.)

Bill McKinney, the executive director of New Kensington Community Development Corp., which leases the farm to Greensgrow, viewed the situation as a phase of necessary, if painful, growth.

“It’s always easier to start something from scratch than to change something that’s been around a long time,” he said. “With all of these challenges — financial, vision, staffing — they really gotta figure out where they’re going to go next.”