Greenpeace Taiwan

Noticed that Greenpeace has an office in Taipei.

Wonder if it is local Taiwan, regional etc., if they have some type of outreach to the public, if they have information on potential ways to contribute or participate, how many people work there, volunteer opportunities, etc.

GREENPEACE 綠色和平
https://goo.gl/maps/gXkdTEWSynJxfez37

The last 2 yrs I’d say I’ve seen volunteers on the streets about once a month or more. Both in Taipei city and new taipei city…although since May have not seen them around and I also go out a lot less.

Usually they are in large groups of 6+ and I’d guess looking for donations. But I’ve never been approached…maybe they are lazer focused on locals only…or I stepped in something stinky :grin:

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They are pretty sizable comparing to some other INGOs in TW. A couple of their folks working in the region relocated to Taipei.

Regional. Taiwan office is still run by Hong Kong office. This has led to some cultural stupidities like the street fundraising in taiwan is required to use credit card on a quota system to oay empliyees, transfers are welcome but not counted into quotas. no cash donations. This is for reasons of Greenpeace to legitimately be able to deny corruption. Which is true, but sad. The issue is that this has totally miscalculated taiwans culture in regards to skepticism towards giving random people personal data on the street. Which i agree is absolutely justified.

I hope soon, especially now that Hong Kong has fallen, Taiwan can be run independantly, or perhaps through Japan. Even Korea and taiwan split away and join each others office. I mean, its pretty silly to tie in with the HK and Beijing now. Especially as GP cant operate normally in China (probably sson HK as well if things keep going to shit).

I understand there are financial legal reasons japan is separated and all that jazz, but it is a very poorly run system for a cause that is absolutely crucial to future health of Homo sapiens as well as all the other shit we look down at (aka everything but ourselves haha)

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Greenpeace has always been an organization that stuck me as a bit odd. They used to send me return address labels by the hundreds using my full legal name and my parents’ address. WWF did it too. I don’t know how I got on their mailing lists, especially with my full name. My guess is some relative made a donation in my name for a birthday or Christmas gift and then didn’t tell me. When I was in college I called them up to tell them to stop wasting resources by mailing me plastic-coated labels that I wasn’t going to use. My dad took a picture of the credit card offers and other junk mail addressed to me from 2019-2021 and I saw that there were more Greenpeace and WWF return address labels in the mix. It’s 2021. The postal service is failing for a lot of reasons, but among them is no one sends paper letters with any degree of frequency anymore. I understand wanting to get your word out, but if you’re worried about saving the earth, you might want to think that your target supporters might not use paper unnecessarily, and probably don’t need hundreds of return address labels. That’s my limited experience with them

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Not volunteers. Professional collectors. Work on commission. Standard for GP worldwide.

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You beat me with your reply, I asked the worker once on the street and they not unpaid volunteers.

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Greenpeace is fed by big oil. It’s a joke.

Being married to a submariner, I remember their encounters with various military boats. My husband’s view was they were a major nuisance as they had to disable them without hurting anyone which puts military personnel at risk.
I’m sure they’ve accomplished some good things however they’ve been known to manipulate photos to suit their narrative.
They remind me of scientologists because on the surface, it’s easy to agree with them. If you look deeper, you’ll find extremist behaviors.

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It’s kinda like PETA. Sounds good on the surface but ultimately they harm society.

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They get paid a salary in Taiwan, a pretty good one for young workers actually. Their quota is 8 donors a month.

That’s a super low target.

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This is true. There are a lot ofvcooky extremists in greenpeace, thats for sure. However i have great respect for some things they have done, such as pollution and food checking here. I prefer them to the local environmental ngos in general because they are more generalist and also do work related to people. Many here are fairly specific in their scope, im sure thats just lack of funding but still.

They arent perfect, i still support them as i think it is extremely important to have private groups checking on things, especially when buisness and government here is so corrupt. I would actually prefer them to be far bigger and more politically involved. I would also like greenpeace worldwide to be more open to working with companies in ways to help them improve. a great one would be more ecological packaging. Helping factories setup more eco products or helping put companies in touch with ones making more eco oriented products etc. But they are afraid of getting the corruption/hypocrite label, so they seem a hard no everytime i have talked with them (here and canada).

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Ye p it is, but lots of people have shitty attitudes towards the environment and people working to protect it. Plus they can only accept credit cards/transfers so its not as easy as you may think in a cash society that generally is worried about fundraisers on the streets as well as a fairly strong industry based on fraud.

They should have a better way than this to get funds. A lot of “donations” go to sales and marketing which I do not like as well hard sales on the street after I say no, they keep talking as I was walking.

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Didn’t they have some press about four or five months ago? They apparently managed to convince 7 eleven Taiwan to phase out plastic bottles over some stupidly long time horizon, no doubt with lots of caveats involved.

Is it better or worse than nothing? And who has convinced them to do anything better?

In general (not aimed at you specifically) I think this is the disingenuously annoying reality with the public now. They see a group, say greenpeace, and if said group doesnt fix everything perfectly without spending money or causing waste they are evil hypocrites that are tossed in the same bag as the rest of the evil doers. Its a bit tiring hearing this sort of laziness and lack of fkresight/experience. Greenpeace isnt perfect. No doubt. They are dealing with an ever stupider population and greedier business environment. The fact they may even do a10% improvement over 10 years should be cause for applaus frankly. Or whatever numbers, as long as its a net improvement, which they absolutely are. I suppose if any of us accomplished more, we could critize them…but i am not seeing it…

As an aside, they do pay salaries to their fundraiserss. Around 40k/month. They pay other employees as well, the hell is wrong about that? inagine if they didnt, the complaints would be 10 fold that the peace side of greenpeace is now a slave camp style hipocrisy. People that think donating money that goes to paying bills is bad, ummmm…to that logic i am truly speechless…unless there is an army of unpaid volunteers from the ground up through to policy makers and lawyers, how else would you expect anything to be accomplished? This is a copp out, an excuse, to point fingers at those who do what we are not willing to do and/or to justify the things we logically know we shouldnt keep doing.

Here greenpeace has done a lot of work for food safety, pollution and garbage issues. I for one am incredibly thankful for that, and i sincerely hope they can get bigger stronger and educate more people (public, but especially people of influence) to change towards a more sustainable and clean system. I know i am not big enough to talk to higher givernment officials, 711 execs etc and communicate better strategies…albiet small steps. I cant see how that can be construed as a negative as it is sill maintaining capitalism and profitability and makes all sides happy, whilst moving towards being less toxic…whats the negative? Donating to a church, temple, tax ccollection etc surely has far more wastes of money in building powerhouse real estate aimed at more membership rather than more people cleaning everyones environment. Seems clear cut to me.

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Get yourself a Grayl bottle/filter and don’t buy plastic bottles. Set an example for everyone else. Think of what you can do with all the money you save, not to mention the reduced plastic waste!

If such a program, and I’m not referring to my example above specifically, is just a meaningless platitude announced in the media, then it probably does more harm than good, in my opinion. I understand your point about raising awareness.

Yes, of course i agree that something meaningless is meaningless haha. But i very much do not think greenpeace is that. They arent perfect but i think they have done far more good than bad. I am talking of environmental improvements. they arent just climbing cranes and circling oil platforms and fishing boat poachers with signs, those are just the extremists getting attention. There are numerous office workers fighting the battle of clean air, food, water etc on paper and computers.