Camila Batmanghelidjh (Kids Company) has passed away

[TERFisTHEnewTREND]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/02/kids-company-charity-founder-camila-batmanghelidjh-dies-aged-61

Oh bless! She seemed a good woman.

I always thought she was treated far worse than she should have been. Her heart was in the right place.

@Whatsthestorynow Nope The MSM are very keen to do a front page splash when someone is accused. When claims are found to be false its a little paragraph on page 14 if you are lucky,

100% this.

To quote the article linked below:

CB stated in her book Kids - Child Protection in Britain : The Truth

, “Conflict arose between the Cabinet Office and Kids Company when I insisted that an independent firm of auditors should count and cost the numbers of children in our care who were the state’s responsibility. We wanted government to step up, rather than use a charity to avoid their statutory duties to protect vulnerable children.”

This issue of the “numbers of children” requiring protection and care was central to the conflict between the charity and the Cabinet.

In 2013 Batmanghelidjh brought in Iain Duncan Smith’s think tank the Centre for Social Justivd (CSJ), to investigate what she claimed were chronic, and systemic, failings in child care protection in this country, with vast numbers of children being excluded from services that local authorities were required to provide by law, and who were turning up at the doors of Kids Company as a result. What the CSJ found profoundly shocked them:

“We have been astounded by the number and nature of legal failings and missed opportunities which were identified by the legal professionals’ review of Kids Company cases.

Our evidence demonstrates a staggering lack of accountability by local authorities with respect to vulnerable children and young people.

We share the sense of disbelief repeatedly expressed by legal professionals, and other witnesses, at the unscrupulous and unlawful practices operated by some local authorities.

We were left incredulous at the lengths to which some local authorities are going, to either completely withhold or restrain services from being provided. We were repeatedly told that this is being driven by financial pressures.”

I believe this ^^ is what lies at the core of what amounted to a smear campaign against CB and KC.

I’ve said this on another thread but may as well repeat it here
She really wasn’t the wronged angel she was made out to be. I’ve had professional dealings with her and her organisations, and they were not OK. Even if her heart were in the right place -which I’m not certain of - I witnessed first hand the harm that her organisations did to vulnerable children. There a reason you need qualifications, accountability, and to comply with best practice/legal guidelines. It’s not nice to criticise someone after they’ve died yet it’s really hard to read things which I personally know to be wrong. I wonder if it will ever all come out or whether her current organisations will fade away without her and the interest will stop. I’m not referring to the financial impropriety stuff, btw, I’m talking about the methods, misinformation, and approaches they used.

She highlighted under funding and poverty of children and their services.

So she had to go, hence a "story" with zero foundation by the state broadcaster.

@Fordingham Presumably you took your concerns to the authorities? you say you witnessed first hand the harm done to vulnerable children after all but did nothing about this? or your concerns were deemed to be without foundation?

Which is it.

@Alexandra2001 yes of course I did and as far as I know there were still investigations ongoing. Can’t say much more than that for various reasons, sorry.

To continue quoting article below,

”Numerous independent organizations investigated and evaluated Kids Company work over this period, including the:

UCL Developmental Risk and Resilience Unit, the London School of Economics (LSE), Kings College London Institute of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge Department of Developmental Psychiatry, the Anna Freud Centre, the Centre for Social Justice, the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, and the University of East London.

All of them were aware of the numbers of children involved in the charity, the complex needs of the often very disturbed children and families who were self-referring, and the efficacy of its programme. This extensive research was shared with government departments but, oddly, barely any mention of it was made in the parliamentary ‘inquiry’.
One person who did know of it was Chris Wormald, the permanent Secretary for the DofE, who attempted to correct the false impression that the inquiry was promoting:

“You were saying there was no evaluation evidence”, he told the parliamentary committee.

“That is not correct. I have already quoted the evaluation that we did in 2011, and there was also the LSE study, the UCL study, et cetera. There were proper studies writing up this work.”

As Batmanghelidjh notes, “the political system’s response was to ‘lose’ reports and documents which demonstrated the charity’s efficacy, so that an impression could be created of Kids Company as an inefficient and failing organisation. This was a strategy to weaken Kids Company’s message – too many maltreated children are being failed by their government”

Even Tim Loughton, the former children’s minister, admitted to the parliamentary enquiry that
“there were clearly quite a lot of papers missing.”

This is a useful breakdown

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/feb/10/charity-commission-report-into-kids-company-questions-and-answers

Thats helpful, thank you.

Wow so the official receiver’s case against Kids Company was comprehensively dismissed, CB was exonerated and the judge praised her and her trustees as highly impressive and trusted individuals and the whole sorry shambles cost us the tax -payers 9.5 million pounds?

And very few media outlets seem to be reporting this today.

this is the report from the charity commission Referenced in the article

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charity-inquiry-keeping-kids-company/charity-inquiry-keeping-kids-company

But the inquiry's reports and court cases etc are all over
She was exonerated of all wrong doing, not just in the financing but in her charity work with children too.

@Alexandra2001 KC wasn’t the only organisation of hers and she did a lot under the radar since it was closed down. HTH.

i'm aware of other organisations, i m not aware of other on going and new inquiry's

why would you be?

It's very hard to believe what you are saying when you can't provide any evidence. There is plenty of evidence that she was exonerated, but doesn't seem to be any to suggest that there are ongoing cases against her.

...because these things tend to be publicised, esp where children are concerned.

As far as i can tell, you ve just tried to rubbish her, with a series of unfounded allegations and assertions that there are on going investigations, of which you can provide zero evidence for, hiding behind the age old "can't say much more, nudge nudge wink wink" tripe.

I regret saying anything at all to be honest and I’m not going to say anything more - I’ve genuinely felt so anxious all afternoon since posting and I’m going to log out of this NC account and back into my main and leave this thread. It’ll either all come out at some point, or it won’t. I don’t think her current projects will be able to continue without her so perhaps it doesn’t really matter any more anyway.

I totally understand that you can’t and don’t believe me, I just can’t give any details and I don’t want to spend hours convincing strangers on the internet of something that they don’t really want to me to anyway, if you see what I mean.

peace

I don’t really understand how evaluation reports were not available to the Parliamentary inquiry and not re-submitted even once they were found to be ‘missing’. CB herself gave evidence. Permanent Secretary Sir Chris Wormald gave references to the reports in his evidence.

All parliamentary inquiries have an email address for correspondence and openly seek evidence. Evaluation reports are often also published on university websites, as well as being published by the commissioning organisation on their website or saved in PDF form. It would have been the work of about twenty minutes to find them, collate them and send them in.

Although the organisation had collapsed, surely a member of staff or trustee would care enough to find and email in the reports? Let alone CB herself?

Or does it also point to the sense that no-one was on top of this information, even while KC was running? No one was focused on evidence and impact and the ‘faith’ in the work was felt to be sufficient.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/09/the-hidden-life-of-camila-batmanghelidjh-why-was-her-exoneration-so-widely-ignored

@CountFucula just read that. Unfortunately it doesn’t really answer the question posed in the headline. I’ve a suspicion she was simply collateral damage in an internal Tory party war: she was seen as Cameron’s ‘pet’ so Bernard Jenkin and his goons decided to boil the bunny. Jenkin was the prime driver of the egregious public accounts committee report that triggered her downfall.

So all the media about giving out cash daily In envelopes no questions asked and buying '£200 trainers' was all lies?!
That's disgraceful!!

One only has to look at the Post Office scandal to see that when the establishment goes against you, they will not stop, regardless of the evidence.

Without the ITV drama, these poor folk would have lived with their convictions for ever more, dozens have gone to their graves and 100s still have criminal convictions, despite the multitude of evidence that they are innocent, the Court of Appeal has overturned just 93 and upheld over 50 convictions.

I wonder when the fuss dies down, whether the state will finally clear these sub post masters and compensate within say the next 12/18 months or whether it'll still be going on in 5 years time?

Same with KS and CB.... cleared but not cleared, unsubstantiated claims still thrown around.

Yes they were. But interestingly those lies were not started by the media, they were merely reported and amplified by them. They were started it seems by a report published by the Public Accounts Committee who wanted to discredit her and, by association, Cameron.

Puts me in mind of this

https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/james-obrien/govt-forced-out-mental-health-tsar-natasha-devon/#:~:text=With%20mental%20health%20problems%20amongst,forced%20out%20of%20the%20role.

I have since read the full Public Accounts Committee report and most of the appended individual written evidence submitted to the committee.

It’s complex, but a few things that jumped out at me were:

• The financial problems, by way of insufficient reserves and a very high risk operating model, went back many years. The committee was very critical of the auditors for not sufficiently flagging the risk to the charity as a going concern. Other professional services firms who conducted reviews (at least one review was commissioned by a government department) were also criticised for failing to identify the risks inherent in the KC model, having applied heavy caveats to the ‘assurance’ they were willing to provide.
• Ministers absolutely fell over themselves to give KC cash, sometimes directly against civil service advice. This especially applies to the final payment, days before the collapse.
• The written evidence submitted to the committee was utterly polarised, whether it was from staff, volunteers or service users, there was a highly disparate and varied view of CB and the work of KC.

I am far less sure of what to think now!