to think Camila Batmanghelidjh is fucking awesome?

[bejeezus]

I saw her talk on a news programme last night...

shes so composed and articulate, and clear-sighted and insightful and compassionate and calm and stylish and unique...

and the work she does/ what she acheives is OUTSTANDING..

heres a link to her wiki page...but it doesnt do her any justice

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camila_Batmanghelidjh

Woah! I'm very sceptical about CB but it would be remarkably gullible to swing from "she is a saint walking upon the face of the Earth" to "she is the very Devil". Try to keep in mind that there'll be lots of axe-grinding going on by groups with all kinds of agendas.

Nauticant I think the point is she never was the saint she has been portrayed and treated as. People have been grossly mislead and taken in.

I'm prepared to believe that most o fthe people working in and around KC were well-intentioned, if perhaps a bit sloppy about things like finance procedures and accountablitly (and a bit reluctant to say things like, do you really need to be paying me three days a week when there'snever any kids here except Wednesday). I certainly don't think CB herself was any kind of sexual predator. But I think she ran her organisation along cult lines and oleft the children wide open to other predators.

Melon, that's sad as the CAB is the mother ship of all British charities IMO - the one most people have some sort of contact with at some point in their lives. It would be nice if MN helped raise their profile through a Q and A perhaps?

Anything to raise the profile of CAB is really helpful. Most people don't even know it's a charity and then they also don't realise that each individual bureau is a charity in its own right (though some are merged now, so we are two bureaux as one charity) and that we get no money from the main Citizens Advice (in fact, we pay them) nor from central govt. The majority of our funding comes from the local authority, and then from grants which tend to be for specific things.

We get almost no funding from individuals, people don't run marathons for us.

I'm prepared to believe that most o fthe people working in and around KC were well-intentioned

But we're all grown ups, and don't pat other adults on the head and say "there there, at least you tried and your intentions were good".

There's a strand in this KC discussion which holds that as CB attempted to do good and her heart was in the right place then it's unfair to ask for evidence that she actually did good. When you're spending your own or your private donors' money, I think the threshold is "do no harm". When it's government money, the threshold is "do at least as well as others". That's a much higher bar.

Coming back to the £3million ... if KC were bankrupt when that went out as wages, then some people may get a nasty shock. HMRC has the power to recall any wages paid in order to satisfy the priority creditor - HMRC. It's a little known power, but it can (and has) been done.

More depressing and/or worrying, is the sense that there appears to be a type of personality which can bulldoze even the most cynical commentators into silence. CB seems to be such a type. Although this thread is remarkably Savile-light, the comparisons are inevitable.

I saw an interview recently, with Louis Theroux, in which he mentions this sheer force of personality that Savile (Theroux spend over a week with JS) exhibited which was able to face down anything - even hard nosed policemen.

It's also worth remembering that part of Saviles armour was he was very litigious. I wonder if CB has been as writ-happy ?

Eugh, I can't stand her.

Solid well- intentioned, bit sloppy about financial procedures and accountability, bit reluctant to highlght paying people and actually there are no children there to work with on those days..........sounds like gross financial mismanagement to me at the very least and dishonesty a distinct possibility.

Being well-intentioned is not :
Managing to misuse 7.2 million of public finds in 4 months and denying it,
Paying yourself a 90,000+ salary, (33% increase in the last 3 years)
Paying your personal chauffeur a 40,000+ salary,
Having a luxury company car, (apparently CB does like walking so can't use public transport- she could do with the exercise to be frank. How self- indulgent is this?)
Paying for your chauffeur's daughter to attend a private school,
Ignoring the warnings of your trustees for 5 years- 3 have resigned citing your unwillingness to listen or take their advice, in that time.
Accusing your staff of tellng lies when numbers of them are expressing concerns to a government investigation- about your behaviours, what you are doing with funds, assaults on them by clients which they have been pressured not to report by you, , drugs and alcohol being bought with funding,
Not passing on allegations that young people have been sexually assaulted and/or propositioned by volunteers working for you

and then telling the government you have no money to keep the service going. Well-intentioned is not a phrase that springs to my mind about CB- 'self-serving' and 'deluded' are.

I wonder how much more money is spent on CB from Kids' Company funding.

A PA who organises her diary, appointments etc?
An assistant who runs round after her all the time.
Do we pay for her 'outfits' ? Please tell me public money or donations is not being spent on that tat, although I suspect it is and they are unlikely to be cheap for a number of reasons.
Lunches? Breakfasts? Snacks? I bet.
I imagine she has no travelling to and from work because the chauffeur will collect her?
Her mobile phone will be paid for by KC and I bet she uses it for all calls, not just work
An Ipad?
Is there a health insurance package?

SHE will be costing £200,000 a year minimum, plus the perks that will be coming her way- holiday offers from the luvvies etc.

I bet she lives somewhere like Tottenham or Kilburn- looking like she is 'down in the hood' with the ordinary folks.

You can see her game written all over her.

part of Saviles armour was he was very litigious. I wonder if CB has been as writ-happy?

That and the fear of public backlash about challenging national treasures is definitely what quietens newspapers LurkingHusband.

Look at the OP and her responses.

Oh, and the fact that these people cultivate networks that editors or other senior executives might not wish to be frozen out from.

Much easier to leave it alone.

The private school thing just sounds like a cheap way to avoid tax.

Apparently some of the cost was covered by a school bursary (bit odd, but up to them) and KC was paying other costs and had the daughter listed as a client. However it seems a stretch that the daughter would fit the KC client criteria as understood by most donors.

However, it sounds to me as though it was a benefit in kind that should have been declared on the chauffeur's P11d, tax and NI being paid accordingly.

The private school thing just sounds like a cheap way to avoid tax.

I agree merrymouse. God, I'm agreeing with lots of things on this thread

HMRC might have a different thing to say when Camila's driver submits his next self assessment form.

Or the same thing

Interesting article in the Independent: Camila Batmanghelidjh is shooting the messengers who helped her raise millions.

Does anyone else have FB friends filling their feed with 'poor Camila, it's all a conspiracy by the establishment' blather? I've only got one so far but am expecting it to spread to other woo-oriented friends.

If the school fees were part of a tax reduction scheme, then just how much was the chauffeur's renumeration package worth? He was reported to receive a salary of £40k anyway. So are we looking at something like £60k all in? Who pays a driver £60k a year if no specialist driving skills are required?

And why would cb pay this kind of salary to a driver when she "only" earns £90k herself? I tell you, I bet kc funded a lot of "incidentals" for cb.

It has just been a magic money pot for cb and the employees. £23 million is a lot of money to get through in a year. One of my friends is an academic Dean and told me that it costs about £20 million to run his Faculty every year: a Faculty with 200+ full-time academics, 400 support staff, estate costs and probably over 1000 students.

Again, on another thread, one poster pointed out that the budget for camhs in Scotland is only about £45 million. KC has been blowing half that and on what?

From the independent article above: As someone who assiduously courted media attention, she must have realised she would attract scrutiny. Perhaps this was why Kids Company employed the expensive global law firm Withers to respond to journalists who didn’t resort to the usual fawning.

So yes, she didn't seem adverse to waving the big legal stick.

Yes FatherReboola. One of mine is on constantly about how badly done to CB is. Surprises me actually, she's a sensible sort usually.

Incidentally, I once watched a Dynamo segment filmed at KC with CB and two young people, and it was very odd.

The trick was something to do with a pencil, but what struck me was how strange the vibe seemed to be. One of the young people looked as miserable as sin, as though he had been forced to be there. All very peculiar.

I bet she lives somewhere like Tottenham or Kilburn- looking like she is 'down in the hood' with the ordinary folks.

Oh no, far from it! She lives in Hampstead, I believe...

Why do you think local authorities were raising their thresholds so high? Because they are meanies who don't care about children? It's because they are underfunded! Thresholds are high because we cannot do the lower risk work, and sometimes cases aren't assessed when they should be, or are closed when they shouldn't be, and in those cases legal challenge is correct. However the reason legal challenge is needed is because local authorities are under funded.

Certainly underfunding has a great deal to do with this. However, the reality is that LAs have been failing in their duties for years, including during periods of relative affluence, probably because during those periods they still kept SEN and social care departments underfunded. Certainly in some cases it wa because they are diverting funds to vanity projects and unnecessary overstaffing in other departments. Ask any education or community care lawyer and they will tell you that they were just as busy 10 or 15 years ago as they are now. The reality is that legal challenges are needed because, over and over again, it is the only way to persuade LAs to carry out the functions that they are required by law to carry out, and it's not just a few isolated cases - it happens over and over and over again. Just ask people on the SN boards if you don't believe it. And, of course, the stupid thing about this is that it results in LAs paying out more in legal fees than they are saving in relation to the child concerned in the first place.

I posted this on the other thread but think its worth repeating on here. This is the follow up article from Miles Goslett, the journo who wrote the piece that The Spectator published. This is some of the background to why he wrote it and how hard it had to push to get any publication to run it.

How I blew the whistle on Kids Company

Why does she wear a rodeo clown outfit ?