to think Camila Batmanghelidjh must be lying when she says she has done nothing wrong in her spending of Kid's Company Charity Funding?

[LuluJakey1]

She is like Jimmy Saville in that what she has been doing has been under all of all our noses and we have refused to speak up about it or believe it.

It is not just the luvvies who have been up close and personal with her- involved with the charity and CB at a very close level, some even Trustees. It is also the employees and the parents of children, the children themselves, the volunteers. We are not talking about a hidden mis-use of funding. We are talking aout a whole culture of open waste and self-indulgence.

I know it is from The Daily Mail but it is actually an interview with het.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3199527/My-heart-clear-says-Kids-Company-boss-Batmanghelidjh-admits-charity-paid-school-fees-employees-children-denies-wrongdoing.html

£5000 a month rent on an Art Deco House with private swimming pool - which houses a member of staff, and the swimming pool is used by CB but hot by any children- they are 'not allowed' (her words)

£40,000 chauffeur- now a specialist worker (according to CB). also has private school and therapist funding for his 2 children.

Staff( how many?) have their children sent to private schools because the job is stressful and it is part of a 'staff well-being package'

The Chauffeur's sister is also employed - now as a 'brilliant accountant', last summer as 'the woman who does my sewing' (mind you that would be a full-time job in itself, but it does imply the charity pays for those vile outfits much as I suspected)

25 young people given £769,000 a year funding - £31,000 a year each, to do nothing. They are CB's specially selected young people- many of whom have received funding for many years. She describes them as 'like a family, hanging round the house'. She deals with their funding herself.

Yet STILL CB complains staff should not have spoken up about any of this and implies those who have will suffer for it.

In my view this woman and her behaviours are corrupt, dishonest and immoral.

Are my views unreasonable? I feel this could be jus the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is yet to emerge and prosecutions will be very likely.

I think there should be a down- to the -bone, in-depth investigation of every aspect of the work of this charity and of CB. Not simply any concerns that have now been raised but a complete trawl of the spending, the practices and the behaviours of CB herself.

I think it's very much a 'right on' issue now. Partly because CB has very astutely realised that if she positions herself as a victim of evil Tory cuts she can mobilise an awful lot of right on twits who just want us to all 'think of teh children' while ignoring the fact that CB has been ripping off those same children's funding for the last two decades and running KC in a manner which it seems very likely will have been highly damaging for their welfare.

I've bought the book 'Amongst the Hoods' which writes about KC but wasn't named as the charity concerned until recently. One of the teenagers in the book talks about how KC stopped young people progressing and kept them dependent because it just wanted to keep numbers up to justify it's own existence. But he said 'Who's going to listen to us when all these middle class white people are saying how wonderful it is'. I think some people on this thread are guilty of exactly that.

I'm rather at a loss, because it seems like some posters on here would have preferred a corrupt, wasteful and inefficient system to continue just because it might occasionally have done the odd bit of good.

Does anyone actually know any of the kids helped by Kids Company, or know from first hand experience about their interventions and how many they actually helped?

It does seem to me that an awful lot of money was spent but no one seems to be able to say with authority what they did and how they did it. I've worked for a charity myself and I know how the reporting goes.. You help one person but you count the 'reach' as all the people that might have an impact on (immediate family, friends etc.). People who may never have heard of your organisation will have been 'reached' because the behaviour of your client has changed.

I'm not saying KC did nothing, but I've yet to see any comprehensive reporting or even anecdotal stories about their interventions from the point of view of other professionals or service users.

it seems like some posters on here would have preferred a corrupt, wasteful and inefficient system to continue just because it might occasionally have done the odd bit of good.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Lazylohan you are right she will turn it around and cold play willcome to her rescue again

Who wrote that book? lazylohan

Well at the urban academy young folk were getting little envelopes of money so that is creating a dependency and is upping the stats for the yearly reports so its win/win for Kc

Homehelp, people tried to implement back up structures but without any funding it's pretty difficult to do anything apart from write policy documents. It takes ages to rebuild actual structures, as AFAIK there still isn't any funding to replace provision, hire new people, etc. KC has effectively eaten all the pies, I imagine.

Boffin, for all the apparent financial mismanagement, KC has clearly not eaten all the pies, not even close. As I mentioned upthread, Southwark's children's social care funding for 15/16 is around 50m, which is an order of magnitude larger than KC funding (reported public funding is 37m across all 19 years of its existence). And there's Lambeth too, and Brighton etc. And central gov't was involved as well, and they found the 3m for KC and could equally have found the money for backup.

HomeHelp - I'm not gleeful, I'm angry. I've donated hundreds to KC. I feel like I've been scammed.

and they found the 3m for KC and could equally have found the money for backup

But why would they find more money for an organisation that clearly wasn't able to manage its finances in a sustainable way? Money is finite and there are plenty of other services that could do with more funds.

BoffinMum, your post about the invisible army is excellent. A close relative of mine worked in the charity sector for a long time, experiencing a lot of that type of thing, including:

(i) a headhunted new head for a very well known charity who lacked the expertise for the day-to-day work but was hired to raise its profile- a licence for self-promotion. The new head was a bully who treated the very modestly paid rank and file badly while commanding a massive salary. Hired due to personal connections;

and at another charity

(ii) an impressive from a distance (aristos, business figures) board of trustees which was actually chaotic, dysfunctional, ignorant of key aspects of charity work and accountability but which nevertheless felt able to be demanding and scathing of key charity employees. Some people who are donating their time almost behave as though those who are paid for it (e.g. front line workers) are greedy people ripping the charity off.

If KC had a board anything like that it would have been hopeless at holding anyone to account and none of the staff would have blown the whistle to it as there would have been no point.

"Kids Company’s 2003 accounts confirm that HMRC agreed in July 2003 to waive all arrears of employment taxes due to 31 March 2003, with the exception of £100,000. The £100,000 was paid by a Kids Company donor, which meant that the amount waived was £589,587.

Laurence Guinness, director of communications at Kids Company, said the charity had "experienced a delay in making national insurance payments to HMRC as resources were focused on meeting the immediate needs of a high number of vulnerable children with complex needs who were not receiving statutory support".

www.thirdsector.co.uk/hmrc-wrote-off-nearly-600000-unpaid-taxes-kids-company-2003/finance/article/1355727

It is ridiculous to apply that logic to any organisation: the normal rules don't apply if you are 'doing good'.
In the light of current information about KC expenditure (not denied by KC) it is completely mind boggling.

And I'm even more angry on behalf of all those vulnerable children, who were not benefiting from the money I and so many other donors gave, because it was being used to pay school fees and chauffeurs.

Funny. I asked HMRC to waive my employment tax arrears.

They told me to fuck off.

Homehelp, yes, that makes sense. I am reassured by your post.

I think KC actually was fairly "right on". Lots of stuff is familiar from the 60s: the "all you need is love" approach to healing complex psychological/social issues, the promotion of 'alternative' therapies like massage, etc, the belief that organisation and structure don't matter, the "barefoot doctor"-type view that normal professional qualifications and procedures are irrelevant, right down to CB's "earth mother" persona and style of dress. KC had a "vibe" that was exciting and anti the status quo: I think it was very "right on", and that attracted a lot of people to it.

Including apparently that famous hippy David Cameron.

that famous hippy David Cameron

Tories love the "do whatever you want, dude" vibe of hippies.

Merry mouse, if they were high need surely support would be statutory and forthcoming.

"Including apparently that famous hippy David Cameron."

Well, he was caught smoking cannabis at school.... But seriously, part of his electoral strategy (and I suspect part of his personal beliefs as well) is to appear 'soft' on certain social issues: witness his support for gay marriage, for example. The whole "hug a hoody" business was part of that.

merrymouse, you need to re-read my post. I was saying they could have found the money for alternate providers who could act as backup/failover in the event of a KC collapse.

CB's 'child well being' philosophy/strategy was fundamentally at odds with national policy and evidenced based practice.

Instead of working with families she did everything she could to blame the mothers (she was clear it was always the mothers fault not the fathers) and replace them with her own brand (this was a brand machine) of mothering.

She sought to replicate the kind of childhood that was 'normal' for her (cash handouts, makeovers, private schools and therapists) for 'poor' kids in London who according to her had mothers who scared off their fathers this causing the kids' 'bad' behaviour.

It is so ridiculously patronising and misogynistic!

KC relied on unrestricted private donations because no credible funder would fund such unevidenced and discriminatory projects.

How completely embarrassing for Rebecca that she had to back track on her deletion threat.

I think that she still thinks that she hasn't does anything wrong. I just consider her deluded.

merrymouse, you need to re-read my post. I was saying they could have found the money for alternate providers who could act as backup/failover in the event of a KC collapse.

Fair enough, I misunderstood.

However in the circs it sounds as though they should have just funded alternative providers instead.

I agree boffin. The way the kids company director of communications phrases it, the government agreed they (the government) weren't meeting their statutory obligations so kids company didn't have to pay taxes. Sounds a bit unlikely.