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.

Er..totally irrelevant about whether this thread should have been deleted, where it was going at the start did cause some concerns though I think the JS comparisons were valid.

As to CB, her personal appearance and profile are relevant for comment , as they were part of her personality and brand, and as another poster said on another thread, a 'Semiotic marker' (love that phrase, in me notebook now) to possibly identify with one group (outsiders) and deflect attention, a bit like dazzle camouflage.

Lightbulb I agree with you very much about not working with families. And I don't think any charity would have got away with handing out brown envelopes of cash which funded school children's drug addictions unless those school children were urban black children who certain sections of society seem to view as inevitable drug takers.

The thing is, if things have been going wrong in the financial side of the company you have to wonder if things have been going wrong elsewhere. We'll have to wait and see what happens but I don't think it's beyond the bounds of reasonable suspicion to wonder if some of these 'terrible' mothers actually feel like their family was undermined and KC facilitated their children's descent into gangs. They almost seem to be gang enablers from a lot of reports.

Twas me banging on about semiotic markers. This short Wiki book deals with it in quite an interesting way, I think - a relatively easy read.

en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Visual_Rhetoric/Semiotics_of_Fashion

I don't think this is a left/right thing. In fact, one of the things that CB was clearly very clever at was appealing to both right and left, perhaps by avoiding being too overtly political or critical of government policy. (Contrast with an organisation like, say, Shelter, which is much more outspoken.)

One of the things this has reminded me of is the experience of the journalist James Cameron with Dr Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer was a renowned medical missionary who operated in Africa - he was one of those people widely regarded as a saint (not unlike Mother Theresa, another dodgy character). Cameron visited him in the 1950s and discovered that the hospital he was running was dirty and badly equipped, and Schweitzer himself had a huge ego. In his biography Cameron wrote that "the hospital existed for him rather than he for it."

There are some people who are just very good at creating their own legend - and we fall for it time and time again.

ooh thanks BoffinMum, really interesting...scope for a whole different thread somewhere else!

We get taken in a lot. Tony Blair. Lists endless others....Now her. It happens A lot. We want to trust and believe. And then we get stung.

'Gang enablers' is a bit much I think. But I do think there was a sense in which KC encouraged family division. That whole ethos in which you were either for or against CB meant that it was very difficult for parents who felt uncomfortable with the amount of cash that was being handed out to challenge that for fear of alienating their own children and dividing their family. In addition, the 'favourites' thing operated within families with some children within a family receiving substantially more cash than their siblings. I can't see how that's in any way helpful

Have n/c for this post. I expressed concern which was ignored by KC when I had contact with one of their clients.

KC had spent a fortune on various private health care interventions and other social interventions (don't want to expand on that as may 'out' people). He was undoubtedly a very disturbed and violent offender but at almost 30 years old I couldn't understand why they were continuing their involvement at huge cost.

His worker was verbally abusive towards other people trying to work with him if they felt he wasn't getting what they thought he should.

And he told me he wasn't the only one who called Camilla 'Mum'. There have been, for many years serious concerns about therapeutic/professional boundaries in Kids Co which contributed to financial mismanagement with people waaaaaay into adulthood continuing to be supported by a charity which limited their opportunity to stand on their own two feet and appeared to be doing nothing tangible to reduce their violent offending or improve their obvious MH issues.

What really fucks me off is that I'm sure Camilla as 'Mum', isn't continuing to support these people that she has fostered complete dependence from over many years.

I fear these people are now abandoned.

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

To pick up on this previous article. The charity was financially lax 12 years ago. How was more money poured down its throat? The first rule of accounting is pay your taxes before anything else. How was it allowed to continue with such poor financial mismanagement?

But I do think there was a sense in which KC encouraged family division.

he told me he wasn't the only one who called Camilla 'Mum'.

I think this comes from CB's notion that these people needed "re-parenting" with KC, obviously, being the surrogate parent.

Having worked for a few charities over the years, I have noticed that all too often they are " headed" by some of the least altruistic people I have ever had the misfortune to meet.

I'm sure some good will come of exposing CB and her entourage...no doubt other unscrupulous " charities" will be exposed and a tightening of regulations imposed to discourage bad practice within such organisations.

Perhaps she's like one of these mugs

sorty, she'd like, not she's like.

FFS! Sorry not sorty

Sorry Mail link Clearly learnt nothing.

So she's already busy creating another little climate of dependency.

Scardey, I wouldn't be too quick to believe that story. I saw tweets about that earlier this week. It was being organised by organisations which had previously been supporters of Kids Co to make sure that no urgent needs (ie eating) would go unmet. It seemed to be primarily organised by the Hawksmoor Restaurant and their suppliers.

CB seems to have attached her name to this after the fact and doesn't actually appear to have anything to do with it other than latching on to help boost her profile.

This is the original tweet, she seems to have hijacked this project:

mobile.twitter.com/HawksmoorLondon/status/631780514102419456/photo/1

I think it sounds like it could be a really valuable resource for people left in the lurch by KC. And I suspect it may fail very quickly because she's associated herself with it. Which she wouldn't have done if she cared about service users rather than bolstering her own ego.

How completely embarrassing for Rebecca to have to ba ktta k on her deletion threat?

Or how professional of her to review a decision she'd made and reverse it.
Very very few people cam admit to being wrong (this is a general point) myself included and I am trying to do it more often. It makes sticking to your guns when you know you're right even more effective if you've shown yiu can admit you're wrong.

Exactly Stealth. MN listened to some well-reasoned arguments and had a rethink. Something far more people should develop the ability to do, especially in politics and media.

I hate that "har har how embarrassing, you had to change your mind, U-turn" sneery response.

Plus, MN didn't 'have' to do anything. They could've deleted it if they'd wanted and there's fuck all anyone could have done about it other than a bit of impotent whining. It's still up because they want it to be, no other reason.

It's a sign of strength, to be able to admit you're wrong. Not weakness. Only weak people stick with decisions that are incorrect.

It all seems to have quiet on the media front. Lots of noise and shouting for a week or so and now.....nothing

I really hope this isn't going to be swept under the carpet to save a few political blushes.

gone quiet

I would be surprised if people are quick to keep donating after this. She (and the trustees) have not only wrecked the charity, but also alienated donors on behalf of other charities as well. THIS is why it's such a toxic outcome.

Right, brace yourselves for the next bit.

I think we shouldn't be assuming it is OK to hand out food in the way that the link suggests, on the assumption that lots of people will 'starve' (usually followed by some sort of clever rhetorical device that implies people will then rampage urban environments in large gangs whilst high on drugs). This is an emotionally manipulative threat that has been used to get people to cough up to CB and the like in the first place.

We have a welfare state. We pay taxes. This provides a basic subsistence standard of living for those unable to work or make enough money to take home. This system, although imperfect and throughly tainted and damaged by IDS, at least is resilient, involves progressive taxation contributions from absolutely everyone earning enough to pay tax that they can't wriggle out of, and represents a means-tested, accountable distribution system of financial support, accessible to all citizens in need who meet the necessary criteria (theoretically speaking). In other words, the basics are there. The welfare state does not show favour to individuals and it does not depend on sucking up for either contributions or distribution. It does not rely on volunteers who feel like turning up, charisma, or the whim of whoever is in power that year (apart from at the margins). It is independent of most of this stuff.

So let's commit our energies to arguing about that and developing the welfare state properly so it does its job better, rather than running around with piddling initiatives so we feel virtuous on a personal level, but all the time reinforcing the idea that it is OK to feed a child for a day at a time via a food bank or local feeding project, but too difficult to give them and their parents the real tools to become independent and resilient. We eke out the higher level stuff such as housing, education and mental health support far too reluctantly, which is what underpins the food bank thing, and creates an environment where CB and the like can flourish at our expense. We are collectively scared of the complexity of fixing the big things. It is easier and more fashionable to give £50 to some little project that improves things at the margins. It does not - it makes things worse, in terms of the bigger picture. It puts off the moment where we have to deal with things properly.

True equality means nobody needing to live hand to mouth, and we need to drop our addiction to quick social fixes that make us feel good individually but miss the whole point, and instead commit to the social welfare ideal that we have been fighting for since the 1940s, or watch our hard-won freedoms disappear over the next few decades, as society becomes more and more polarised. I for one could not live with that.