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.

A few comments:

1. The problem with the comparison between JS and CB is not that the cases aren't identical. It's that the single most important and well-known thing about JS is that he was a serial celebrity paedophile. Everything else about him that might (or might well not) be a valid comparison with CB: his selfishness, his focus on his personal gratification, the degree to which others were in thrall to him etc ... all of this is irrelevant compared to fact that he was a serial celebrity paedophile. When CB was compared to JS, that is the fact that was brought to my mind by the mention of JS. I doubt I will have been alone.
2. On this wider point about the danger of handing over the responsibilities of statutory agencies to charities. I agree that this is a danger, but it is not, in fact what happened here, at least not directly. Southwark and Lambeth (and the other councils) did not receive less money than they otherwise would have done because KC was operating on their patch. Southwark alone has a budget on the order of £50m for 2015/16 -- that is orders of magnitude more public funding than KC.
3. Public bodies are just as capable of failing as private organisations. Rotherham is just one grim example. And while the councils where KC operated are thankfully not embroiled in that kind of high profile scandal, I'll bet quite a lot of folks working in the public sector where KC operated will have been instinctively hostile to any third sector organisation whose remit was explicitly to pick up the pieces that their own employers had missed or been unable to address. This will be true for the centre too (ie those civil servants who wanted KC to lose its funding). So it will be difficult to distinguish genuine issues at KC from mudslinging without getting deep in to the detail.

" she wants to open a childrens food bank now "

what FatherReboola said

That a charity was behaving is a dodgy way is wrong and makes me cross. That the charity was given £30 million pounds of public funding (taxes) makes me furious.

How many more KC type "charities" are there??

Caviar and somked salmon for her emplyees and vouchers for dining out at the Ritz.. And Iceland''s basics for everyone else. I agree. She's nuts.

Mental health is a theme for CB, and she uses it to shock people out of questioning what she does.

That's what I was trying to say on page 2 werksallhourz, but you were much more succinct I totally agree with you. All of these doom laden statements she makes about her work and her clients gets thrown around by her so lightly. I don't believe her either.

Just quoting from the OSCA link on page 6 but I thought this was very pertinent and highlights what I find most frustrating about the whole story:

"Moral authority, however glitzy its celebrity endorsement, should not substitute for democratic accountability, and no charity, however morally authoritative, should be exempt from scrutiny. Nor, by extension, should a charity be able to bypass scrutiny and fair competition in its receipt of public funds by staking its claims through the media."

The figures are just daft.

As an interesting comparison, look at the demographic data of KC's main London borough: Southwark.

Ten to nineteen-year-olds comprise ten percent of the Southwark population, so there are about 29,000 of them.

Baring in mind that Southwark includes Surrey Quays, College, East Dulwich, Village, Cathedrals, Riverside, Chaucer, Grange and Rotherhithe ie. some of the most expensive real estate south of the river and includes a number of famous public schools, I think you could assume that not all those 29,000 kids are living in poverty.

Yet, KC claims that their reach across all their branches (London, Bristol and otherwise) is 7000 more than the entire teen and tween population of Southwark, one of the most densely populated areas of London.

For KC's figures to be true, they would have a reach significantly greater than the state secondary school system in Southwark, considering that tweens don't go to secondary school, a good few thousand Southwark kids will go private, and KC claims an extra seven thousand kids than exist in Southwark in that demographic.

Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Again, lets look at the average birth rate in Southwark: it is about 5200 a year. Intensively supporting 18,000 children across all branches would be the equivalent of intensively supporting every child born in Southwark for a year across a three and a half year time frame.

Yeah, right.

Then look at the money. If they have had £30 million of public funding over eight years, then they have had about 3.5 million of public funding a year. This is the equivalent of around 610 secondary school places a year.

The Harris Academy Peckham (state funded) has 794 pupils from 11-18.

KC has basically been paid from public money a year the same as it would cost, more or less, to run a smallish secondary school.

YABU to take facts printed in the Mail as gospel. Even if they purport to be from an interview with her. There are legions of Mail interviewees out there who deeply regret giving interviews because they have been so badly misrepresented.

And why do you talk about her paying private school fees for an employee's child when, even in the Mail version, it says that what she paid for was speech therapy for a child with SEN in a special school?

I can not name one individual or family who have been appropriately supported by KC. Not one.

So what, Finola? I can name several.

Totally agree OP. Seems like a total Mickey Mouse "charity".

"This is what happens when taxpayers' money is taken away from accountable local authorities etc. and given to rather less accountable charities "

No - This is what happens when government minsters and politicians over-ride all the usual criteria for selection and accountability and choose pet projects, and the media hype outstrips the nitty gritty and an organisation gets let through on its sainted status.

I work for a organisation that works with extremely marginalised and disadvantaged young people. We are monitored and checked and evaluated - and I can assure you that we work more efficiently, more cheaply, more effectively and with more scrutiny than public sector equivalents.

We always build external evaluation into the cost of our projects, and are glad to do so - we need to be sure that every pound is being used to make a difference - for the sake of the young people. the charitable donors, the tax payer and also for the sake of being able to share effective practice with similar organisations. We work alongside statutory provision, and bid against LA / public sector providers, and I can assure every taxpayer that charities like ours are far more effective in funding the 'sharp end', with less spent on overheads. And yet people always criticise charities for having overhead expenses.

One of my frustrations with the KC debacle (and we have previously chosen not to work with them because the paying of kids is directly against our ethical practice) is that many people will have thoughts along the same lines as those quoted above, we will be subjected to even more bureaucratic scrutiny, and people will be suspicious of the results of properly run projects.

And who will be the losers then?

And why do you talk about her paying private school fees for an employee's child when, even in the Mail version, it says that what she paid for was speech therapy for a child with SEN in a special school?

IIRC, KC paid for her chauffeur's daughter and son to attend private school. In true CB style, the special needs of the son sound rather exaggerated so that no one tries to question her further.

"they would have a reach significantly greater than the state secondary school system in Southwark"

Well, they would. Because the south London operations cover both Southwark and Lambeth. And take the (notorious) self-referrals from anywhere.

And the 'famous public schools' (by which I guess the 3 Dulwich ones) don't have a particularly local intake. So I don't think you can just knock their pupil figures off the total numbers.

I think having a potential reach of the entire secondary school system of Southwark is one thing, claiming to actually reach all those students is absurd. Not least because I refuse to believe that the entire teenage population of Southwark are in need of KC unless they're working on some very variable definitions of a vulnerable child.

KC aside - my Dad was born in Sudan and doesn't know his exact birth date - every so often the registrar would visit all of the villages and register all of the children who had been born since he last came (with the start of that month as their DOB) so he has New Years Day as his bday along with numerous other family members.

The problems with funding the chauffeur's children's fees as a 'charitable' exercise are:

1. Difficult to believe this wasn't impartial.
2. Kids Company is not publicised as an SN/school fees charity, it is publicised as a charity specifically set up to help deprived children.
3. government funding - sure plenty of parents would like help with speech therapy costs.

I think there are plenty of questionable charities and spokespeople around and personally I couldn't care less how CB dresses. I am concerned that they have received such significant governmental support and that their practices have been portrayed as the answer to so many social problems.

Difficult to believe this was impartial.

Just been doing some background reading and found an articles on MN by her from last year. Most posters talking about how wonderful she was and a couple saying hang on, I'm not so sure. One poster commented:

"I was shocked by CB-J's comments to the select committee but given she's done far more for troubled children than I ever have, and has oodles more experience, I'm not hugely in a position to criticise."

This is so telling and a major problem. Everybody can critisise someone, no matter how much they do for a charity or how much experience they have. This was the problem both in the case of JS and in the case of CB- people thought they did so much for charity it was wrong to critise them, or question them. No one is beyond questioning, enquiry and criticism. Not even Mother Teresa (sorry, I couldn't think of someone current and saintly).

" Not even Mother Teresa (sorry, I couldn't think of someone current and saintly)."
interestingly there WAS some hoo har about people in her shelters not having the best experience wasn't there?

Mother Teresa is far from criticism. See Hitchens' book about her...

Her position on birth control is/was hugely problematic, imho

Tbf she was a catholic Nun her view on contraception was to be expected

Father

No feedback on the review as my dissertation was a piece of primary research on health promotion interventions in schools and as such the literature review was a small element of the piece of work.
The other literature on emotional wellbeing interventions I reviewed were about TAMHS and SEAL - massive samples across England double blind randomised trials and generally they found it difficult to show that the interventions had made a significant difference in their quantitative (statistical) strands across all the various tests / measures they performed but had shown positive impacts within qualitative strands. There were lots of reasons / discussion around why that was the case and it showed that the measures being used were as important as the results they had.
Yet Place to Be showed a high success rate - the one test / measure they used showed that the emotional wellbeing of the children improved significantly in a very short space of time with very little intervention (when compared with the other bigger studies). Plus their test was one of their own devising / adaption... It was all very odd and stuck out like a sore thumb - I remember saying to the dog (she is a very good study buddy) - 'Oh like they weren't really paid to write that!'. I think I wrote one sentance calling into the question the impartiality of the author and then left it at that.

Yeah, but then going over to India and trying to convince women in poverty of it was hugely problematic. And, hello, condoms don't just prevent pregnancy.

Generally, this is what happens when ideology is allowed to trump facts, so it's a little hard to fathom why people are surprised it could happen.

The question that needs answering is whether she was just incompetent - because she was a "big picture" person who couldn't be bothered with the finer details of how the money was being spent and so on - or whether she was deliberately misusing funds (e.g. spending them on sending employees' children to private schools) and deliberately lying about how many children the charity was helping.

The stories coming out in the Mail are worrying and suggest the latter. While I'm not a fan of the Mail, they would have to run this kind of story past their lawyers before publishing. I don't think they're just making stuff up.