Government cuts hit Kids Company and Camila Batmanghelidjh is stepping down

[4kidsandaunicorn]

Here

Does anyone know anymore about this? I've only read the one article.

No but it does sound as though being good at therapy doesn't mean you are good at accountancy.

Kids Company is amazing. If I lived in London i'd have volunteered there years ago. What Camilla Batmangellidh has done is give abused and neglected children and young adults a voice, food, shelter, therapy, the things that other children experience such as a Christmas dinner and presents, birthday parties and days out. Kids Company is like a big lovely family who will never give up on the children it helps.

Am truly ashamed of a government who won't invest in this. I would like to start a change.org petition.

Most of all though Kids Company gives kids dignity and respect. Forgot to put that and they are probably the most important things.

Currently she is being asked to stand down, this has not happened yet. There are concerns around financial irregularities.

But with the large amounts of money they are getting especially from the government they need financial accountability.

The government has given money, if you read all the links the concerns are it's not b being spent wisely.

There have been questions about Kids Company's accounting for some time. Helping deprived children is best done if you run your charity efficiently. The doubts about how Kids Company have used their funding means they're now going to see a drop in donations - which is awful for the children. Camilla could have avoided this scandal and kept her charity's reputation if she'd given more attention to management and accountancy and less time to self publicity.

Just googled and apparently she has been asked to step down or the government will withdraw funding as they are questioning her ability to manage the charity adequately financially. So it looks as if they aren't stopping the £3m annual support but making it conditional on her stepping down into a more presidential role.

interesting article

Cait thanks for that link.

"Batmanghelidjh warned that without a regular source of state funding, Kids Company would be reliant on fundraising: “We are doing the most serious work [funded] by cupcake sales and cocktail parties, and I don’t think that is right or sustainable.”"

This will actually put them on a par with other examples of "the most serious work" such as the RNLI.

She has huge advantages, arising from her public profile, in terms of ability to generate funds.

But you know, all the money that I raise, or out schools raise, from our cakes sales goes to good causes. I've really taken against that comment that it's not good enough for a 'serious' charity.

And I hope the children in any school that have ever find raised to help other children via Kids Company don't see how dismissively its leader thinks of them.

Yes AuntieStella. These comments tell me that the Trustees should have got in a CEO years ago to allow CB to focus on what she does really well.

There is a lack of respect for her supporters that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

If the majority of your funding comes from the government, you're not a charity, you're an agency (quango, arms-length authority, whatever). Rather like the NSPCC, no matter how good the work KC does, by straddling the third and the public sector they avoid a lot of the constraints of the former and lot of the governance of the latter, and can spend central government money a lot more freely than the government itself can. They're not subject to Freedom of Information, even though they are in large part doing the work of the state funded by the state. Their ever-present cry that social services aren't doing enough would be easily answered by taking the money they're getting and giving it to social services.

Batmanghelidjh is a high-profile example of a common issue with charities: that what starts out as the laudable work of an individual funded by cake sales and small donations rapidly becomes a larger, more complex organisation. The skills to start a charity, and campaign on the charity's issues, are not the skills required to run a large organisation, but the founder is usually reluctant to let go. Government funding the follows and with it a certain amount of oversight, but by that stage the organisation has become something of a cult of personality; it's the difference between genuinely large organisations with appropriate governance and audit and small organisations that got large whilst remaining, at heart, small.

Someone up thread has referenced the (contested, and rather thing) Speccie article, and it in turn links to various things by disgruntled former employees. The comments make interesting reading, too. You need to bear in mind that disgruntled former employees often have it in for perfectly decent organisations, but on the other hand it was disgruntled former employees that were shouting for years about the News of the World and about Lance Armstrong: just because someone has a motive to lie doesn't make them a liar.

My gut feel is that CB is a decent woman with a rather large ego who has surrounded herself with something of a claque and has played government hard to the point that they're now asking awkward questions about governance, and the KC is a decent charity that does good work but probably also has some stuff going on that could be better run. They're getting a lot of government money, their governance is obstructing running it properly, and CB should get on with what she does well - appearing on TV and campaigning for people who have no voice - and do rather less of being a chief executive, for which she is unqualified and doesn't appear very good at (real CEOs don't appear on Today at 10 to 8 making wild accusations about government conspiracies to silence them coming all the way from Number 10, for example, because it makes them sound unhinged).

*This will actually put them on a par with other examples of "the most serious work" such as the RNLI.
*

My gut feel is that CB is a decent woman with a rather large ego

Absolutely. Ridiculous failure by the trustees to let the situation get to this stage - one report I read said that young children queued up to receive handouts of cash of up to £200 per week. When we talk about "government funding" we actually mean taxpayers' money and it's the duty of government to make sure that money is accounted for. Good intentions don't over-ride everything else.

Thanks, all.

The comments on this thread have been enlightening and the link very informative. I now have a different take on KC and what the issues are.

This will actually put them on a par with other examples of "the most serious work" such as the RNLI.

Actually, the RNLI's main funding stream is legacies in people's wills (something like two thirds of their income, as I recall). They can survive like that because they have been in existence for long enough that, bluntly, their supporters have been dying for generations. The same applies to the National Trust, the Scout and Guide Associations and other "traditional" charities for which membership is virtually an admission ticket to the Waitrose carpark.

It's not a viable way to fund a new charity for the simple reason that the lead time to getting the money is too long.

I used to attend Kids Co in the early 2000's (when it was in its original location se17) and have seen first hand the behaviour of both staff and children.

Whilst I can't deny that it does help some disadvantaged children, alot of these 'children' were infact late teens who would threaten staff and kick off smashing things etc if they didn't get their own way.
Staff in the office would regularly have to lock themselves into the office because they were threatened.

Treats to these 'children' included trainers, tracksuits, phones, cash and even mopeds!

CB used to arrive in black taxis at £50+ a pop until she got her own driver.

Then there was the taxi account that was promptly shut down after everyone was using it to get home.

I'm not surprised in the slightest that the accounts are being questioned.

It's a sham that rewards violent arseholes instead of helping children that truly need it.

If I heard the report of the statement correctly, she's carrying on, just without the accounting responsibilities.

It is totally possible for a charity doing 'serious' work to have both a known figurehead/founder (IYSWIM) and professional standard management. such as the role of Chad Varah, and how it changed as The Samaritans grew.

I know that RNLI isn't an exact point of contact; after all, they run expensive services at so many locations, and is a much more complex organisation to run. But they just get on with fund-raising to cover the shortfall from endowments (returns have been down with interest rates so low) and any grants.

I'm struggling to think of any other charity that has publicly said it does not value those who sell cupcakes,or have sponsored walks, or coffee mornings or whatever.

Kid's Company's approach has always been to run themselves into the ground then demand a bail out from No 10.

They appear to be claiming that the work they do is so self-evidently excellent that they shouldn't be subject to the oversight and audit that normally accompany government money. Even were their work perfect in every regard, their accounting transparent, their overheads minimal and their evaluation both independent and laudatory, there is still the question of whether they can spend £5m more effectively than some other organisation, given that in the end the pot has a fixed size.

Her appearance on Today this morning was completely unhinged. If she's like that on national radio with a skilled interviewer, God alone knows what she's like in a meeting which she is chairing.

According to that Spectator article (which a couple of the comments have questioned the bias of btw) it's only 15% of the funding which comes from the government.

Whilst I agree that charities should be accountable and donations both public and private should be spent wisely, I wonder how much gets spent on the bureaucracy in Whitehall deciding if they should donate to kids co or not!

I remember reading something about KC years ago which suggested many of the older teens were attending fully tooled up with knives etc., and CB was not asking them to even leave the knives at the door, so many younger children stopped going because they were too frightened. It made me a little about CB then.