Fine talk, big staff, but where are the children, Lady Bountiful?
Six weeks ago I visited Kids Company, the charity for deprived children, now at the centre of a funding row. I wanted to look into some of the problems faced by Camila Batmanghelidjh, the luxuriant Lady Bountiful who founded this beacon of altruism.
These included the strange case of Joan Woolard, a furious 77-year-old donor who thought the whole thing stank.
Woolard, a widow from Lincolnshire, complained that she had sold her house to donate £200,000 to the charity, only to become concerned a year later that neither Batmanghelidjh nor anyone else could tell her how this huge amount had been spent.
A visit she made to Kids Company’s drop-in centre in Brixton, south London, had only complicated matters, leading to a furious showdown with Batmanghelidjh.
There didn’t seem to be many children, Woolard said. She couldn’t work out how the charity claimed it “reached” 36,000 disadvantaged kids when the site she saw in Brixton had room for about 60. Some of the staff didn’t always bother to turn up for work.
Batmanghelidjh dismissed her claims, but Woolard wanted her money back.
Woolard’s outburst was the first real sign of trouble at Kids Company, a once untouchable charity supported by many gushing celebrities. Batmanghelidjh’s combination of books, clothes, meals and love for children who had simply “stopped being able to feel” was the ultimate linctus for middle-class guilt. JK Rowling, Richard Branson and even Samantha Cameron supported it. Coldplay donated millions.
Last week, ministers decided to withdraw government funding unless Batmanghelidjh stepped down. Officials had investigated the charity, which receives about £4m of taxpayers’ money a year, and raised concerns about its financial management.
Batmanghelidjh responded explosively, blaming politicians and “ugly games”. She was reported to have agreed to go, but she told me on Friday she was refusing to leave.
“I’m not going to step down because the government tells me. I’m not stepping down until I’m ready.” Ministers telling a charity chief to leave was “unprecedented”, she said; the only way to get rid of her was “to sack me” — David Cameron would have to come and drag her out. She added defiantly: “I would argue that I’m a bloody good manager.”
Batmanghelidjh believes Kids Company, which employs 650 staff, cannot survive without her. It is true she has managed to charm vast sums out of celebrities and socialites for years (she said she must raise £2m a month). Yet after hours touring the various Kids Company sites, I began to wonder whether the charity could survive with her. There were so many odd practices, unanswered questions, strange claims and counterclaims.
Its headquarters, then near Blackfriars Bridge, seemed to be physically and mentally falling apart when I visited. The company was in the middle of moving out, its office murals, big childish paintings, seemed tired and sad. The hundreds of employees largely ignored the decay, gliding around the building as if it were still a shining utopia.
I was greeted by a pair of soporific psychotherapists; the charity employs nearly 130 in its enormous therapy programme. One of them, who looked like Andy Pandy, skimmed through the building explaining how the therapy programme extends to massage, reflexology and hypnotism.
I had no idea hypnotising abused children was such a good idea, but according to Batmanghelidjh, it “gets kids off drugs”. Ditto massages, which are offered in a cubicle at Brixton. They are not given “willy-nilly”. The children are fully “supervised” and the door isn’t locked.
One of the problems with the company, Batmanghelidjh told me when I visited her, is that “it’s casual, colourful” and spontaneous: “The rigour of the structures don’t come out.” This means that people “often assume that it’s some woman in a shoe, you know, with all her kids”.
To me, though, she is indeed the woman in the nursery rhyme shoe. We met in her lair, a bizarre grotto filled with flowers, trinkets and love notes (“wishes”). Even her yellow Crocs had decorations. At the centre of the room there was a tree trunk alongside a park bench. Batmanghelidjh seemed like a piece of furniture herself: vast and slow-moving, covered in bright material like an explosion in a Nigerian sofa factory.
She has often spoken about her strange childhood in Iran and her health problems, how she was born two months prematurely with an endocrine disorder as well as dyslexia.
The “Fat Beggar” ( her words for herself) says she can barely read or, crucially, do figures despite being sent to boarding school in Dorset at the age of 11. She is brilliant at speaking, and charming, but any finer details seem to elude her. She has never read a novel, can’t drive, can’t even open an ironing board. She has three PAs.
While painfully aware she can’t do a lot of things, she was desperate to convince me when we met that the charity was robust. She did this by trying to discredit Woolard, showing me two abusive emails, written in a large font and block capitals, that she received after they fell out. One of them called her a “cunning fat stunt” who ran “a lucrative scam”. Later I emailed Woolard to find out if they had come from her email address. She replied that she would not speak to me unless I revealed how I got her address.
Batmanghelidjh’s intentions are good, I concluded. She genuinely cares for the children and Kids Company has had some amazing success stories. But she is also completely chaotic. The whole place felt like some hippie-dippy version of Google run according to Batmanghelidjh’s narcissistic fantasies.
I repeatedly tried to extract simple facts from her, such as how many meals are delivered at the charity’s main site (it claims 3,000 per week), but faced a waffle of baffling categorisations and explanations. Did they really serve 3,000kg of turkey at Christmas? Who carried it? Why does so much of the budget (73%) go on staff? Indeed, why are there so many staff? And why the focus on therapy even for these many employees?
Staff have weekly “supervisions”, which are described as part of a duty of care to people working with troubled children. This struck me as odd, something organisations like the Church of Scientology would do. But therapy is the heart of Kids Company. At one point Batmanghelidjh was having therapy “four or five days” a week.
She told me she believed in a special order, a kind of “pinnacle of mathematics and aesthetics”. The inspiration for this kind of thinking seems to have been her father, Fereydoon Batmanghelidjh, another striking figure, who owned a sports centre in Iran “with ice skating rinks and swimming pools and shooting ranges”.
He was a rich doctor, imprisoned during the 1979 revolution, who developed ideas about the medicinal benefits of water, eventually believing it could cure people of any disease, even cancer. According to Batmanghelidjh, he “did very rigorous academic work on it” in prison. Pharmaceutical companies “wouldn’t do the clinical trials” so he carried out tests on his fellow inmates himself.
Batmanghelidjh herself has been devising cures based on therapy. Someone told me about 100 children have been tested in order to prove — and I’m simplifying here — that hugs can reverse the effects of abuse on the human brain, which is similar to post-traumatic stress disorder.
One of the nurses showed me the room where they carried out the experiments. No one, however, allowed me to have a copy of the academic report Batmanghelidjh said she was producing.
I was told to speak to yet another psychotherapist, on top of the tens of case workers, volunteers, therapists and knife-crime gurus to whom I had already spoken (including a headmaster at a school with Kids Company connections who initially dismissed the therapies as “bollocks” before quickly correcting himself: “No, it’s great”).
Batmanghelidjh’s fixation on therapy may be one drain on resources. Looking around, I could see another: the staff. Vast numbers of twentysomethings swanned around, eating food from the children’s canteen and socialising.
“It’s not lavish down there,” said Harriet Harman, the acting Labour party leader and local MP, who came to the defence of Batmanghelidjh on Friday. “It’s not like spa treatments.”
I disagree. It is quite lavish — the staff quarters bristle with laptops and gadgets — and there are spa treatments, manicures, massages and facials. I saw a whole therapy wing packed with staff, but very few children were in evidence.
During my nine hours, spread over two days, at Kids Company, I met about 75 staff but only two children. Quite a few turned up for dinner at the main site later, but nowhere near the 150 required to meet the claim of 3,000 hot meals served per week.
Batmanghelidjh said they could accommodate up to 300 but a manager told me they were only allowed to let in 100 because of health and safety. So how many children do they actually feed?
Dinner was a strange event, with staff looming over the few children. One table of six children had nearly as many helpers. Staff seemed keen to pathologise the children’s behaviour. A therapist told me the way a four-year-old waved his cutlery suggested he was disturbed. Getting children to “disclose” (ie, break down) in therapy sessions is a key part of the work.
This site was probably a bit more organised than a few years ago, when a writer reported seeing children receive envelopes of cash “ranging from £50 a week to £200”. A former worker recalled “tears”, “fights” and “shouting” when the money was handed out.
Batmanghelidjh argues that “people are living in environments where they have to maybe pay for an electricity meter, buy a pair of shoes”. She might give large sums “for university stuff. There are 300 people who receive that sort of support.” To her, this is like middle-class children getting pocket money.
I found Batmanghelidjh deeply charming and persuasive. She is so winning, in fact, it is easy to miss the vast discrepancies in many of the things she says. I don’t even think she’s lying — it’s just that none of it is joined up.
One thing that is clear, though: she has spent a lot of time in rough situations and won’t leave without a fight. “I didn’t survive in the ghetto because I was a soft touch,” she said. “People confuse kindness with weakness.”
@camillalong
Dear David letter
Tim Loughton, the former children’s minister, had refused a grant of more than £3m to Kids Company but was then overruled by the prime minister.
The MP said he officially advised against another multimillion-pound grant but had been overruled by Downing Street after the charity’s head, Camila Batmanghelidjh, wrote to David Cameron.
Loughton, the children and families minister from 2010-12, said: “When I was minister I had serious concerns about the way this money was being used and was not subject to the usual scrutiny processes and therefore advised the government to stop the grant, only to be overruled by No 10 because she [Batmanghelidjh] wrote a ‘Dear David’ letter.”
Loughton said he was personally lobbied by Alan Yentob, chairman of the trustees and a BBC executive, to continue government funding.