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.

You seem to be posting at cross purposes solitude and not really understanding my post.

Journalists, pop stars and politicians are attracted to causes where they feel privy to insider knowledge and close to 'real' people.

Part of Kid's Company and CB's brand is 'telling it like it is' and ignoring fusty bureaucracy that gets in the way of action.

This has little to do with how they are perceived by people actually working in the sector, but is very much part of what they are selling.

75% of charity funding going for staff pay is not a feasible way to run a charity!!

That depends on what the charity has been set up to do. Plenty of charities have high staff costs, as has been discussed earlier.

If you haven't seen W1A, thi is the kind of branding I am talking about:

www.standard.co.uk/stayingin/tvfilm/w1a-the-funniest-moments-from-ian-fletcher-and-siobhan-sharpe-10199608.html

what happened at A4E ? *derailing

Journalists, pop stars and politicians are attracted to causes where they feel privy to insider knowledge and close to 'real' people. Part of Kid's Company and CB's brand is 'telling it like it is' and ignoring fusty bureaucracy that gets in the way of action.

As a journalist who covers celebrity and human interest rather than the issues to do with social work I'd say you were dead right.

I could take a different approach, but that's not what my employers' are looking for.

Fujimotos - from Wikipedia:

A graduate engineer (BEng) of the University of Bradford, Harrison founded A4e in 1991. The company now employs 4000 staff across 250 centres worldwide. It is a principal supplier and prime contractor to governments of services such as the Flexible New Deal, Legal Aid Helpline, Social care, Education for Offenders, Business Enterprise and Youth Vocational centres.

She was appointed as a voluntary troubled families 'Family Champion' by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010, despite civil servants recommending propriety and ethics checks on her. In this role she established the Working Families Everywhere campaign. Harrison resigned from the post on 23 February 2012, following allegations of fraud at A4e and controversy over her £8.6m personal dividend payment. On 29 February 2012, David Cameron announced he had launched an inquiry into her appointment, saying he had not been aware of fraud allegations at A4e when he appointed her.

In February 2012, it was revealed that Harrison was paid an £8.6 million dividend on her shares in 2011, in addition to her £365,000 annual salary. The company's chief executive Andrew Dutton stated that Harrison's dividend payment reflected her personal risk as a shareholder. MP Stephen Barclay said the payment's size was of concern with regard to the DWP receiving value for money. He questioned the justification of paying management fees not linked to performance, adding that "It’s not A4e's fault if they get paid for poor delivery." The payment was criticised by former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and current Chair of the Public Accounts Committee Margaret Hodge as "ripping off the State".

On 25 February it emerged that in addition to her £365,000 annual salary and £8.6m shares dividend, A4e also paid Harrison and her partner around £1.7m over two years for leasing properties, including their 20-bedroom stately home, to her own firm.

On 24 February 2012, Harrison announced her resignation as Chairman of A4e, stating, "I do not want the continuing media focus on me to be any distraction for A4e..." In March 2015 six former employees were jailed for forging files in a scam that cost the taxpayer almost £300,000. Another four ex-members of staff received suspended prison sentences for what Judge Angela Morris said were ‘deceitful and unscrupulous’ practices. They had falsified employer details, time sheets and jobseeker signatures to inflate the numbers they said they had helped into work.

Journalists, pop stars and politicians are attracted to causes where they feel privy to insider knowledge and close to 'real' people.

It's not just charity. As a random example, if you blag a ticket to an F1 event where you're in with one of the big sponsors, they make a big deal about some performing seal engineer or driver coming into the alcohol-drenched tent to tell you about the session you've just seen. They give you a load of stuff about front end stiffness, clutch bite points, slip angles, weight distribution, roll centres, torque maps, tyre wear rates and the problems of oversteer in the mid-corner phase when using the intermediate tyre on a drying track. Almost no-one understands it especially given how much most of them have had to drink and without massive background in the design of the car and additional data that they're never going to show you anyway, it's close to meaningless. But the drunken audience nod and lap it up, because suddenly they aren't a marketing "executive" from Slough with a drink problem, they're an insider in the Williams' pit strategy, making split second decisions like whether to have another gin before throwing up.

Genuine exchange from a tour of the Williams collection of cars, some years ago:

Bloke: The brakes, they seem quite big...?

Engineer: Well, they all convert kinetic energy into heat via friction, obviously.

Bloke:

I presume that's how large charities get away with it, but with the added exoticism of poor people (or should that be Poor People) who can be wheeled into the meeting to tell their sad story and be patronised royally (in every sense) by their benefactors.

Well look how the general public get suckered into comic relief with all the celebs doing their daily mail sad faces whilst highlighting a particularly sad situation.

The amount some celebs charge for turning up at charity fundraisers can be quite outrageous too. Fine if they are providing a service but not so much when it is just to be seen

merrymouse and gemauve you are so right.

We have sat many times in management meetings wishing we could get a good celebrity to endorse us but whilst hospices are v well thought of, they just aren't v Zeitgeisty.

Children's hospices on the other hand are a different story - everybody loves a cute sick child which is no doubt why Kate Middleton went for them as her first charity. It's like charity endorsement for beginners. I suddenly had respect for Princess Diana for picking homelessness, AIDS (in the era when being gay was not OK and people thought you could catch AIDS from public transport) and landmines.

Kundry - at risk of derailing thread further but as hospices have been mentioned, I was surprised to note that Helen House in Oxfordshire has been in the news because its charismatic founder, Sister Francesca, has been asked to distance herself from the organisation (it would appear on account of historic information relating to sexual abuse, which she strongly denies). I always thought HH was an example where a difficult to sell cause had been given a lot of exposure (there was TV programme plus lot of media coverage of its services) and all seemed pretty good. Just wondering if all these very driven people are just somehow unable to keep within the confines....

As somebody said up thread there must be a certain amount of narcissism about somebody to start up their own charity. And sometimes the narcissism outweighs the charity.

Hah, Kundry, Di had her drawbacks. Not least handling the meeja frenzy when she popped her clogs. Most bizarre week of my life - myth-making in action.

Both Cicely Saunders (founder of St Christopher's Hospice and so essentially modern palliative care) and Lady Sue Ryder (founder of Sue Ryder, second largest hospice provider in the UK) were removed from the management of the charities they founded against their will having been inspirational leaders but unable to face up to managing a large organisation.

I suspect you could find similar in many charitable sectors. Mother Theresa is another. Wish I could think of some male ones ignores Jimmy Saville as too awful

An awful lot of these 'tell it like it is' or 'maverick' people are just shit at what they are supposed to do, and their 'radical' strategy is either woo-bollocks or has been tried by other groups in the past and been proven not to work.

CB is basically the Russell Fucking Brand of charity, isn't she? Famous friends, lots of media sycophancy and the same old clueless hippy crap about rejecting 'rules' despite the fact that it's been shown time and time again that without some kind of structure and some kind of rules, it all goes horribly wrong.

Oh Di had major drawbacks, I totally disliked her when she was alive and was mystified why we all thought she was a saint when she died as the papers had hated her just the day before. But her photoshoot in the minefield was genius and I'm sure she knew it as she made an important but previously v niche and not at all visual topic mainstream news. She paved the way for Angelina picking up wartime sexual violence.

Narcissism can be a serious force for good but it's a tricky one.

It's in that crossover zone between charity and superstition where the worst goes on (Mother Theresa was another ego-tripping toxic assclown). But a lot of stupid people are still impressed by woo elements and stuff that 'can't be measured by your dull scientific boring rules'. So you get these religious revival cults with some big old noisy attention-seeker in charge, and sooner or later (particularly if it's a bloke) it all comes out that he had one hand in the till and the other in most of the parishioners' knickers.

There is a certain campaigner against domestic abuse who has also been sounding alarm bells for the past two and a half years.

Mother Theresa was another ego-tripping toxic assclown).

Post of the day, nay, YEAR

At the risk of saying: 'Some of my best friends are gay' one of my close
friends who was gay and died from an AIDs-related illness a few years ago loved Princess Di for literally embracing people with HIV when no-one would touch them.

He knew her though his job, which was in a senior role promoting theatre in London in a very pragmatic way. He was hard-headed when he needed to be, so I trust his judgment there.

But yes, she was bonkers. I was shocked when around the time of her separation/divorce in about 1992/3 she jettisoned scores of charities and portrayed it as part of the necessary shedding of her skin to emerge as a stronger person.

She'd collected them like stamps and then just dumped them. Maybe that's what she needed to do but they were left floundering with no patron through no fault of their own.

It was incredibly selfish.

I also remember reading a 5,000-word hatchet job on her in the Sunday Times which unfortunately was published a few hours after her death.

I agreed with every word but wondered how many death threats the author got.

It was 1997 so before Twitter. Can you imagine it now? He'd probably have to go into witness protection.

Princess Di's death eclipsed Mother Teresa's SGB

And Gianni Versace's also in the same short space of time.

I had a grim satisfaction about that.

Its not about 'not having rules'. Its about looking after those who are outside of the structure/system

But it's about what is best practice in supporting people who are outside the structure/system - and actually I'd say that with young people, in particular, it's not just about 'looking after' them, it's about making it possible for them to look after themselves, and indeed see a future - there are plenty of young people in this neck of the woods (I live in SE London too) who do not see any future for themselves at all beyond gang activity, which is notoriously short-lived.

Just saying 'well, because CB was doing it means it must have been the right thing to do' is circular.

And there are, in fact, quite a lot of other charities doing similar work in a less 'look at me, aren't I matey with the great and the posh, oops now everyone is picking on me because I dare speak truth to power' way.