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.

The cynic in me says that if they're struggling to get corporate finders then there are issues because there's barely a corporate in London which doesn't have at risk children as a major funding priority.

God yes, this. With bells on.

CB sounded utterly unhinged on radio 4 this morning. Like she should be in a tin foil hat.

Thank you Mumsnet for some sanity and sensibility! As someone who works in the charity sector and who wasn't in the slightest bit surprised by this news (and frankly quite relieved that finally someone is doing something about the poor way KC is run) it's been galling to see people getting teary eyed or angry on social media about CB being asked to step down, all day. Train journey home and quick Mumsnet search and my faith in logic, research and not just falling for the hype is restored!!

The majority of the posts above are so spot on, her heart is in the right place and she is an amazing, convincing public speaker - but she really isn't CEO material for a charity that big. My guess is that without her at the helm the organisation will suffer significantly; she has not managed to break away from the 'founder syndrome' which many charities can suffer from. I don't think however that she will go far away and I am highly intrigued as to who's going to be brave enough to fill her shoes knowing she will be the power behind the throne...

I'm not sure I would go that far, Libraries, but she did not sound like someone who had a good grasp of the issues.

She was very patronising to the interviewer ("as I'm trying to explain to you" without actually explaining anything), batted away concerns ("red herrings"), several times referred to "children with severe mental health problems" (!) and finished by stating that "the ghettoes of Britain are full of traumatised children".

I have to say how disappointed I am by recent developments. CB has always been someone I've greatly admired so to see this side of her - and the larger issue of how the charity is managed - is saddening.

I think I must have listened to a completely different interview on Radio 4 Today's Prog - I didn't find her unhinged at all - she was defending the cause of vulnerable children passionately.

She answered the question about financial accountability by saying they had been audited for 19 years and and independent study by the LSE found the productivity and management to be good. And successive governments trusted her organisation enough to fund it.

And I don't think she was dismissing the contribution of fund-raising by cocktails and cream teas (or whatever it was) in a superior way; she was making the bigger point that the future of vulnerable children with mh issues shouldn't be determined by the availability of sporadic charity funding.

I don't claim to know where the truth in all of this lies but my sister runs a smaller charity and what she says chimes in so closely with what CB is saying that I find it hard to dismiss her assertions completely ie the fundamental problem is that you are always focusing so hard on where the next buck is coming from (and are so worried about survival and sustainability) that (a) you almost spend more time on that than on the end-users, (b) you and your staff get so worn down by the inability to plan or have confirmed projections, and by all of the unrealistic conditions that come attached to the funding, that they first become disillusioned, then leave.

Newspapers too have a vested interest in printing a good 'controversial' story and don't care who gets hurt in the process.

I don't think the assertion that the provision of mental health care for children and adolescents in the UK is pretty woeful is a particularly controversial one. The so-called 'care' system is in a similar state (despite many dedicated staff who do their very best in a system that is creaking/on its knees). I don't think it is beyond the realms of credibility that someone like CB who is prepared to stand up to the powers that be and repeatedly draw attention to these issues, would make herself unpopular, and of course the perfect way to discredit someone and their cause would be to accuse them of financial irregularities.

She may be a poor money manager- I've no idea - but I wouldn't be too quick to jump to conclusions on the basis of a couple of newspaper articles.

independent study by the LSE found the productivity and management to be good

I read the study by the LSE and was very disappointed: I would have expected more methodological rigour from the LSE. For example, the sample size was very small; there was little to no discussion of the biases inherent in this type of study; there was no analysis of the ages or ethnicity of those researched; there was no quantitive analysis of outcomes; blame for tension between the statutory sector and KC was largely placed on the former; there was little to no discussion of governance within KC; and, most importantly, there was no discussion or breakdown of how funding was used.

What the study did examine was the KC's approach to support, which was interesting, but did not provide me with a greater understanding of how KC's funds are spent or how it is managed.

"the ghettoes of Britain are full of traumatised children".

I'm afraid that anyone who talks about Britain's "ghettoes" is immediately in the realm of Ali G talking about the mean streets of Staines spilling over into the ghettoes of Egham.

I read the study by the LSE

Here's the first sentence of the "independent" audit's introduction, written by the principal investigator.

"I met Camila Batmanghelidjh in 2007 and was immediately struck by the beauty and profound truth of her simple message: children recover with unconditional and unre- lenting love."

Yes, that sounds independent.

She's on Newsnight now saying she hasn't stepped down. She's admitting there's no succession planning, and is going to be CEO for months to come.

Who was it who said upthread that she's the Sepp Blatter of SE11?

It wouldn't be the first time that a high-profile charity with a high-profile leader has come unstuck due to a mix of incompetence, megalomania and one or two unsupervised fingers in the till.
I'd always be inclined to be wary of any Good Cause with a single figurehead rather than a 'brand' IYSWIM. It takes a certain amount of arrogance to found a charity or activist group in the first place, so some of the people who do this sort of thing are bound to be invested in feeding their own egos as much if not more than helping the target group.

The comparison which keeps coming to my mind, and which may well be unfair, is Erin Pizzey.

I was going to say I had been unfair but I just watched news night and I am not sure I was.

I utterly agree that founders syndrome is at the root of the problem. In a charity you absolutely do spend most of your time wondering where the next buck is coming from and understanding that it's not realistic to rely on government funding. Her fundraising director should absolutely have been succession planning. The bottom line is that the charity has got too big for CB. She can't manage it effectively and she felt that the public image she had cultivated would carry her through and it won't. That's not to say she doesn't make some really valid points about children's services, she does, but she's not the person to tAke it forward.

Many charities have had to merge and downsize due to government funding - breast cancer care and breakthrough breast cancer have merged as an example, children's centres have been merged, Homestart is under serious threat, why should her charity be protected!

And people wonder why charities need to spend money on admin...

It is bizarre. I worked for a major charity until fairly recently and people talked about how much money they had despite their pleas for cash all the time in fairly dark tones. People were quite cynical about CB but none the less impressed with what she had acheived.
But her attitude is bizarre. The charity i worked for had an income many times that of KC but every penny had to be accounted for. We had huge research departments that looked exclusively at impact of our work in order to justify ourselves to individual donors, never mind government.
Yes it was an expensive and complex pain in the bum to do this, but it is just how it works!
Sneering at minor donors really is not on for a charity, no matter its size.

As far as I can see it's more a matter of the charity's accounting practices rather than Govt. cuts being the driver here.

buttonmoonboots I am party of my companies CSR committe and we do a lot of fundraising for KC, pm me your charity info and I'm sure we can do something for your orgainisation too...

Kids company Did good PR masks deeper failings?

Can someone try to get that link to a telegraph a photo society article? It comes up on Google but then isn't there

I'd always be inclined to be wary of any Good Cause with a single figurehead r

Very true. A good founder is one who knows when to say "this needs to be more than me" and plans an exit so that their vision and values live on in an independent charity with an independent, challenging board and a CEO with the experience to manage a larger organisation- GBP20mill is a fairly big charity. Then there are the other kind.

I was also disappointed by the evaluations on the website- seems like they found sympathetic parties to do a few interviews with staff and say how great they are. I suspect one of the issues is that they don't track service users after they stop coming, which is semi-understandable, so they don't know what their outcomes are, but other charities do find ways.Good evaluation costs money (you usually need to pay for an independent controlled study) but typically pays off in terms of attracting new long term sources of funding.

I also think KC has managed this badly. By screaming "we've lost our government funding" from the rooftops, she's put herself on red alert with every existing and potential corporate and foundation funder. She would have been much better to downplay it in a gracious fashion, pointing out that they never had ongoing government funding (commissioned services/ subvention) as far as I can see. It was a few years of one off grants.

I'm a little bit astounded at the naivety of some posters. Yes, there are plenty of children with severe mental health issues. These can stem from, among other things, growing up in poverty, fleeing war or domestic violence, parental drug abuse or mental health issues. Fact: thanks to government policy (including this week rescinding the child poverty act) a lot of these children will be struggling with money. Some won't: some will be from wealthier families and will be better served by interventions like art therapy etc, all of which kids company offers. However many children's most pressing issue is hunger, clothes that don't fit, having nothing to do, not getting a birthday present. Not having a facebook aged 16 because you don't have the internet or a computer. Having to do your homework at school for the same reason. These are very small short term problems that are, nonetheless, urgent, allowing no space for healing. I pity a therapist working with a hungry, tired, ill child, and can only imagine how difficult that child's life must be.

It's very easy to scoff and be smug about small-scale interventions from a warm, clean, dry, quiet home, with a full stomach and the weekend to look forward to. The reality is, if I'd put my hand in my pocket to give a tenner to everybody I have met this week who would have had a problem solved with that money, I'd have nothing left. I very much doubt that children were being given envelopes containing money willy-nilly, and it's not a huge deductive leap to wonder if, perhaps, mum's benefits had been stopped (Friday afternoon common payment time) and there was nothing in the cupboards for the weekend? Or if say a 17 year old had to move out due to the euphemistic "family problems" - hard to get benefits as a 17 year old, £20 might make a difference between their going to college that week or something far worse going on. FYI if a 17 year old leaves college for any reason, their parent gets NOTHING FOR THEM, no child benefit etc once they're out of education. Lots of troubled young people who don't quite have the life skills yet to manage college. Very easy for a volunteer to then look at that and tut because it doesn't fit their mental image of how things are done. Have seen it before. Several charities actually give discretionary pensions to older people on low incomes - often already getting £200+ a week from benefits AFTER you take housing costs into account. Is that all right because they're old, and therefore more deserving? Or is it just that their donors are ok with it?

Re the email comment on donors mental health, quoted in the spectator. Journo behind that article fails to mention that this was a snippet of a section concerning the on going debate between donor, kc and her family about whether she had mental capacity to donate or not. Not an offhand remark in that context.

Will say they are not just handing out money left right and centre. Just impossible. Their accounts will have been through 3 lots of auditing (internal, accountancy, charity commission), then submitted for annual review to funders and government would have serious egg on their face if it were found to be misused after they've spent X years approving it. Very easy for government or press to talk about envelopes full of money and Xboxes as if that were a prevailing culture, for some media attention. Bit like when the Philpott case resulted in that revolting benefit Britain headline. Would imagine the facts include separate charitable / social services / young carers grant applications for reconditioned Xbox for a family who desperately need something at Christmas as relief from grinding poverty, illness or disability and haven't got 2 pence to rub together. Nobody is going to go out and spend £200 of therapeutic money on that sort of thing when there are children turning up needing food, clothes, shoes.

Finally finally. Very common for local on the ground charities to give small amounts of money. Decisions made by staff well versed in clients situation. All in dire need. Judge away, this is why we have charities in the first place.

Anyone who believes these claims is a gullible fool:

“Kids Company has been evaluated 15 times since 2000.

All of these evaluations have found that Kids Company’s interventions have success rates of between 80% and 100%.”

“96% of clients aged under 16 were helped to either return to education, or sustain themselves through our additional support.”

Absolutely fucking ridiculous.

And Mrs. Woolard is no fool:

www.mirror.co.uk/money/city-news/barclays-changes-its-policies-after-widow-907514

www.spaldingtoday.co.uk/news/latest-news/plucky-oap-nominated-for-oldie-award-1-5775279

LSE study here: eprints.lse.ac.uk/52856/1/Jovchelovitch_Kids_Company_Diagnosis_2013.pdf

it cites a report by 'Gaskell', claiming 97% effectiveness for Kids Company, among a number of other eye-catching statistics. Gaskell, it transpires, now works at Kids Company.

A report cited to Wainwright and Hillman about dramatic reductions in gang involvement - Wainwright was working for Kids Company, and Hillman still is.

There doesn't appear to be anything resembling an independent review of their effectiveness.

She did not sound at all unhinged to me and it sounds a bit misogynistic to dismiss a high profile, charismatic woman as unhinged.

But she dismissed her own critic as unhinged

Open secret amongst London based fundraisers that KC is badly run and that it's very ego driven (founder syndrome).

It's a shame though that a lot of what CB says about kids being abandoned and is true, and now will be tarred with the brush of her failures. There was something about the child centred approach that was on to something I think, just was executed very badly and far too indulgently.

misogynistic?