Can we talk about Camilla Batmanghedjh?

[HarveySpectre]

Everywhere I look, she is getting totally crucified. Including on MN chat.
I don't get it. Even if she has been bad at financial accounts, she has still done amazing work for kids, for the last 19 years.

People are saying the money could have been 'better spent'. What the fuck do they know about what those kids need??

People are calling for measurable benefits I.e. Improved exam results, employment, reduction in offending/criminal activity. You cant link those things to whether a child should be fed! There is no 'measure of improvement' to providing basic need

To my mind KC thought outside the box and catered for those that absolutely needed help the most. You cant always do that effectively, by conventional methods

I read that as 36,000 supported (all support)

3000 meals per week, so if a child is coming in say 5 days a week, that's 600 children daily and for 510 of them, it is their main meal.

If it's every day, then it's about 430 children with it being main meal for 365.

I read that as 36,000 supported (all support)

Yes, meaning all support, not just provision of meals and including possibly advice provided to teachers.

She's being criticised because the charity hasn't done quite so much "amazing work" for anywhere near as many kids as the pubic and donors have been lead to believe. Good article from Camila Long in yesterday's Times. She didn't set much store by the info from the lady who sold her house, but did find the charity's claims to be lacking/exaggerated

I once had the misfortune of working for CB's bank. If she's charismatic, she obviously didn't feel the need to show it for the little people. Quite vile on a regular basis.

"You want charities to be more regulated by the government? That's a terrible idea"

I want the Government to make sure that all organisations working with vulnerable people are properly regulated, and the regulations are appropriate.

How else do you think we are going to avoid further instances of abuse and protect vulnerable people?

It is a child protection issue. There still seems to be immense fuzziness about who is responsible for children if their parents aren't capable of being responsible for them. It really is not reasonable to expect children to fend for themselves.

Buffy, there are already systems in place to deal with that. It is quantified through client engagement, and evidenced through worker recording. Local Council Supporting People teams fund support based on number of times client has engaged to facilitate exactly that kind of client, one who needs to build up trust and be supported in basic tasks like rent payments and food buying before they can do those things independently. The Supporting People team pays agencies to visit a set number of times a month over a set number of months or years, depending on the level of need of the client. The target is client engagement.

It isn't a million dollar question. It is just a question with multiple different specific answers to deal with the different specific problems that have arisen in different areas of client support.

The loop holes around residential drug treatment services can be closed by following the expertise of mainstream drug treatment services.

The lack of support for girls in the Youth Service can be dealt with by better training and selection of workers and following best practice from organisations that have demonstrated client engagement with girls.

Local provision that cannot meet the equality act can be replaced by charities franchising - allowing local workers to deal with local needs while centralising policy writing, training and legal advice.

On MN alone, there will be hundreds of workers who have experience and know where the problems are.

Umm..why do you think the government are effective at protecting vulnerable people and preventing abuse??

Are the figures just for the London centre?

98% self referrals is ringing alarm bells for me.

I work in a different type of service but highly specialist, as KC claims to be. V few of the self referrals are actually those in deepest need. Those with the most complex needs are usually unable to find help by themselves and get referred to us by other providers who have identified them as having a need. Our self referral rate is about 1% and it's rare for the self referrers to need much specialist input compared to those found by professionals.

The big selling point of KC has to me always been that they are reaching highly complex kids who can't access other forms of support. But 98% can find KC by themselves quite easily To me it sounds more like going down to the world's most overfunded youth club with your mates.

Kundry, that makes sense.

Buffy, I've done that job and I found the system worked for me and my clients. Having records demonstrating that I had seen each client regularly and what had been done at each meeting helped me be aware of what was happening, what was working, and made it possible for other workers to take over if I was away. I also made a point of leaving records open when I left the room so the client could see what was written about them.

The only time I have known a worker not complete their records properly was when they were doing something unethical.

It is ridiculous for an organisation not to have basic evidence of client engagement rates. That is how situations like this arise - where multiple people have been to Kids' Company and reported seeing hardly any clients there.

And Buffy, I think your quotation marks are a little patronising. If you have a preference for other words rather than client and engagement, why don't you just say what they are?

The outcome of a service that aims to see clients regularly is to see clients regularly.

A service aiming to help the most vulnerable has to identify the most vulnerable.

Kids' Company seems to have spent an awful lot of time and money not seeing clients and not helping those most in need.

An organisation that doesn't see its clients, or can't accurately say how many clients it is seeing, shouldn't be funded.

Buffy, so say what words you think should be used instead of client and engagement.

Yes but things like how many meals they provide is easy to demonstrate and prove. If they claim to be giving 300 kids breakfast every day then they should surely be able to produce reciepts for a lot of cornflakes and orange juice. If they can't even do that (particularly if they dismiss requests for receipts as authoritarian, irrelevant, bureaucratic or unfeeling or whatever) then you really do have to ask what the fuck they think they are doing.

Buffy, there's plenty in the social care sector too to that end. Everyone is aware of the flaws in linking input solely to outcomes. But we have to know if something is working or not. Not just in financial terms. In terms of whether this is overall an approach that should be taken.

I worked, in the mid 1990s, for the biggest youth homelessness charity. Chaotic, unhappy young people - most v hard to work with, for all kinds of reasons - and many of my frontline colleagues were utterly terrific, both focused totally on the clients and aware of what was and wasn't feasible/a good idea. And we knew how many kids were coming through. Where they'd been staying before. Why they'd become homeless. We had to establish that stuff because without it all we were doing was providing a roof. If you want to interpolate, to get into the causes, to prevent other kids ending up in similar situations, and also to provide better solutions at helping them out when they do become homeless, you need to collate that information.

Because the thread is about an organisation that cannot produce relevant records and doesn't have processes in place, and is losing funding as a consequence.

You seem to think them losing funding is some kind of injustice.