Children's Charity - Kids Club

'Always the plan'

The government has said it will continue to work with Kids Company

poster wrote:
Wow, how DIRTY is all this 'missing children' supposed charity stuff?

Kids Company charity is investigated by Scotland Yard's child abuse, sex offences and exploitation unit

The Met said it was looking into a 'number of allegations of crime'
IAN JOHNSTON   Friday 31 July 2015

The charity Kids Company is being investigated by police from Scotland Yard’s child abuse, sex offences and exploitation unit.
The Metropolitan Police said it was looking into a “number of allegations of crime” involving Kids Company, which works with vulnerable children and young adults.
In a statement, Kids Company said it was “co-operating fully with the police to assist the investigation into what it understands to be historical but serious allegations”. It added it had “no further substantive information”.
“Kids Company’s first priority is the safety and security of all the children, young people and adults we support and protect,” the statement said.
“The organisation operates robust policies and procedures that ensure all Kids Company’s clients are protected. The safety, security and well-being of the children, young people and adults we support is our first priority and it is this imperative that will guide our response to the allegations once further information has been disclosed by the police.”
Police said they had “commenced an investigation into a number of allegations of crime involving a children’s charity”.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that ministers had overruled advice from senior civil servants and handed a £3m grant to Kids Company despite allegations of financial mismanagement.

Freedom wrote:I presume that this is it?

http://www.place2be.org.uk/

Now, now Peter, there is no problem with Mrs Batman wearing curtains - as long as they aren't low-cut!

Freedom wrote:
Now, now Peter, there is no problem with Mrs Batman wearing curtains - as long as they aren't low-cut!

Kids Company charity is investigated by Scotland Yard's child abuse, sex offences and exploitation unit
The Met said it was looking into a 'number of allegations of crime'

If we had been aware of sexual assaults taking place on our premises we would have reported these to the police and the local safeguarding board. So you can understand that I am taken aback by allegations which now present themselves, about which I knew nothing.
We are cooperating with the police fully. If these allegations are true, I am filled with horror at the thought that someone may have been harmed in our care and we were not aware of it.

We provide practical, emotional and educational support to vulnerable inner-city children, young people and families.
Our services reach 36,000 across London, Bristol and Liverpool,

Kids Company operates through nine centres and a two therapy houses in London, Bristol and Liverpool.

Stantonbury Campus is a secondary foundation school located in north Milton Keynes, England, established in 1974. It is the second largest secondary comprehensive school in the United Kingdom with more than 2,100 school students aged 11–18 (Years 7-13 / US Grades 6-12). It is built as part of a community site, including shared facilities including a leisure centre, theatre, health centre and church.

Staff payment

Civil service scepticism

In 2006, when David Cameron was leader of the opposition, he made an infamous speech that is remembered as an exhortation to hug a hoodie. Feral youth, he said, should be helped rather than demonised. He was reaching towards what he hoped would be a new, ‘compassionate’ conservatism inspired in part by the charismatic social activist Camila Batmanghelidjh.

She was the perfect lodestar for the young Tory leader. She began her drop-in centre — the Kids Company — in 1996 and within a few years, was helping thousands of disadvantaged inner-city children. She’s colourful, powerful but also a former Sherborne girl with whom Cameron and other members of the establishment felt at ease. Cameron told his shadow ministers that Camila embodied the Big Society. He suggested they study her work and design policies that reflected it.

The cash has rolled in to Kids Company. It has received more than £25 million from the government, and another £4.25 million has just been agreed. Prince Charles is a fan; the rock group Coldplay have donated £8 million. Then there’s Richard Branson, J.K. Rowling, Jemima Khan, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, John Lewis and more.

Good for Camila Batmanghelidjh, you might say, but there are a number who believe that Kids Company has perhaps grown too quickly and would, despite its undoubted achievements, benefit from a review of its operations and controls. They worry that Kids Company has become too famous, untouchable, and now acts as a drain on well-meaning donations that might otherwise go to better causes. Having investigated the charity for several months, I’m afraid I agree.

I first became interested in Kids Company after meeting and writing about a recent benefactor of theirs, Joan Woolard, who sold her house just over a year ago so as to give the proceeds to Kids Company. Less than a year after making her enormous donation, of about £200,000, she became so disillusioned that she complained to the Charity Commission and is demanding back her money. I wrote about Mrs Woolard, a 76-year-old widow from Lincolnshire, for the Oldie magazine. My piece covered her wider life, which included working as a Labour MP’s secretary. But one observation I made was this: ‘What is perhaps most bizarre about this tale is that Joan has no idea what has become of her money. The charity has never informed her how it has been or will be used, despite her being its largest individual donor.’

Ms Batmanghelidjh does not take criticism on the chin. She wrote to the then Oldie editor Richard Ingrams insisting he ‘repair’ the ‘incredibly damaging narrative’. She stated Kids Company had ‘worked very carefully’ with Joan for more than a year before accepting the donation.

Is that right? Not according to Mrs Woolard: ‘Contrary to what she claims, I never received a personal letter from Camila thanking me for making my donation. I had a few meetings with her in the 15 months before I made my donation but it’s not correct to say I “worked” with her.’

So much for hurt feelings — more interesting are Joan’s other misgivings. After the Oldie spat, by way of making up, Joan spent a week volunteering at Kids Company, to see how donations were spent.



One of its therapy centres she attended was the Morgan Stanley Heart Yard in south London. It was bought with £1.6 million given by the London arm of the American investment bank after which it was named and opened by Joanna Lumley. What struck Mrs Woolard was the absence of children. She says: ‘Camila said that the charity is “short of money” because summer is a busy time because so many more children need to be fed and looked after during the school holidays. But I was told by staff that during the summer holidays there are fewer children to look after. I can’t square this fundamental contradiction.’

Nor, as it happens can some other former senior members of Kids Company, who claim that there are ‘exaggerations’ in the numbers of people it says it helps. In the charity’s annual reports, the numbers increased from 13,500 in 2008 to 16,500 in 2010 before jumping to an astonishing 36,000 the next year. That figure of 36,000 has been used in Kids Company literature ever since, but some ex-staff members have questioned it. In response to this, the charity stated it uses a computer system tracking all the children, young people and families with which it works, recording why money was spent on them and what outcome arose, and that the earlier figures were under-estimates.

This all sounds very professional, but it turns out it is not just children who are included in the much-touted 36,000. In an email to me the charity wrote: ‘When we refer to clients they include children, young people, young adults with special needs, carers, i.e. foster parents or parents who predominantly have mental health difficulties, and school staff.’ Strange to include parents and school staff in the number of those helped.

On to Joan’s next concern, which she heard from staff in Kids Company HQ. Some employees are former ‘clients’ — people helped by the charity itself when younger — and the complaint from regular staff was that some of these former clients did not bother turning up to work. Joan told me: ‘One girl had apparently swanned off for the whole summer, to the obvious annoyance of colleagues. I was also told that others who visit the charity are given cash allowances to supplement their Jobseekers’ Allowances and to prevent them from stealing or dealing drugs. I don’t think private donors or the government give Kids Company money so that it can be handed out to young people in cash?’

When I put this to Ms Batmanghelidjh, she said: ‘Money is only spent on the most destitute of our clients.’ She said this included ‘trafficked mothers’ unable to access welfare despite having children born in the UK, and young people in education who ‘receive food vouchers and a bus pass’. She said: ‘I want to be very clear that at no time have we paid or do we pay clients to come to us.’

However, I’ve spoken to former Kids Company employees who might disagree. I’ve also spoken to a former Kids Company member of staff, Genevieve Maitland Hudson, who left the charity in 2009. She told me that young people were given cash and travel cards. She said: ‘On Fridays in 2008, little packages of cash were handed out to every young person through a window in the Urban Academy reception. It was always tense. There were tears. There was shouting. There were threats. There were fights.’ What prompted Genevieve to leave Kids Company was not the challenging work and certainly not the young people, about whom she has only good things to say, but the ‘culture’ of the charity.

Finally, last August — six weeks after it was promised — Joan Woolard received the report setting out where her money had gone. It had been overseen and written off personally by Ms Batmanghelidjh. But instead of allaying the widow’s concerns, it only increased them. Five of its 11 pages were simply photographs of children. Within the text were three boxes referring to what her money had bought. This included the claim that £44,181 of her donation went on ‘the entirety of our food budget at Kenbury [one of its London centres] between September and December 2013’.

Mrs Woolard found this odd. A Kids Company report produced for the government — covering the period 2011 to 2013 — had stated: ‘In the past year, £174,379 was spent providing meals at four of our centres’ — including Kenbury. This suggested that the average monthly budget for each of the four centres was only £3,600. Yet according to the report given to Mrs Woolard, the monthly average for Kenbury during the period her money was spent on food there was £11,045 — three times higher. The charity says it’s confident about its figures.

Its special report for Mrs Woolard stated that Kids Company fed ‘approximately 3,000 children each week’. An article in the Evening Standard last October also stated that the Kenbury Street centre serves 3,000 hot meals each week.

The figures are confusing. Are 450 youngsters being fed a meal there daily — a total of 3,000 meals a week? Or are 3,000 youngsters getting one meal there each per week? Mrs Woolard tried to find out by visiting the Kenbury Street centre unannounced. She estimated that the dining space had enough room for 60 people at any one time. To serve 3,000 meals per week would require seven separate sittings per day, seven days a week. She feels these numbers just do not add up.

Camila Batmanghelidjh dismissed my concerns about the treatment of Mrs Woolard, saying in email: ‘We have been concerned about Joan Woolard and her mental health. A few months back we discussed our concerns with the Charity Commission and placed the evidence with them.’ Quite apart from the distasteful nature of the accusation, and the fact that I found Joan Woolard to be perfectly sane, the question remains: if Kids Company really thinks Joan Woolard might be mentally unwell, doesn’t it have a duty to return her £200,000?

Camila Batmanghelidjh claims that Kids Company has an open-door policy, and she invited me to spend time there, as Mrs Woolard had. I daresay I’d be charmed by Camila, as so many others have been. But I’m not sure a casual day-long visit is the solution for Kids Company. Like other charities in receipt of vast sums of taxpayers’ money, it needs to be able to demonstrate to donors — and the outside world — that the money is being used as well as possible, however worthy the objectives. If a government department, say, or a donor like Joan Woolard or a former staff member has concerns about a charity, they must be properly addressed.

Charm is no substitute for transparency. Or at least it ought not to be. Officials in the Department for Education, for instance, were so unimpressed by Kids Company’s financial management that they persuaded ministers to stop millions in funding. Ms Batmanghelidhjh’s response was to contact the Prime Minister, who personally intervened with the Department for Education to make sure Kids Company got its cash. Not a word of the argument leaked.

Who can blame Camila for fighting for her charity? But this sequence of events exemplifies the problem: if you’re too well connected for anyone to criticise you, if you’re always pulling strings, you risk losing transparency and therefore accountability — however well intentioned you are.

A genius for seducing the rich: Kids Company founder was expert at convincing wealthy to help vulnerable youngsters, says HARRIET SERGEANT
By HARRIET SERGEANT
PUBLISHED: 23:50 GMT, 5 August 2015
Kids Company founder Camila Batmanghelidjh, who was an expert at convincing wealthy people to help vulnerable youngsters
Nearly a decade has passed since I first met Camila Batmanghelidjh. She was holding a meeting with a dozen businessmen, and I watched astounded as she dazzled them with a lecture about her theories concerning emotional development and violent behaviour in young people.
When she excused herself to take a call from one of the children in her care at the charity Kids Company, they all shook their heads in admiration at her dedication.
Here was a woman, I decided, with a genius for convincing wealthy people that helping vulnerable youngsters was not only a noble thing to do, but was also fashionable.
Because of that particular talent, the charity Camila founded in 1996 has been a peculiar mixture of glamour and deprivation. It’s been where the great and the good, the wealthy and powerful — right up to the Prime Minister himself — have felt able to do their bit for the poor and dispossessed.
Distressing stories of the children the charity helped even appeared in glossy magazines such as House & Garden.
That contradiction is personified in Camila herself. An Iranian who went to an English public school, she presents herself as a radical outsider while at the same time befriending leading members of the political and showbusiness establishments, and raising funds from City institutions.
David Cameron is said to be ‘mesmerised’ by her.
The multi-millionaire artist Damien Hirst is a fan, as is Prince Charles, while the band Coldplay have donated millions.
Yet given recent events at Kids Company — allegations of sexual impropriety, questions over its management, a row about a £3million government grant, and its final collapse yesterday — disturbing questions must surely be raised about whether those who’ve given so much money really knew where it was all going.

This, remember, is an organisation which received tens of millions from successive governments. Did ministers really scrutinise its practices, or did they simply see a chance to make some political capital by funding such a fashionable cause?
Certainly, the history of Kids Company over the nine years that I have followed its progress offers a disturbing insight into how easy it is to exploit government goodwill, along with the public’s commendable idealism and impulse to help the vulnerable.

I came into contact with the charity as part of my research into the care system for a major report I was preparing. After I sat in on that first meeting, I visited Kids Company in South London. From the outset, I was concerned about the numbers of youngsters it actually claimed to be helping.
In the world of charities, numbers matter. Numbers dictate government funding and private donations.
Camila told me 50 or 60 kids turned up every day for lunch and Pilates or yoga classes. But when I visited the centre, I found just one sulky teenager over whom ten staff hovered solicitously. When I asked some youngsters the following week why they came to the centre, they looked surprised. ‘For the money of course,’ one explained. It certainly was not for the education or yoga.

As I saw for myself, every Friday staff handed out envelopes of cash ranging from £50 to £200 — a serious amount to a young person who might otherwise only receive £50 a week from the State to live on.
The allowance appeared to be the key to the popularity of the centre.
One member of staff even admitted: ‘You don’t see most of the kids coming any other day.’
As one teenager told me: ‘I come on Friday lunchtimes to socialise, pick up my allowance and then I go.’
Kids Company, it appeared, was using cash hand-outs — some of which came direct from taxpayers, remember — to bump up those all-important attendance numbers.
Before its closure yesterday, it seemed little had changed. Young people, especially teenage gang members, were still not using the charity in nearly the numbers it claimed.
One Wednesday last summer, I sat outside to see for myself and counted, over a three-hour period, 40 arrivals.
The majority of the visitors I saw were not ‘exceptionally vulnerable’ children suffering from malnutrition, as one journalist claimed, but adults. Only seven teenage boys were among the 40. In fact, middle-class white visitors outnumbered black teenagers.
These issues surrounding Kids Company raise disturbing questions. Did not one of the great and the good, the pop stars, politicians and journalists think to visit the charity unannounced? Did one of them ever ask a young person for their views?
I befriended one teenage boy who went to Kids Company at the age of 15 in the hope of some education. Two years later, he was a crack addict spending the cash he received from Kids Company on his addiction.
‘I am not going back there,’ he told me. ‘If you stay you don’t progress, do you get me? You got to leave to progress.’
The shocking fact is that many of the people who eulogised about Kids Company did not pay close enough attention to what the children who used the place had to say.
They accepted Camila’s story because it suited them. Association with Kids Company made them look and feel good.
I got the impression that the young, largely black youths in the background were merely accessories to the image the donors sought to project. They used Kids Company to promote themselves, and Camila exploited that need. So politicians won voters; music fans were impressed: journalists gained awards.
But what about the young people who were supposed to be the ones to benefit? Of course, some youngsters have had their lives improved or even turned around by the work of dedicated staff at Kids Company. But there are others whose views are disturbing.
Protesters outside Kids Company offices in south London

Prime Minister David Cameron, has also been described as being 'mesmerised' by the charity founder
They saw no point complaining about any faults they might have found in the running of the charity.
As one said: ‘Who’s goin’ to ask us, crack addicts, robbers, street kids, kids from care, our views? Who’s goin’ to talk to us when all those nice middle-class people are saying how wonderful Kids Company is?’
Even the Government was in on it. It continued to lavish money on a charity despite the misgivings of civil servants and some ministers.
When Michael Gove was Education Secretary, he and the then children’s minister Tim Loughton are said to have opposed giving grants to the charity. But Downing Street was in favour of the funding.
Perhaps the real tragedy is that charities such as Kids Company are desperately needed to pick up the pieces of our failed welfare state.
Because of the epidemic of broken homes and dysfunctional families, there are large numbers of children who desperately need help.
Equally, I have no doubt that many of the Kids Company staff did a heroic job.
Now, it seems, those staff and those youngsters will have to look elsewhere after Camila shut down the charity last night.
Was this the action of a woman with her heart in the right place? Or one who cannot face a future out of the limelight?
Charities should be judged with heads and not hearts, and Camila and her organisation — for all their good intentions — should be no different.