Camila Batmanghelidjh
Charismatic founder of Kids Company courted by politicians before it collapsed amid acrimony
CAMILA BATMANGHELIDJH, who has died on her 61st birthday following a long illness, enjoyed enormous success transforming the lives of some of the most deprived and vulnerable inner-city children and young people in Britain as the flamboyant and charismatic founder, in 1996, of Kids Company.
Under the direction of the so-called “Angel of Peckham”, the charity promoted a “holistic” approach to providing practical, emotional and educational support, establishing walk-in projects in London, Bristol and Liverpool; over nearly two decades, thousands of young clients were given, alongside therapy, a day-time surrogate home and family.
The charity’s activities spread across a broad spectrum of need: feeding, housing, psychiatric counselling for children suffering from acute emotional disturbance – and everything from arranging trips to the dentist to helping out with homework. It was an abiding principle of Kids Company that no one was ever turned away.
In an article in The Independent in 2009 Deborah Orr reported that 82 per cent of young people referring themselves to Kids Company centres arrived with substance-misuse problems, 84 per cent were homeless, 81 per cent had some criminal involvement, 83 per cent had sustained trauma, 87 per cent had emotional difficulties and 39 per cent were teenage carers struggling to cope. Many had not been in formal education for years.
Many had problems that were properly the responsibility of government and local authorities; in 2015 The Daily Telegraph’s Mick Brown reported being told of occasions when social services would refer clients to Kids Company because they were “too stretched” to manage the cases themselves.
Stories abounded of children, on whom society had given up, on finding stability in education or employment thanks to Camila Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company. Deborah Orr noted that independent evaluations of the charity had featured “such astounding statistics as ‘96 per cent return rate to education and employment for children who were otherwise disengaged’ or ‘impact on crime reduction 88 per cent’ – [suggesting] that the charity does its work with wonderful efficiency.”
In 2013 Kids Company itself commissioned a major LSE study which concluded that the charity “combines flexibility and staff commitment to enable absolute focus on the needs of vulnerable children; they offer to the child the knowledge that someone cares, loves and will not give up on them, irrespective of any challenging and unstable response that may come back from the child.”
A cheerful woman of large stature, always distinctively dressed in colourful patchwork robes and turbans, Camila Batmanghelidjh was lionised by journalists, celebrities and politicians of all political hues, who lined up to be photographed with her. She became seen as a sort of British Mother Teresa – a status with which she skilfully raised £164.3 million from private and public donors for Kids Company over 19 years, of which some £46 million came from the taxpayer.
She was showered with accolades, awards and honorary degrees, named Entrepreneur of the Year, Most Admired Chief Executive and one of the 100 most powerful women in the UK, and was appointed an honorary CBE in 2013. To David Cameron, Kids Company was a shining example of “the Big Society”; the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams hailed her approach as a model that might usefully be applied to transform the lives of child soldiers and former child soldiers in Africa.
But in August 2015 Kids Company collapsed amid allegations of abuse (which turned out to be unsubstantiated) and financial mismanagement – for which there was more evidence.
The fall-out caused considerable embarrassment to the Conservative Government under David Cameron which, it was revealed, had ignored civil-service warnings of the charity’s parlous financial state and, according to a National Audit Office report, continued to hand out money to the charity, including a grant of £3 million on the eve of its collapse, with “little focus on what it was actually achieving”.
The NAO report was followed, in February 2016, by an even more damning assessment by the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which found that Kids Company existed “on a knife edge”, relying upon “wishful thinking and false optimism” that the Government would forever give it handouts. And it accused ministers of stimulating this habit by allowing Camila Batmanghelidjh “unique, privileged and significant access” to the top tiers of government.
From then on Camila Batmanghelidjh’s reputation became caught up in the slow-turning wheels of bureaucracy and the courts. In October 2020 the Official Receiver began a legal bid to disqualify her and nine former directors of the charity from serving as company directors. In February 2021, however, the High Court dismissed the application, the judge in the case, Mrs Justice Falk, praising Camila Batmanghelidjh’s “enormous dedication... to vulnerable young people over many years”.
In February 2022 the Charity Commission published the outcome of a statutory inquiry launched under the Charities Act 2011. The report made a formal finding of “mismanagement in the administration of the charity”, claiming that it operated a “high-risk business model” characterised by a heavy dependence on grants and donations coupled with low reserves.
Of Camila Batmanghelidjh’s leadership it observed: “Founders of charities need to be mindful that a permanent leadership role is rarely in the best interests of a charity. There are other ways of harnessing the passion and talent of founders or charismatic individuals without their having executive or strategic power and responsibility. No charity should be defined by a single individual.”
Camila Batmanghelidjh won a High Court bid to pursue a judicial review of the report, but at the time of her death the issue remained unresolved.
One of four children, Camila Batmanghelidjh was born two and a half months prematurely on January 1 1963 to a wealthy Iranian-belgian family in Tehran, then ruled by the Shah. Her grandfather was an entrepreneur and philanthropist who built hospitals and hotels; her greatuncle was head of the Iranian armed forces. Her father, Fereydoon, was a doctor who had studied at St Mary’s in London, where he met her mother, Lucile.
Weighing less than a kilo when she was born, Camila was not expected to survive, and although she did she had many health problems, including an endocrine disorder which led her to put on weight, neurological problems and severe dyslexia.
She struggled at school, but showed skills as an artist and when, aged nine, she won an international art competition, the Iranian minister of culture advised her parents to send her abroad to be educated. She attended a special school in Switzerland until the age of 12, when she transferred to Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset.
She was there when the Iranian revolution began. Her father was locked up and his bank accounts frozen. There were rumours that he had died in prison. Though the fees dried up the school kept her on. Camila gained political asylum and won a place to study theatre and dramatic arts at Warwick University, graduating with a First.
She went on to study psychology and child development at the Tavistock Institute, then worked as a child therapist at the Family Service Unit in Camberwell, before establishing Kids Company in premises under a railway arch in south London.
Even before the charity collapsed concerns had been raised by a number of journalists about the way it was using donations and the number of children whom it claimed to be helping. In February 2015 Miles Goslett, in a piece in The Spectator, alleged that the charity’s statistic of having 36,000 clients had been inflated by including parents and school staff, and concluded that Kids Company “now acts as a drain on well-meaning donations that might otherwise go to better causes”.
But it was the broadcast in July that year of a BBC Newsnight report into allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation at the charity that proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Its closure came shortly after police launched an investigation into the allegations, which was eventually dropped seven months later.
As the roof caved in on her charity Camila Batmanghelidjh blamed its demise on “rumour-mongering civil servants, ill-spirited ministers and the media”. Speaking to Mick Brown shortly afterwards, however, she said she hoped Kids Company could return after some restructuring once the media storm had died down.
But as numerous examples of misspending of funds emerged, including the decision to spend £55,000 on sending a drug addict to Champneys spa to relax, with a “chocolate massage” thrown in to “boost his self-esteem”, it was clear that her wish would never be granted.
Yet there was no doubting Camila Batmanghelidjh’s commitment to child protection. At Kids Company she had worked 11 hours a day, six days a week, and after its collapse she continued to work with vulnerable children and families, collaborating with several other charities.
“People say, oh, she’s so arrogant,” she told Mick Brown. “What they don’t realise is that my constituents are these kids; they’re watching me and they don’t want me to break down, to be yet another battered mam in their lives. And that is why I will not back down publicly because that is the name of the game. They’re looking for a sacrificial lamb. But I’m not doing any sort of injury tango. It’s a tango and I’m not party to it.”