For two decades Camila Batmanghelidjh, who has died after a long illness aged 61, was one of the most passionate and readily recognisable figures on the UK charity circuit.
Kids Company, the charity she founded in 1996 to help distressed, abused and abandoned children and teenagers in south London, undoubtedly helped several thousand young people. Batmanghelidjh and her assistants surrounded them with unquestioning love, meals, support, advice, therapy and even clothes and pocket money, and the charity eventually spawned other outposts in Bristol and Liverpool.
Largely through the force of her own charisma, Batmanghelidjh charmed not only Labour and Conservative prime ministers into giving the charity public money – David Cameron was particularly struck by her ideas about personal engagement, developing the strategy derided by Labour as “hug a hoodie” – but she also captivated a succession of public figures, ranging from the then archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to Boris Johnson as mayor of London, JK Rowling, Damien Hirst and the band Coldplay. She secured donations from City firms and captains of industry, in all raising more than £164m over two decades, more than a quarter of it from the government.
In 2009 Deborah Orr reported in the Independent that 96% of the children who had left education and were helped by Kids Company returned through its intervention. The article also claimed that 82% had substance abuse problems and similar percentages were homeless, involved in crime or had emotional problems.
To the media Batmanghelidjh became variously and uncritically, according to taste, the Angel of Camberwell or the Pied Piper of Peckham, and she received a number of awards and encomia: woman of the year, social entrepreneur of the year, one of the 100 most powerful women in the country in a BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour poll, and was appointed CBE in 2013.
But Kids Company spectacularly collapsed in 2015 in a welter of allegations of abuse – subsequently unsubstantiated – and criticism of financial mismanagement from which her reputation struggled to recover, although she was largely absolved of personal blame.
Habitually dressed in voluminous, colourful costumes, with distinctive turbans wrapped around her head, Batmanghelidjh was unmistakable as she swept through her Kids Company headquarters in Southwark or into Downing Street. She claimed that the covering allowed her to keep some privacy and furthermore that the children who came to her for help loved the flamboyance. It also made a virtue of her size, the result of an endocrine imbalance stemming from her premature birth.
“The children’s stories turn my stomach and make me cry,” she told the Sunday Times in 2006. “I never hide my emotions because the whole point is to bring their emotions back to life. I have given up defending against their pain. I now allow it like a stream to channel through me. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t deeply believe that these kids can get better.”
It seemed to work: traumatised and sometimes violent children were not censured but cajoled, and given care and understanding. “Neglect, a continuous lack of love, deprives the child of a personal, soothing repertoire,” she said.
The third of four children, Camila was born into a professional family of entrepreneurs in the Iranian capital of Tehran. Her grandfather had built hospitals and hotels, a great-uncle had been head of the country’s armed forces. Her father, Fereydoon, was a doctor who had trained in London, where he had met his Belgian wife, Lucile. The family’s affluent lifestyle would come to an end in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, when her father would be imprisoned, incommunicado for four years and rumoured to be executed, and her sister Lila would take her own life.
By then, Batmanghelidjh had been sent abroad, first to a school in Switzerland and then to Sherborne school for girls in Dorset. She struggled both with her health, arising from her premature birth, and her dyslexia, but the school allowed her to stay on after the family’s wealth was frozen by the Iranian regime. She was granted political asylum in the UK and went on to study theatre and dramatic arts at Warwick University, then psychology and child development at the Tavistock Clinic in London, going on to work as a child therapist in Camberwell, south London.
It was there that she was first struck by the sight of abject child poverty and neglect. She witnessed a seven-year-old girl trying to take her own life and was moved to set up a project called Place to Be (now Place2Be), which placed counsellors in primary schools, in 1994. Two years later Batmanghelidjh remortgaged her flat to set up Kids Company, originally under a railway arch in Southwark, then, in 2004, after neighbours complained across the river in Blackfriars.
No child would be turned away by the charity, no matter how abusive their behaviour was, and each was provided with a mobile phone so that they could stay in touch with trained helpers, or Batmanghelidjh herself.
By 2012, the organisation was providing sit-down lunches for 3,500 children on Christmas Day. Beside the hot meals, there was therapy, counselling and advice on housing and jobs, help with homework, supported trips to doctors and dentists. Pocket money was given out on Fridays – middle-class children received it so why not deprived children as well, she reasoned – and clothing, even expensive trainers, was purchased.
There were claims by journalists that some bought drugs with the money and that others only turned up to receive their handouts. The media would subsequently highlight the case of a drug-addict teenager allegedly sent to a Champneys spa break at a cost of £55,000 to boost their self-esteem.
While Batmanghelidjh proved herself to be a hugely successful fundraiser and self-promoter, the charity’s financial management proved deficient. Kids Company collapsed in August 2015, days after Cameron had ignored civil service advice and authorised £3m to be granted, and following the news that there would be a Metropolitan police investigation into allegations of abuse at two of its sites made by the BBC Newsnight programme. The Met later found that there was no evidence to justify the allegations, and the investigation was dropped.
Nevertheless, subsequent official reports into the handling of the charity were critical: the National Audit Office said that ministers had devoted little focus on what the charity was actually achieving, and the Commons public administration and constitutional committee in 2016 claimed that Batmanghelidjh and the trustees had relied on wishful thinking and false optimism. In 2022 the Charity Commission reported that there had been mismanagement in Kids Company’s administration and had used a high-risk business model. It added that no charity should rely on the passions and talent of a single, charismatic individual.
A high court challenge to the findings was not pursued last year due to Batmanghelidjh’s ill-health. Earlier, an attempt by the official receiver to bar her and others from serving as company directors was dismissed in the high court by Mrs Justice Falk, who threw out claims that Batmanghelidjh and former trustees had failed to properly manage the charity, and stated that it might have survived had it not been brought down by unsubstantiated allegations of abuse. She went on to praise the “enormous dedication Batmanghelidjh showed to vulnerable young people over many years”.
Batmanghelidjh continued to live in a modest flat in West Hampstead, maintaining a low profile while advising other charities. As recounted by Libby Brooks in the Guardian: “Only a week before her death, she put 150 carefully wrapped Christmas gifts in a taxi and sent them to Brixton Soup Kitchen with the instruction: ‘Don’t say they came from me.’”
She is survived by her brothers, Bobby and Ardi.
