For two decades Camila Batmanghelidjhwho died after a long illness aged 61, was one of the most passionate and easily recognizable figures on the British charity circuit.
Kids Company, the charity she founded in 1996 to help distressed, abused and abandoned children and teenagers in South London, has 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 power of her own charisma, Batmanghelidjh not only charmed Labor and Conservative prime ministers into giving the charity public money – David Cameron was particularly struck by her ideas about personal involvement, and developed the strategy described by Labor as ” print a hoodie” is mocked – but she has 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, raising a total of more than £164 million 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 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.
For the media, Batmanghelidjh became different and uncritical, 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 collapsed spectacularly in 2015 amid a flurry of allegations of abuse – later unsubstantiated – and criticism of financial mismanagement from which her reputation has struggled to recover, although she has been largely cleared of personal blame.
Usually dressed in voluminous, colorful costumes, with signature turbans wrapped around her head, Batmanghelidjh was unmistakable as she swept through her Kids Company headquarters in Southwark or down Downing Street. She claimed that the covering allowed her to maintain some privacy and further that the children who came to her for help liked the flamboyance. It also made a virtue of her size, the result of an endocrine imbalance resulting 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 to channel through me like a current. I would not would have been here if I didn’t deeply believe that these children can get better.”
It seemed to work: traumatized and sometimes violent children were not censored, but enticed and given care and understanding. “Neglect, a constant 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 Tehran. Her grandfather built hospitals and hotels, a great uncle was head of the country’s army. Her father, Fereydoon, was a doctor who trained in London, where he 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 rumored 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 with both her health, stemming from her premature birth, and her dyslexia, but the school allowed her to stay after the family’s wealth was frozen by the Iranian regime. Granted political asylum in the UK, she went on to study theater and dramatic arts at Warwick University, then psychology and child development at the Tavistock Clinic in London, and then worked as a child therapist in Camberwell, South London.
It was there that she was first struck by the sight of severe child poverty and neglect. She saw a seven-year-old girl try to take her own life and was moved to set up a project called Place to Be (now). Place2Be), which placed counselors 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 neighbors across the river in Blackfriars complained.
No child would be turned away by the charity, no matter how abusive their behaviour, and each was provided with a mobile phone so they could stay in touch with trained helpers, or Batmanghelidjh himself.
By 2012, the organization provided sit-down meals for 3,500 children on Christmas Day. In addition to the hot meals, there was therapy, counseling and advice on housing and work, 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 too, she reasoned – and clothes, even expensive trainers, were bought.
There were allegations by journalists that some bought drugs with the money and that others just turned up to receive their handouts. The media will subsequently highlight the case of a drug-addicted teenager who was allegedly sent to a Champneys spa break at a cost of £55,000 to boost their self-esteem.
While Batmanghelidjh has proven herself to be a highly successful fundraiser and self-promoter, the charity’s financial management has proved flawed. Kids Company collapsed in August 2015, days after Cameron ignored civil service advice and authorized £3m to be granted, and following news that there was to be a Metropolitan Police investigation into allegations of abuse at two of his websites made by the BBC Newsnight programme. . The Met later found that there was no evidence to substantiate the allegations, and the investigation was dropped.
Nevertheless, subsequent official reports into the charity’s handling have been critical: the National Audit Office said ministers had focused little on what the charity actually achieved, and the Commons’ public administration and constitutional committee alleged in 2016 that Batmanghelidjh and the trustees relied on wishful thinking and false optimism. In 2022, the Charity Commission reported that there was mismanagement in Kids Company’s administration and that it was using 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 ban her and others from serving as company directors was dismissed in the High Court by Mrs Justice Falk, who dismissed claims that Batmanghelidjh and former trustees failed to provide the charity properly managed, and stated that it would have survived had it not been brought down by unfounded allegations of abuse. She went on to praise the “enormous commitment that Batmanghelidjh has shown 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 told by Libby Brooks in the Guardian: “Just a week before her death, she put 150 carefully wrapped Christmas presents 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.
