The voluntary sector has become “a bit grovelly, a bit apologetic” in the way it gets money, Kids Company founder Camila Batmanghelidjh said last week.

Speaking about her success at achieving a high profile for her charity and securing £12m of government money to a hall full of sector communications specialists at the third annual Charity Comms Conference, Batmanghelidjh chastised the sector for ceding power to funders.

She was replying to a question about why she gets so much media attention when many other charities share her commitment and knowledge about children’s services.

“Two reasons,” she said. “One, I’m fat and colourful. Two, I am prepared to be attacked and diminished as an individual, but I will never give up what I need to say.

“Others are often worried about funding being withdrawn, or someone getting on the phone to them asking ‘why did you say that?’ I think in this way the voluntary sector has become a bit grovelly, a bit apologetic in the service of getting money. We’ve allowed the people who have the money to dictate the socio-political narrative, and we need now to get brave and refuse that equation.”

Batmanghelidjh said that she sometimes says things publicly that might not be in the best interests of herself or even of Kids Company, but are always in the best interests of the children it helps.

She cited Damilola Taylor’s death, when nobody else “dared to represent the narrative of the kind of kids that might be given to commit a murder”.

“I stuck my neck out and said there were two sets of kids experiencing this tragedy – Damilola and the children who killed him. 

“People were saying ‘who the hell is she?’ I got hate mail.”

All about the kids

Batmanghelidjh is remarkably clever at steering any conversation around to the cause – and boasts as much. Asked why Kids Company has such a high profile, she said:  “If you read or watch all my interviews you’ll see I don’t really talk about Kids Company, but about the kids.”

Kids Company has established a pool of about a dozen children who have successfully turned their lives around after being helped by the charity to speak on its behalf. But Batmanghelidjh refuses to fulfill “rent-a-kid”requests – media requests for “drug-abusing, one-earlobe, one-eyeball-missing kids” and advises charities against “planting people all over the shop”.

There are other ways of getting your message across than simply wheeling out your beneficiaries for potentially damaging face-to-face interviews with journalists, she added.

“We would never put a kid forward with any sort of vulnerability, even if it means losing that double-page spread,” she said. “That’s why we have created a ‘communications collective’ pool of kids that have said they want to be spokespeople. And in fact they feel very empowered by representing their peers.”

Charities should be imaginative about how they convey their messages, she advises. “Get letters from the children printed in the papers, do phone interviews. Think laterally. You don’t always have to ‘bring a specimen’."

For instance, some Kids Company children took part in an exhibition at Tate Modern called Shrinking Childhoods, where they created representations of their lifestyles.

“We brought the experiences of the children as close as possible to members of the public. Members of the public are not just going to walk into a crack den, so we will bring a version of the crack den to the member of the public.”

Celebrity Big Brother? No way

She confessed that she had been asked by the media to take part in Channel 4’s Celebrity Big Brother, and also to spend time in a nuclear bunker pretending to run the country as prime minister. She refused.

“Whenever they try and do anything about me, every line goes back to the children.”

Yet she admitted that if it wasn’t for the media, the charity wouldn’t have got the £12m government funding it recently secured.

“I worked for 11 years to get to the point where I could do that,” she said. “Initially we had to demonstrate that these children are not hard to reach, but that the current services provided do not suit their needs.”

So Kids Company brought in independent researchers from London University for three years who verified that 97 per cent of the charity’s beneficiaries found the charity’s services themselves, and that there was an 88 per cent reduction in crime committed by the kids once they used Kids Company’s services.

Needed sustainable funding

She said the charity had benefited over the years from a variety of sources of funding, but now needed sustainable funding from the government. So she announced publicly that the charity would have to close unless it got it.

She went public, she said, because “everything was going to take too long otherwise and I wasn’t going to wait for slow admin processes”.

She said the government didn’t have a model in their structures that matched Kids Company’s clinical model, which had been proven to work, so the government had to create something that did.

“I couldn’t go to different departments to fund the food, underwear, bedding, education, etc. that a kid needs when he turns up on our doorstep. We needed the government to create an exceptional financial construct that matched our clinical model, and they did.

“Then I found I’d opened my big mouth and 90 charities applied for the same fund!” Five got money in the end.

No child born a killer

Batmanghelidjh is a staunch defender of the 11,925 children in her charity’s care, and wholly blames their parents and other adults in their lives for failing them.

“No child is born a criminal or a killer, something has happened to them to make them behave in such a savage way. We have to stop blaming the children – we are responsible for their childhoods, so we have to shift the locus of responsibility back to the adults.

“Love and respect is a much better surveillance camera than a surveillance camera itself...through the process of respect they modify their behaviour.

“If you have to hit them then you, the adult, have already failed.”