Name: Camila Batmanghelidjh
Job: Kids Company
Qualifications: MA philosophy and psychology of psychotherapy; BA theatre studies
Last Job: Founder, The Place to Be, a charity that offers therapy to children in schools
First Job: Assistant in special needs school

Working with vulnerable and damaged children at their lowest point can take its toll on staff . And this everyday problem is nothing new at children's charity Kids Company. Psychotherapist Camila Batmanghelidjh founded the organisation in 1996 to work with profoundly vulnerable and isolated children from backgrounds lacking the nurturing essentials: a stable home life, love and understanding.

Central to the Kids Company's philosophy is a belief that children's needs must come first. Batmanghelidjh, who has more than 15 years experience in child psychology, says: "The key thing in this organisation is that the child is the primary client to whom we are accountable. And everyone else is a secondary client whose needs we meet if it means the child's life is enhanced." But reconciling this while looking after staff has not been easy.

Batmanghelidjh is all too aware of how quickly child care workers can burn out. She says: "People become care professionals because they aspire to providing a quality service. They often end up in an agency where this sense of quality is compromised because of a lack of resources and so on, and so, in order to survive, the worker will eventually shut down emotionally."

For her the biggest problem in working with children is the revenge mentality. "Because children have often been horrifically humiliated they then seek victims to humiliate, including staff. In most agencies the worker tries to address this by exercising some power to make the child feel small - and you get a cycle of humiliation."

Batmanghelidjh believes that such a cycle is an inappropriate way of working with children. For her, these children are not bad, but they are often angry and depressed. She says: "Society operates on the premise that depriving someone of their freedom is a punishment. But to children whose freedom is filled with uncertainty and instability, prison is no deterrent. Hundreds of children grow up not caring whether they go to prison, or if they live or die. Our vision is that every child who comes to us will have the value of their life reaffirmed."

This philosophy is underpinned through a work culture where punishment or retaliatory action is not used. "As a manager I have to take care of workers' feelings. I have to give them a way of understanding the way the children were behaving through training, role play and by providing weekly supervision."

Unsurprisingly, further problems can arise when children realise that the workers will not retaliate - giving the children a sense of power that often leads to them baiting workers. "We had to start talking to the children about their need to humiliate, and explored why doing it stemmed from their own sense of humiliation," says Batmanghelidjh.

With this difficult client group one might expect them to hit staff and for them to be restrained regularly, whereas this apparently seldom occurs.

Batmanghelidjh has adopted a style of management that works alongside the therapeutic aims of Kids Company. She says: "The caring professions need an emotional style, but most management training is handed down from business, and business models are inappropriate." This also means that other aspects of traditional management have been discarded. "I don't like job titles," she adds. "Nobody here has a title - they're all 'workers'. I make sure that I clean and mop the floor like everyone else. There's no hierarchy in that way."

It is because of the organisational philosophy that Batmanghelidjh believes Kids Company has had successes with many vulnerable children when other agencies have not. One such success is 16-year-old Mia Johnson.* Mia says: "I don't live with my family; I am independent now. It's changed me completely and made my life so much better."

Batmanghelidjh says: "Workers are proud to be a part of this organisation. We've been through hard times but we've stuck to what we believe in. As a result, we're now seeing great returns on our work."

*Not her real name

TOP TIPS

• The child is always your primary client - each decision and action should reflect that.
• Avoid punishment as this leads to negative cycles.
• Give staff long holidays and promote time-out breaks if pressures become too much.

RUBBISH TIPS

• Getting the paperwork right means you've got the service right.
• Make sure your staff know their station and who the boss is.
• It's more important to get on with your colleagues than to provide a good service to children.