Camphill Village Trust serves EVICTION NOTICES on Botton's Co-workers
20 February 2015
The Camphill Village Trust has sent Notices to Quit to over thirty Co-workers in Botton. Botton's community will (would?) be sixty years old this year and was the first Camphill community for adults with learning disabilities, founded by Karl König and other Co-workers in 1955. They also established the Camphill Village Trust in order to support the Botton community and several that followed.
Now however, CVT is being run only by independent trustees, who show no consideration for the values and practices of the charity, such as shared living or the central role of co-workers. They also shocked us again and again with a steely command and control approach, bordering on the inhumane, to managing the charity and its communities. However, what is happening now is new in Camphill: eviction notices were sent to all co-workers who don't want to become employees of the new organisation.
From 31 March the charity will stop supporting over thirty real co-workers and expect them to leave. Leave the community they created, leave the disabled villaggers they lived with for years, at times decades. They could ask to be employed by the organisation, and still move out, live seperately, work shifts and according to support plans only. It's not the fact that CVT offers minimal wages, it's their arrogance and dishonesty, their lack of committment to Camphill values and practices, and most of all their lack of concern for the hopes and wishes of the villagers that co-workers find almost impossible to endorse by signing up with them.
It is a real dilemma. In this, trustees could make a difference by showing a human face, make a human gesture. We hope they will. Apart from that legal action is the only way to save the first community for adults in the Camphill movement.
The Northern Echo, 20.2.2015, "Row between charity and volunteers escalates as eviction notices served" Link
Whitby Gazette, 20.2.2015, "Eviction notices served at Botton" Link