The essential David Gustave

Arabella Mileham talks to David Gustave, a key worker for well-known charity Kids Company, about engaging ‘difficult’ children and inspiring them to turn their lives around.

Recently hailed as ‘the British Obama’ with a Facebook group devoted to his activities, David Gustave refuses to be pigeonholed. As a mentor to disadvantaged kids, a social and political activist, Oxford graduate, student-barrister, ex-delinquent, educational motivator and convert to Islam, a convenient stereotype doesn’t exist.

Gustave, 42, is a key-worker for Kids Company, a charity that gives practical, emotional and educational support to vulnerable inner-city kids. His own experiences have given him with a real understanding of their detachment. Brought up in a predominantly white working-class neighbourhood in London, his mixed-race parentage gave rise to racial abuse and by the age of 16 he dropped out and left home, embarking along a fairly dubious career-path. A series of disturbing personal events prompted a rethink when he was 30 and he enrolled in an adult education course, graduating from Oxford several years later. During his degree he converted to Islam, won scholarships at Middle Temple and was called to the Bar.

Although a legal career beckoned, Gustave decided to direct his fearsome intellect and political passion at campaigning for social justice and joined Kids Company in 2006. Last summer he was noted as an ‘up-and-coming force to be reckoned with’ by the Evening Standard, largely for his work with troubled teenagers.

Although his story is inspiring, he doesn’t envisage himself as having overcome barriers simply through hard work. He describes his life as “a synthesis of different experiences” which informs the way he interacts with others; his ability to reach out to disadvantaged kids who have fallen outside the system as “grounded in the individual not the homogenous group”. He explains that they are separate from the harsh and brutal environments in which they find themselves.

One of the most striking things about Gustave is that he doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. He doesn’t even try to stop others from going down the same route that he did: “You can’t go in there and tell the kids what to do, it’s about a relationship. You can inform them of the perils but people make their own decisions.”

It is this philosophy that underpins his work as a mentor - in empowering kids to think for themselves. “It’s all about the interaction,” he adds. “People live in a social contract and what I am trying to do on a day-to-day basis is interact adequately. What I learnt from the law is the idea of contract being based on a meeting of minds - trying to get kids to the point where they say ‘I do want to actionise [sic] myself, I don’t want to be a robot’. Everyone needs something that acts as a locus of change.”

It seems likely that Gustave will be exactly that.