The millionaire and the absurd truth behind the Educate and Empower fundraisers

If you’ve ever walked down a street in Manchester and been smiled and waved at by a fundraiser in a dark blue jacket, collecting money for ‘Educate & Empower’, then you have Phillip Hanks to thank.

Google his company – and it is indeed a company rather than a registered charity – and you won’t be short of people calling it a “scam”, alleging that not only do they not support people with learning disabilities, as they claim, they also don’t pay their own staff. We have since found evidence of incidents of both these allegations being true.

Unfortunately, that’s not the half of it. We’ve now heard multiple accounts from ex-staff, of Hanks being verbally and on at least one occasion physically abusive towards his employees — most of them ranging between the ages of 16 and 22. One ex-staff member, 18, sent us a harrowing recording of an argument he had with Hanks over alleged non-payment, in which Hanks threatens that he could “fucking do [him] harm here,” before seemingly locking them both inside the room, unzipping his trousers, and screaming at him repeatedly to “come and fuck [him] up the fucking arse”.

So you can of course imagine our surprise when we looked up Educate & Empower on Companies House, and discovered that their offices were in the same building as ours.

We went down there the very next morning and knocked on the door – no answer – and, being chancers, tried the pin – no luck. When we knocked on the neighbouring offices, a man came out to say that whoever occupied those offices recently was “definitely dodgy”. He told us that he was frequently distracted from his work by the stench of smoke emanating from the neighbouring premises; and often the sounds of someone – a man – “sacking people in the corridor, and shouting at the 17 year old girls that worked there.”

Not long after this, we manage to get hold of the man himself on the phone.

Hanks – who has since moved his offices five minutes down the road – paints a very different picture of life at Educate & Empower.

Yes, it’s true, he’ll admit, that he had to “get rid of” a few “degenerates”. Yes, he explains, he’ll occasionally lose his patience — but never his temper. But there’s now over 200 employees that work for him, he tells us, and all under the age of 21. When they come in to work, they hug him. When they leave, they hug him again. “And if you speak to the best ones, you’ll tell [your readers] that their exact words were: ‘You’re like a father to me.’ Yeah? ‘You’re the most pleasant man.’”

Hanks explains that it’s the degenerates who are at fault: for stealing from the company, going to the pub on company time, and showing up to work high on weed. He invites us to the office to see the pleasant, post-degenerate reality for ourselves.

Now 54, born, raised and life-lived within the bounds of Greater Manchester, Hanks was for a time the director of Rockefeller’s Jewellers, and by his own account a multi-millionaire.

But when, around 10 minutes after our phone call, we go to meet him in his offices – which, it feels reasonable to stress, are Snow White and the Seven Dwarves themed – he looks older, possibly owing to his habit of filming himself smoking cigars in said offices, and uploading those videos to the internet. His milk bottle glasses make him bug-eyed, or perhaps he really is just permanently aghast.

“Shall I give you a tour, do we want to do that first?” he asks. “Because I think you’re going to have a little bit of a shock at what you’re going to see.”

The Tour

You might know Phillip Hanks by another name: ‘Cheshire’s own Uncle Phil’.

Hi, it’s Ophira — editor of The Mill, and one of the writers of this piece.

I’ll be honest, something else was meant to come out this weekend. But when my colleague Lucy found out on Wednesday evening that the fundraisers for a strange-looking charity we kept seeing outside our offices were actually registered in our offices, I knew we had to drop everything and investigate.

The next two days were a mad dash to get all this information in order: spending two hours in the bizarre Snow White-themed offices, making countless phone calls to track down ex-staff, and shielding very angry calls from one Phillip Hanks — who rang us on the morning we were writing, to tell us he can’t respond to any of our allegations, because he “can’t read” (there is clear evidence that this is untrue).

I genuinely believe that every city needs a local news outlet with the time and means to do this kind of reporting. If these fundraisers were in a city with no independent paper, well-meaning people would carry on making "donations" with no way of knowing the truth.

That’s why I’d like you to consider joining The Mill today. Without our paying members, it would be impossible to do the work we do.

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