Been wondering whether to post or not, but bugger it ... I will be a bit vague to avoid outing myself.
I had misgivings about KC and CB when I first came across KC back in the early noughties. I telephone-interviewed CB for a vox pop to go with a piece I was writing. A colleague gave me her name.
Because that is how this kind of thing works. All it needs is for a journo or editor to meet an "expert" and for that "expert" to be up for interacting with the media, always coming back to you with a quote very quickly or agreeing to write a short piece at 24 hours notice, and that expert then becomes seen as a reliable source. Journos them use them over and over, and then other editors and journos start to use them because they have become a go-to "name" for quick quotes and opinions on a subject.
As a result, said expert's media exposure spreads and they become seen as even more of an "expert" because the media treats them like one. This effect then spreads to other arenas: governmental, corporate responsibility, the public lecture circuit et al. The "expert" becomes an expert because everyone believes they are one.
As far as I can tell, this is what CB did. She prioritised press in the early days of KC and just rode the wave. And that is probably why no one questioned anything because everyone just presumed KC and CB had been previously "vetted" by someone else.
With KC and CB, you have to remember that editors want an "expert" voice on inner-city problems that isn't academic or governmental when a relevant story comes up for reasons of "balance". CB filled this gap perfectly.
But I came across KC a lot earlier than most, and had reservations from the beginning.
For a start, I couldn't figure out what KC did or how they managed to get inner city "youth" through their doors. The name of the charity itself sounded like some sort of soft play venue for six year olds, so I initially assumed they catered for primary-school-aged children. When I was told they targeted an older demographic, it didn't seem to make sense. I couldn't figure out how you could attract gang-related, street-wise, speed-garage-attuned teens (as they were then) if you were called kids company. The branding seemed too childish for a teen demographic, let alone a teen demographic that tended to be thrust into the harsher aspects of the adult world from an early age.
I also couldn't figure out what exactly KC did with these young people, and no-one could give me a clear answer. When I considered some of the practical work Connexions was doing in SE London, KC seemed rather adrift and fluffy -- and the one thing their target demographic wasn't was fluffy.
One thing that really niggled me was the way CB dressed. To colleagues, she was "colourful" or "eccentric", but, to me, she looked as though she was co-opting the traditional dress of a West African woman, a style that has also influenced certain cultural expressions of black pride and black identity in the UK and US, and a style that was very common amongst the congregations of evangelical African churches in South East London at the time. As she was of Iranian heritage, I couldn't shake off the feeling that she had knowingly chosen to echo some of those memes and it made me feel uneasy, particularly in light of her charity's focus on young, black, inner-city youths and her status as a "voice" for those youths. I felt that she was appropriating a culture to convey an image of herself that wasn't accurate, and was using that persona in a way that struck me as dubious and slightly fraudulent.
Of course, I couldn't say anything like this at the time. You really couldn't criticise a charitable endeavour back then, and a charity personality was totally off limits, so I swallowed my disquiet. Yet every time I saw her on TV, I still got the feeling that something wasn't right.
Having said all that, I am still shocked by these recent revelations about KC. It goes way beyond what I thought possible.