Kids company - what a cock up!

[Northernlurker]

So I understand from the bbc that kc got the three million they were waiting for and which was given to support restructuring of the charity and promptly spent 800 grand of it on the months salary bill! What on earth were they thinking? Looks like it's totally done for now.

Did anyone watch Channel 4 news? Camila basically say that the charity would re-open if the media stopped picking on them.

So basically she is using those kids as blackmail tool.

I figured that's why she shut it so quickly and so dramatically. She thinks it can't be allowed to fail and someone will bail them out.

Great advert against "The Big Society" (idea of charities doing govt duties).

Thanks carol - just looked into it and it is with an income of over 1 million they have to be audited by a registered auditor -so KC would be. So they would look in more detail than an independent examination but then I guess they won't be checking every transaction either.
And they are mainly looking for fraud - and that the figures reported are accurate. Not really whether the money is being being poured down the drain...
The responsibility that the charity is fulfilling its charitable aims is completely down to the trustees.
(And in Scotland ALL registered charities have to have their accounts 'independently examined' - an external scrutiny - even ones with a turnover of a few hundred - with larger charities etc needing an audit. )

My impression is that kids company have closed their doors because they aren't solvent - at this point they have no choice. It seems as though they have been heading in this direction for a while.

Although I read somewhere that many staff are still working unpaid (and uninsured/unsupervised etc) to help the YPs until they can get taken on elsewhere.

Looking at this awful car crash, my question is what other charities are operating like this? I agree about the constantly having to repackage what you are doing to look new as nobody apparently is willing to fund running costs, donors don't like charities that spend money on administration - how many threads on here talk about giving only to charities that spend the minimum on admin?

The results will either be that the charities won't have proper administration procedures, or they will get into the habit of lying about what they spend their money on. Neither being very healthy.

I'm also a bit at an organisation being denigrated for spending money on staff wages. An organisation doing what Kids Company said it was doing would surely spend most of its money on wages, and a million quid a year is 18 people on London average wage plus oncosts, plus CB's salary. Staff wages cost, and quite right too.

I think this should be a chance to rethink how charities/changos (I like that word) operate and the Charities Commission should be leading on that. For a start, there might be a guidance figure or figures about how much a charity should spend on administration, and a charity spending less than this shoudl be just as suspect as a charity spending more.

Why exactly have they closed their doors so suddenly and without at least warning staff and clients?
Yentob was v aggressive on Channel 4 News but he didn't answer that question.

As ItsAllGoingToBeFine (I hope so ) said it does feel like a coup d'éclat. Instead of addressing any of the issues and trying to compromise they just shut the whole thing down.

annandale there is a lot of guidance out there and a lot of information. All charities have to publish accounts and these can be viewed by anyone. Generally the view is that donors are the ones who should do the investigation as they, like company shareholders, are the ones being damaged by bad charities.
government spending with charaties should also be reviewed by the government
There is no benefit to anyone of another group interfering

I don't agree that donors are the ones damaged by bad charities, or at least not the only ones. If Kids Company was operating badly, the children it was helping but not well, or the ones it was supposed to be helping but wasn't, were the main ones being damaged.

Even with volunteers it will cost money to keep the buildings open. They have no money.

On sky news last night Tessa Jowel said when discussing Cameron apparently being mesmerised with CB , that Gordon Brown had been exactly the same. Completely mesmerised with this woman

I saw this on the Popbitch message board. Normally a very reputable source when it comes to gossip.

If it's all about the kids, why doesn't that Kids Company founder fund the charity via her billionaire playboy alter ego?

What could this mean? Do you think CB could be facing fraud charges?

I think it's a play on her last name, Batman having a billionaire playboy alter ego.

Kirsty Wark is killing her.

Again, the claim that you can run an organisation for 19 years with thousands of disturbed young people and have zero child protection issues and zero sexual harassment cases is ludicrous. Any employer larger than a corner shop, any school, even any charity beyond two blokes raising money for the scouts, will have an allegation of sexual misconduct at least once every nineteen years. If you've got thousands of teenage clients of course these things happen, and if you claim they aren't, you must have child protection procedures that are not worth the paper they are printed on.

Wark is still taking her apart.

I'm watching her on Newsnight and I just don't believe a word she's saying. Nothing's her fault, she didn't know about it, it's all a conspiracy... arrogance and denial everywhere.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel, isn't it.

We didn't have reserves because we spent all the money, that's why we were asking for more? That isn't quite fraudulent trading, but it's skating very close to it. If the definition of solvency is being able to pay debts as they fall due, then only being able to do with on the assumption you receive discretionary funding from central government is pretty sketchy. No wonder the finance directors resigned: they were worried about their legal position.

I think it's a play on her last name, Batman having a billionaire playboy alter ego.

D'oh! You can tell I'm not a comic book fan

BarbarianMum: I appreciate that it's hard to prove that one magic bacon sandwich stopped a teenager from self-harming, but KC appears to have either been unable or unwilling to prove that there was even a bacon sandwich prepared and offered to a troubled teenager in the first place.

And I am certainly going to base my future donations to charity on giving to those who DO spend money on 'admin'. Because good admin is what makes a charity able to function properly in the first place. Competent admin and finance staff make sure that the charity is spending its money as well as possible by taking care of the boring, unglamorous stuff such as making sure that everything the charity purchases is obtained at the best possible value-for-money rate, whether that's food and goods to be given out to people, or the contract for servicing the charity's photocopiers. If a good admin person looks at a charity's books and says, switching your electricity supplier from X to Y will save you £5k a year, that's an extra £5k a year that could be spent on, you know, actually helping your clients.

I appreciate that it's hard to prove that one magic bacon sandwich stopped a teenager from self-harming

That's right, and that explains why its impossible to do any sort of testing of drugs to see if they work, which is why we don't know whether appendicitis is best treated by surgery or exorcism.

It looks increasingly like KC was on the side of exorcism. The reason why "alternative medicine" quacks make such ludicrous excuses for the lack of trials is that they know at some level that their treatment don't work, and are avoiding facing the reality of that. Presumably that's why KC so consistently avoided any substantive followup work.

I saw the Newsnight interview and every time CB said "that wasn't brought to my attention" I wanted to say "maybe not but you should have procedures in place so you would find out!".

Kirsty Wark was v v good.

Radio 4 this morning again quotes her as claiming to have not had a single child protection issue in 19 years.

Nineteen years. Thousands of young men from chaotic backgrounds. Hundreds of staff who were often young, vulnerable or former clients. Not a single accusation of sexual misconduct, either proven or unproven, in all that time.

Seriously? It's like schools that claim to not have a bulling problem. It just means they have no proper process in place and are ignoring the issue.

Alternatively, if KC's client base were thousands of young men from south London not one of whom ever so much as entertained an inappropriate thought towards a young woman, why would such paragons of virtue need millions of pounds spending on their moral development?

"What other charities are operating like this..."

Apparently Gordon Brown & D.Cameron stepped in a few times to get big govt money to KC when KC didn't have their admin up to date. The point is that other charities aren't allowed to operate like this, the money dries up a lot earlier.

I've had management positions with lots of small charities & we report on the bank balance & funding projections every meeting, always worried to stay a small part into the black. Maybe reality changes when they're huge, dunno.

Maybe reality changes when they're huge, dunno.

They weren't huge. Oxfam, for example, turns over approaching £400m a year. They were a small local charity that ran a youth centre that managed to strike it big through having a larger than life CEO (and being in London: were she to have started in inner-city Manchester no-one would have ever heard of her), and ended up operating a large charity with the governance and systems of the original youth centre.