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.

blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/08/revealed-how-kids-company-is-dealing-with-the-allegations-against-it/

I have heard CB speak at fundraising events in the City couple of times. She has friends in very high places and knows how to fundraise! she's an amazingly charismatic speaker and has clearly given her whole life to vulnerable children.

But some of the stuff she came out with - pseudo science speak - about children imbibing abuse and holding on to it "at a cellular level" in their bodies which had to be massaged away, was far too woo for me.

There's a long thread in 'chat' about this.

The £3m of public funds was given for a specific purpose and KC have used a substantial chunk of it for something else. Before the grant was made, officials sought a written ministerial direction (rare - and in effect is usually to formalise the minister over-riding departmental advice).

KC is saying that there shouldn't be talk of closure; which has made me wonder if they were bluffing at some point and now find themselves having to live up to their word or renege rather more publicly than they might like.

If the Spectator article is accurate, what KC said about the MH of the donor is appalling. That alone makes me very uneasy.

Do you have a link to the other thread?

I'm guessing maybe this?
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/2416795-Government-cuts-hit-Kids-Company-and-Camila-Batmanghelidjh-is-stepping-down

Basically, the sooner this dangerous fucking scam of a charity is shut down, the better.
Batmangelidh is an ego-tripping, toxic idiot, whose methods not only don't work but are actually putting children in danger: there is more and more coming out about violence and abuse within Kids Company centres.

She's been shouting for years about how wonderful she is, there's been no independent evidence that any of her woowoo bullshit works, no proper accounting - if you are running any kind of organisation that recieves public money, you need to be able to indicate what you are spending it on. It's not unreasonable to spend money on food or necessities for clients but if (as KC claimed) you are feeding x amount of children breakfast a week, it's not remotely unreasonable to be expected to produce either receipts for cornflakes, juice, bread etc or proof that these foods were donated by a local shop.

And the stated policy of never excluding or punishing or giving up on a child is all very well but you need to be able to keep your clients safe from EACH OTHER which they appear not to have bothered with as magic Camilla's unconditional love would stop them knifing each other. Somehow.

A lot of organisations suffer from 'founder syndrome' where a (sometimes brilliant) person starts an organisation and grows it but can't recognise the point where it needs more than their skills.

I also fail to understand how the children are subject to such serious abuse yet seem to be left at home/no child protection or care proceedings being initiated. KC say they fill the gaps left by lack of social services resources but a) that's bollocks because they aren't a statutory agency therefore cannot carry out CP investigations or remove children from abusive families and b) if there are abused children in these numbers being seen by KC with no statutory involvement that's a national fucking disgrace on a par with the Rochdale abuse ring. Or they aren't passing on CP concerns!?

It wasn't an £800,000 wage bill though, it was £800k worth of paye tax which had to be written off by the government last year, because KC had "forgotten" they had to pay it and didn't have the money.

So any charity which has had £25 million of public money in the last few years and can't organise itself to pay their paye bill is being run by idiots, whichever way you look at it.

It wasn't an £800,000 wage bill though, it was £800k worth of paye tax which had to be written off by the government last year, because KC had "forgotten" they had to pay it and didn't have the money.

I think it was an £800K wage bill. There was a similar amount owed in PAYE written off in addition to this.

£800k seems a huge bill for a month's wages! How many staff are employed?!

Sorry ItsAll, you are of course correct

600 paid staff.

Wow. So their wage bill is £800k monthly and they have had to sack the boss to get the grant of £3m. That's only 4 months wages. How can they be a sustainable charity if they had no cash to pay their staff until they got a one off (and very controversial, within government as well as without) handout? How much longer could they function for in any case?

Blimey if you scale that up their annual salary expenditure is over £9million that's huge.

pseudo science speak - about children imbibing abuse and holding on to it "at a cellular level" in their bodies which had to be massaged away

That sounds really alarming. If it was a man saying that we'd have some very serious concerns indeed.

I'm also worried about the handing out money thing, not because it might not be needed, I'm sure it could be – but because of the potential for vulnerable young people to be exploited – made to go and get the money to hand over to a drug-abusing parent for example (quite aside from the drug-buying power it gives them in itself).

Small amounts of money for bus fares, proving meals etc is different but large sums could be going to some seriously dodgy recipients.

The "flamboyant" think is getting on my wick a bit as well. So she wears colourful clothes and has a foreign-sounding name. I'd despair of anyone who is bedazzled by that to the point they'd neglect to care whether the charity's books are in order. That's just a basic and I don't buy that it somehow explains why everything's gone to pot.

I'm sure Zandra Rhodes and Russell Brand and their work interests are subject to financial regulations like anyone else. Yes even though they do look a bit "flamboyant".

I do wonder where the money is actually going. I thought initially it was down to sloppy accounting - it's possible that a chaotically-run organisation would do things like forget to cancel direct debits when they change energy suppliers, or get hit with late payment fees because they lost relevant bills - as well as the amount of undocumented cash being given to clients.

I don't have that much of a problem with them handing children cash - I don't think it's a great idea but it's not the end of the world.

The biggest problem with this wretched 'charity' was always going to be the strong likelihood of a lot of its 'clients' ending up worse off (in terms of being scared, traumatized, physically attacked) than before they went there in the first place. Because troubled teenagers quite often resort to violence - they don't know any other way of getting their point across; they are mentally ill; they are so traumatized by previous experience that they panic and lash out... aromatherapy massages and creative fingerpainting are not going to work on them instantly and, in the mean time, the smaller/weaker/younger ones have to be protected from the more aggressive ones. Set-ups like this often end up with the little, unaggressive ones being bullied not only by other attendees but by the staff, for not 'engaging with the process' (ie locking themselves in the loo to get away from someone who's threatened to stab them).

The whole business of alternative/unconventional therapy is crawling with stupid, harmful, arrogant people who make things worse because they have no idea what they are doing except that they are 'wonderful' and the world needs to be made aware of it.

I heard on the news that the annual running cost of Kids Company is £23 million*. If there's no more government support and if other donors desert them (likely) they'll have to shrink to a fraction of their current size or shut up shop.

Whatever happens there's going to be lots of parties highly motivated to blame others. About the only party coming out of this with clean hands is the Civil Service who spent years warning ministers something like this was coming.

• although it's always best to be sceptical about these kinds of figures

I do wonder where the money is actually going.

kidsco.org.uk/download/Annual_Report_2013.compressed.pdf (triggers download)
It's very colourful ...

Zandra Rhodes and Russell Brand aren't funded by the government or altruistic donors, though. Their income derives from selling their branded products, so financially their responsibilities are to the Inland Revenue and any staff they employ, and that's it.

CB got away with it for a long time partly because she was well-connected and an excellent self-publicist - but also because the one thing she was right about is that a lot of the children she was supposed to be helping were hard to help. Disturbed, deprived teenagers are often violent, they tell lies, they steal, they use drugs. They are disruptive even when people are trying to help them. Having CB there in her ridiculous wearable sofas, yelling on about how her magic powers could sort them out because she was so fucking special, made it easy for people to back away with a sigh of relief, maybe after handing over a fiver: someone else is fixing this mess, and aren't I wonderful for 'caring' as long as I don't have to break up a knife fight between two hulking great teenage boys or pick up syringes every time I'm cleaning the toilet.

One of the saddest and most disturbing things about this mess is that not one single person has come forward to say that going to KC turned his/her life around. The organisation has been running for over 20 years, and the only people with anything good to say about it are dimwit celebs with no direct experience (who liked contributing to an 'edgy' 'real' charity rather than a cats' home or something) and CB's circle of friends and fans.

People on the other thread are asking how you measure outcomes for children living in dire poverty etc

You can carry out proper longitudinal research using young people who have used the service. Is that happening?

There is also plenty of research about what works for young people in mental health crisis etc. If they are paying to train their staff in CBT, suicide prevention, counselling skills etc and can evidence how they have delivered those services that in itself is evidence of effectiveness.
Getting NEETS into ETE is, or should be, a key target of a young persons charity. That's a totally measurable and achievable performance indicator. Not sure why that's a controversial expectation to have of a publicly funded charity. How about getting kids registered with GPs and dentists and keeping records of that? Delivering sexual health workshops and getting nurses in to do chlamydia tests and administer larc? All measurable. I don't understand the outrage at the idea that a children's charity shouldn't have to evidence what it does.

This Guardian piece gets it about right.

Interestingly, SGB, you're wrong, but in a way which makes you very right. People have come forward to say they were helped by KC, but the article in which they did it actually makes the place look more, not less, dubious.

www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/15/without-it-i-would-have-given-up-three-women-on-how-kids-company-helped-them

Incidentally, it's odd (given the demographics of gangs, which are supposedly KC's main constituency) that the three are all women, but there might be all sorts of innocent explanations for that. I'm not sure that it's quite as accidental, but let's move on.

Of the three, one has a first from a decent university and another is a young litigation solicitor in a high-end firm of London property solicitors , so if indeed these are examples of people picked up from the gutter and taken to the heights then it's very impressive.

Except you read the stories, and there's no deprivation qua deprivation involved. The first is someone living in what appears to be a safe, suburban and supportive home who had mental health issues and had a weekly coffee, later dinner, with a nice lady from KC (and in passing, it's so nice it was dinner, not tea, isn't it?). Which is lovely, but is hardly dramatic interventions with da streetz, now, is it? The second is someone who fell out with her mother while doing her A Levels (in the meantime getting south London "student of the year") and lived in a hostel for a bit, and it was nice seeing someone from KC once a week.

So if KC's work is "we find nice aspirational middle class councillors to spend an hour a week with nice aspirational students who have fallen on hard times and help them get into decent universities" that's perfectly laudable, but it's hardly what KC says on the tin, is it? You don't need to talk about unconditional love and the healing power of woo when the real issue is writing a decent personal statement and making sure you get decent A2s, do you?

The third case is an adult who has mental health issues arising from being raped when she was younger who was given a crisis loan and some practical help in her twenties. Which is again perfectly laudable, and the sort of thing I think we'd all say was worth supporting, but not remotely the constituency CB claims to be working with; this is not the landscape of difficult to reach, risky young people with "cellular damage" or whatever crap she talks, this is about giving solid practical help to women with problems. Lots of charities do that, and do so without handing out envelopes of cash.

So the interesting thing is not that no-one has been found who's been a client - that might just mean they are helping the voiceless, or some such excuse - but that the three poster-children who are put up are simply not even in the same travelcard zone as the claimed constituency KC claim to work with.

Oh, and the Spectator article today is devastating. The emails from CB, if accurate (and there's no reason to believe they aren't) are just unhinged.

It is very telling that they don't seem to have much client feedback published, especially as apparently some of the YPs to onto be employed by them -you'd have thought that's be a good promotional thjing.

There is a letter from a YP in the front of the 2013 annual report that comes across as heavily coached at best.