Kids Company

I have been watching a recording of a Parliamentary Select Committee in which the founder of Kids Company, Camila Batmanghelidjh and the companies Chair of Trust, Alan Yentob were grilled by the committee of parliamentarians.

The committee sat on Thursday and I had heard snippets of the meeting and read reports in the news of the clash of personalities, particularly between the Committees Chair, Bernard Jenkins and Miss Batmanghelidjh.

Kids Company like many charities these days do the work of what used to be that of a government department. Charities have, over the years taken on their shoulders parts of the States responsibility to its electorate and vulnerable people depend on charities to function.

Kids Company was just such an organisation run and conceived by an extremely charismatic woman who, dressed in bright flamboyant clothes,  was dedicated to helping kids and young people who were so damaged by their upbringing they didn't fit the template which Social Services accept and by being on the fringes of society her clients were always vulnerable to being misrepresented.

How do you reach out to people who both self harm and harm others as a normal course of life.

How do you audit not only their progress but also the expenditure as a unit cost.

The Committee of Parliamentarians were hell bent on tying the company up in accounting procedures and questions of probity especially when it came to the responsibility of the Trust and its fiduciary commitment.
The question Batmanghelidjh kept asking "where was the governments responsibility towards these socially impoverished people" she was derided, bullied and told to be quiet by Jenkins in quite a most unsavoury manner.
Trial by media has made Kids Company and its founder almost indefensible. The company was responding to a situation which has no parallel and a typical company profile was inadequate to describe this funding of a service which had little in common with other welfare services. 

More a series of meeting places and tenuous communication projects which relied wholly on trust.

The money was spent on a hard core of administrators but relied heavily on people giving of their time or in the case of 'university health care students', picking up experience. 

In a hand to mouth operation where the recipients firstly needed money for either a fix or a stimulant and then, only after establishing the supply could you begin to work on the long and tenuous rehabilitation back into society. Only in this underworld does the hard headed "black is black and white is white" forensic accountancy, making every penny accountable and transparent,have little relevance.  

Only in the tidy mind of the mythical, unsullied parliamentarian could this discussion proceed but of course they are living in a parallel universe to the reality on the street and in this simple fact lies what is wrong in most societies, between the governor and the governed.