Kids Company: Everybody Loses

Kids Company is closing, with about 24 hours’ notice for staff and its service users.

The children and young people attached to Kids Company projects, many of whom have profound barriers to thriving independently in mainstream society, are being given the following psychological messages:

a) This security blanket that represents something familiar to you is now gone. The staff you have learnt to trust are now not insured to keep seeing you.

b) The company that you have come to be familiar with and understand, is now being publicly called-out as a failure. Everything that stands, can quickly fall.

These are overwhelming signals to be giving any child or young adult, regardless of additional anxieties they may have. The suddenness of the charity’s closure and Camila Batmanghelidjh’s statement that the government have essentially sanctioned the ‘abandoning’ of thousands of its beneficiaries is of enormous concern to anyone working in education, youth services, social care or health. Actually, it should be of concern to everyone.

Photo: ITV

Photo: The Independent

Personal and professional hubris, and the politics of politics, seem to have created the worst possible outcome for this charity and its dependents. I use the word dependents deliberately, to include staff and volunteers, but also pointedly as there has been much criticism over the years about the Kids Company method of care, the darkest of which has pointed to bullying, abuse and the perpetuating of need - with some suggesting that there are instances of the charity needing needy young people, more than they actually need it.

For context and clarity - I have no vested interest in criticising or supporting Kids Company, other than that my own work has been supporting vulnerable young people for over a decade, so I am aware of the needs and challenges out there. I also have no evidence of specific allegations or incidents made against the organisation beyond what has been published in the press over the past few weeks. I do, however, have friends and colleagues who have vociferously undermined the Kids Company image to me in the past, warning not to touch them with a barge-pole. Lots of style, not much substance.

It probably doesn’t really need saying, but the genesis of Kids Company is from a good place and it was a small organisation frustrated by ineffective and/or under-resourced social care teams that sought to make a difference. The charity should never have needed to exist in the first place, but there was a gap and it got pro-active in trying to fill it. Whilst the numbers they claim to have helped are much in doubt, a child-centred environment that offers  sanctuary and nurture for those in most need is valuable even it only supports a handful of people.

But it has failed - and by saying so, I am now one of those voices joining the confusing and frightening messages for the service users who are now left to struggle with something new. Yet, it is absolutely essential that we recognise failure when it happens. Failure is not absolute; it is not the end point, it is the process by which things get better.

Kids Company seems to have got bloated and arrogant. Former senior staff complained about the organisational culture, led by Batmanghelidjh’s force of personality, rather than her acute business sense and strategic vision. Not all good leaders need to be expert finance managers, but good leaders sure as hell need to bring on board people who are - and listen to them especially when they tell you things you don’t want to hear.

Batmanghelidjh has the brand, the interesting and affable face of compassion and safeguarding. She speaks with ease and comfortably on Question Time and in front of large crowds. She stands out in a room, she gives off an entrepreneurial spirit - this is fundamental when winning favour and freedoms from Prime Ministers and civil servants. She is clearly colourful in every way. Politicians look good by being associated with this energy. 

But if you’re not delivering, it is meaningless. I don’t mean that Kids Company didn’t deliver individual care to individual young people - of course they did, and they almost certainly improved thousands of lives. But they didn’t deliver on the nuts and bolts of structure. Ideas are lost if you’ve got nothing to pin them to. Kids Company needed the charismatic resource investigator to go and win Coldplay’s £8m donation - but then it needed an extremely good Managing Director or CEO making that money last, and making that money provide the most effective service it can. Possibly the one thing worse than them not providing the service at all, is inflating the service so that it collapses when it is needed most. Everybody stands to lose except for expensive liquidators - skilled staff, vulnerable children, tax-payers, company creditors, the reputation of charitable causes.

Batmanghelidjh has stated on the website that her single mistake was not to raise more money. If she truly believes this then she becomes a poor example for other leaders in the voluntary sector. I hope, with time, she becomes more reflective about bigger leadership issues- as should we all when looking at how our businesses are run. Her intentions have been noble, her method has been caught short.

If you Google 'Kids Company' and select the images tab, you see Camila Batmanghelidjh in over 40% of the photos - many of which are of just her, or even her office. I can't think of one single other charity, claiming to intensively support 36,000 people each year, that would focus that much PR on its CEO, no matter how charismatic. 

The leadership got flattered by its own presentation here, and the Cabinet got lazy when seeking their press-friendly partners. If failure like this is going to happen, then it needs to fail properly. And by that, I mean it should never happen again.

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Richard Freeman is Director and Lead Consultant at always possible.

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