Kids Company, the children’s charity, closed on 5 August 2015. Reactions across the country were mixed because Kids Company was very much an exotic curate’s egg – magically good in parts – but questionable and self-righteous in many of its practices.
The charity’s founder, Ms Camila Batmanghelidjh, established Kids Company in 1996 in Camberwell, South London, providing a range of support for extremely vulnerable children, including runaways, the neglected and those permanently excluded from school. It had a policy of never turning a child away.
Over the 19 years of its existence, the charismatic Ms Batmanghelidjh raised over £160 million from the good, bad and ugly – individuals, organisations and the government. In April 2013, it received £9 million from government to cover two years’ work and £30 million over its lifetime.
However, for several years, a number of people expressed serious concerns about the waste of resources, the most recent being Ms Camilla Long, correspondent and feature-writer of The Sunday Times, who in May 2015 visited the Kids Company. She wrote a semi-satirical piece on her findings on 5 July 2015 stating, in so many words, that she was mystified by what she saw during visits she had made over two days. Continue reading