Leekbrookgull
Well-known member
Please.
giant walking fruit salad
If only they were allowed to use phrases like that on the 10' o'clock news.
It seems like they dished out a fair bit of money to kids and young people in cash, rather than through covering rental or utility costs. This money could then be spent on anything, i.e luxury goods, alcohol, drugs etc.
I'm just still yearning for The Day Today
The reporting of this has been pretty shoddy. What's being forgotten is that Kids Company looked after kids that had generally been abandoned by social services as they were too difficult to manage. Mrs Gwylan was a youth worker in Southwark for many years and had lots of dealings with KC - she says that they did wonders, even if their administration was (to put it mildly) haphazard.
But that's the rub. As this article points out, good administration costs money - and people moan about contributing to charities where a certain percentage goes on admin (even though that costs less).
The demise of Kids Company doesn't mean the problem children vanish: they will either be cared for my social services (which will cost a lot more than KC ) or simply abandoned ... so, a few months later we'll hear stories of children being raped by gangs or killed by their relatives, or something equally grim
Not a good few days for the party of responsible spending and parsimony ...£3M to a dodgy charity and £1Billion loss on flogging off RBS shares cheap to George Osborne's City chums.
That's the shame of it. Rather than just closing it down completely, an administrator should be placed so that the business side gets organised/ straightened, but the good work that this organisation has done, continues.
It's like throwing the baby out with the bath water, and the media won't care.
The reporting of this has been pretty shoddy. What's being forgotten is that Kids Company looked after kids that had generally been abandoned by social services as they were too difficult to manage.
I was treasurer of a charity for 12 years. There are very clear rules about accounting and payments (if you know where to look for them in all the bumf). However it is extremely easy to flout them. I never let anyone get away with anything, but my successor is having to deal with committee members urging spending on 'hospitality', covering first class air fares for invited speakers, the hiring of private cars to car people about, etc., and is finding it hard not to cave in to pressure.
I was also on the executive of another bigger charity (let's call it 'Kevin'), that at one point, was budgeting a quarter of a million quid every year for the 'Kevin annual meeting'. This included provision of free registration and lunches for Kevin members. I saw hundreds of luch bags left untaken a few years ago, at a cost of several thousand quid.
Charities can seek sponsorship for specific activities. Thus, the small charity for which I was treasurer had small meetings (100 attendees) that made a small profit due to clever seeking of sponsorship from Industry interested in the activities of the charity (medical research). By contrast, 'Kevin' obtained no sponsorship, despite having a full time employed meetings manager.
The difference between the two charities is my small one was brilliantly run by volunteers, none of whom were paid, whereas 'Kevin' was badly run, by rather self-regarding folk, with 10 full time staff including a CEO on about 90 grand a year. The latter could 'afford' to be profligate becuase of an income of over a million a year from Kevin publishing activities.
So, in the present case my guess is that the charity had more money than they initially needed (over 20 million from government over several years, was it not?), so 'expanded', employed staff, didn't manage spending properly, and had leadership with a sense of entitlement and naivety that failed to see the crash before it came. All rather sad.
Conclusion? I think the rules governing charities are too complex and too easy to disregard. If a charity gets a lawyer to write its constitution it won't understand what it means - it should be written by clever lay folk. And the treasurer needs to be a brutal ******* (like I was) prepared to have a stand up row and overrule even the CEO if needs be. A treasurer cannot be sacked from the executive of a charity just because the CEO can't get his/her way, and if the CEO tries the treasurer has the phone number of the charity commision . . . .
I heard yesterday an interview with someone at the Kids charity who dealt with accounts mention that she was very unhappy about 'spending'.
It wouldn't surprise me to find that the charity has been squandering money on inappropriate things, with insufficient oversight by its treasurer, probably mesmerised by the florid CEO.