Kids Company 2015 Newsletters: Final-Year Record

Kids Company’s February and March 2015 newsletters survive in full; the linked April page does not. The two recovered issues document corporate volunteering, storage, food-poverty work, a designer raffle, challenge events and the Year of the Bus auction during the charity’s final year.

These pages were published on 11 February and 13 March, less than five months before Kids Company ceased operating on 5 August 2015. They should be read in their own time: the copy presents an active organisation recruiting teams, staging events and raising money. A separate “what happened next” section adds the later financial and regulatory timeline without rewriting every early-2015 activity as a warning sign.

What survives from the 2015 newsletter sequence?

The February capture and March capture preserve the article bodies, dates and old links. Former Kids Company email addresses, donation pages, raffle tickets and event-registration routes are not live and should not be used.

Consolidating the three URLs into one annual record does not erase the missing page. April has its own indexed section and FAQ, so someone following that old backlink gets the precise answer: the URL existed, but no trustworthy text has survived in the sources checked.

February: volunteering packaged as a corporate fundraising product

The February newsletter opened with a Fun Day planned for 12 March at a Whitechapel school. A company could bring 15 to 25 volunteers for face painting, a bouncy castle, musical statues and a tomato-pot activity. Larger teams could add a workshop. The stated cost was £1,750.

That price changes how the opportunity should be understood. This was not simply “volunteer for free at a school”. It was a structured corporate-engagement package that combined staff participation, an activity day for children and fundraising income for Kids Company. The organisation supplied the school relationship, programme and coordination; the company supplied both people and money.

The issue calls the days highly anticipated and successful, but it gives no evaluation, child number for the specific date or breakdown of the £1,750. A modern reader should not infer that the fee was the cost of bouncy-castle hire, a donation net of delivery costs or a tax-deductible amount. It is the package price published at the time.

For current opportunities, use the separate UK guide to volunteering with children, which compares active organisations, commitment, checks and support. It deliberately does not reproduce the defunct Kids Company application route.

Safestore Deptford: 1,000 square feet as operational infrastructure

Kids Company thanked Safestore for donating 1,000 sq ft at its Deptford site as part of what the newsletter called a “Charity room in every store” initiative. The space was intended for donated beds, bedding and furniture that the charity could not hold elsewhere.

This item is easy to overlook because it is not a gala or consumer product. Operationally, it may have been one of the more practical partnerships in the issue. Donated furniture is useful only if it can be received, sorted, protected and matched to a household. Storage turned in-kind gifts from an immediate space problem into deployable stock.

Safestore’s current corporate information confirms the company and its long UK operating history, but the current About page does not document this exact 2015 allocation. The location, size, items and initiative wording therefore remain claims from the recovered newsletter. No commercial relationship with the current KidsCo site is implied.

Valentine’s Day: the key worker as the appeal’s central figure

The Valentine appeal focused on Kids Company key workers. It described them as additional or substitute parental figures who helped with food, clothing, school, health appointments, encouragement and emotional consistency. Donors were offered a printable or email Valentine card through a campaign page.

The important historical detail is not the expired card. It is the public explanation of the key-worker model: practical help and relationship were presented as inseparable. The March Mother’s Day copy developed the same theme, saying a key worker could provide maternal-style care where a young person lacked a reliable adult.

Those are Kids Company’s descriptions of its model, not proof that every young person received every listed intervention. The broader team and governance record explains the distinction between frontline staff, clinical workers, volunteers, senior leadership and trustees.

Hungry Childhoods, National Toast Day and what contemporaneous reporting confirms

The February newsletter said the Hungry Childhoods art exhibition, funded by Ella’s Kitchen, would run at St Mary Redcliffe Church in Bristol from 18 February to 2 April. It described work by children and young people about food insecurity and malnutrition, following earlier London and Bristol showings.

The newsletter also promoted the first National Toast Day on 24 February. The proposed mechanic was intentionally simple: eat toast and donate £2 per slice through a JustGiving page, with a prize draw involving a toaster and food hamper. The copy attributed broad “feel-good” claims about toast to Professor Tim Jacob of Cardiff University.

The event itself survives in later observance histories, including a record that the inaugural 24 February 2015 National Toast Day raised money for Kids Company. That does not validate the newsletter’s loosely phrased claim that toast had been “scientifically proven” to be Britain’s number-one feel-good food. A smell-and-memory observation cannot support every marketing superlative attached to it.

The strongest independent picture comes from the kitchens

Four days after the newsletter was posted, Jay Rayner reported from Kids Company’s food provision for the Observer. The 15 February 2015 feature described an after-school cooking session and a crowded meal at Arches II, including children’s accounts of missing breakfast, eating plain rice and coming to Kids Company when cupboards were empty.

The report corroborates that food was a live, substantial part of the service and that children interviewed described real insecurity. It does not establish national prevalence or prove every claim made in the exhibition. Rayner explicitly discussed how hard it was to derive robust population data for the lowest-income groups. The right use of the article is qualitative confirmation of the service and the experiences encountered there.

This is a stronger connection than simply listing “Hungry Childhoods” and moving on. The exhibition translated experiences into art for a public audience; the contemporaneous reporting went to the meal service and documented the daily setting behind that message. The Kids Company Bristol record provides the local context for the Redcliffe exhibition.

Year of the Bus: from 60 sculptures to more than £100,000 shared

Both newsletters promoted the 24 March Year of the Bus auction. Sixty sculptures based on the New Routemaster had been decorated by established and emerging artists and displayed on London walking trails. The newsletters correctly said proceeds would be split between Kids Company, Transaid and London Transport Museum.

The project has unusually strong public documentation:

• TfL’s October 2014 launch described four trails, up to 60 sculptures and the three intended beneficiary organisations.
• the Mayor of London’s disposal decision, signed on 25 March 2015, confirms the 60 sculptures and distribution of net proceeds to charitable institutions;
• TfL’s March board paper fixes the auction date at 24 March and again says proceeds would go to three charities;
• TfL’s 2014/15 annual report supplies the outcome: the auction made more than £100,000 for Kids Company, Transaid and London Transport Museum.

The final clause is essential. More than £100,000 was the combined result for three causes. The documents do not support saying Kids Company received £100,000. Nor does “net proceeds” necessarily equal the sum of hammer prices, because the mayoral decision contemplated deduction of TfL’s costs.

March: Mother’s Day, a florist pledge and the same campaign calendar

The March issue announced an updated corporate fundraising pack, then recast the key-worker story for Mother’s Day. It described young people who had taken on adult responsibilities in their families and positioned Kids Company’s reliable adult relationships as an additional source of care.

Scarlet & Violet: £10 from a £35 Sweetie Jar

London florist Scarlet & Violet pledged £10 from every £35 Sweetie Jar sold on 14 and 15 March. This is clearer than an undefined “share of proceeds”: it names the eligible product, retail price, contribution per sale and two-day window.

Even so, multiplication requires a unit count. The newsletter provides none, and no stable campaign settlement was located. The exact safe statement is that £10 per eligible jar was pledged—not that a particular total reached the charity. The old telephone number, email and address are historical and have not been republished as ordering instructions.

Nine designers and a £1 raffle ticket

February previewed an online raffle associated with Intelligent Life; March supplied more detail. Nine fashion and interiors designers who had featured in the magazine contributed prizes including a Bally leather overnight bag, a Rug Company rug and an Ercol chair hand-painted by Liberty designers. Tickets were £1, with proceeds described as going to Kids Company.

The recovered pages disagree slightly in how they name the magazine: February says “The Economist’s Intelligent Life”, while March says “The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine”. These refer to the same publication relationship, not two raffles. The March issue still does not give ticket sales, prize-delivery records or a final amount.

Why the repetition matters

Year of the Bus, Pico Aneto and the Superhero Fun Run appear in both issues. That was normal newsletter behaviour: repeat a future event until its deadline. It is not evidence of two auctions, two May climbs or two identical Regent’s Park runs.

A careful annual record therefore deduplicates campaigns while preserving which issue mentioned them. This makes it easier to see what genuinely changed between February and March: Safestore, Hungry Childhoods and Toast Day belonged to February; Mother’s Day, Scarlet & Violet and the corporate pack belonged to March.

Four kinds of support appear in the two issues

The newsletters use “support” as an umbrella term, but the underlying contributions were not interchangeable. Separating them makes the practical model clearer and prevents a donated room, an employee day and a product pledge from being misreported as equivalent cash gifts.

The £1,750 Fun Day is a good example of why the categories matter. The fee was not described as a simple unrestricted donation. It bought a structured day for a company team, including preparation and activities at a school, while also serving a fundraising purpose. To evaluate it properly, a reader would want to know whether the event happened, how many staff and children took part, what the £1,750 covered and how much remained for services. The advertisement alone answers none of those result questions.

Safestore is different again. If 1,000 square feet was provided free, the benefit was usable storage capacity for donated furniture, beds and bedding—not £1,000, and not automatically the commercial list price of the unit. Its real value would depend on the length of the arrangement, access terms, location and how much suitable stock moved through it. The newsletter supplies the claimed area and purpose, but no end date or utilisation record.

The product and raffle offers are the easiest to express as formulas but still require missing denominators. Scarlet & Violet’s maximum newsletter formula is eligible jars sold during 14–15 March multiplied by £10. The designer raffle formula is valid £1 tickets sold, less any stated processing treatment. The Year of the Bus is more complex because the later £100,000-plus result was shared among three organisations. None of those amounts can be assigned to Kids Company without the relevant sales, settlement or allocation record.

Finally, key-worker and food support should not be reduced to fundraising mechanics. The Valentine’s and Mother’s Day appeals used a personal relationship to explain why flexible funding mattered; the contemporary food reporting described meals and individual experiences. Those are service claims, and their strongest evaluation would follow continuity, reach and outcomes rather than counting flowers, page views or campaign mentions.

The Pico Aneto date error: a copied 2014 schedule

Both 2015 newsletters advertise Pico Aneto as:

“Friday 23 May – Sunday 25 May.”

That weekday/date combination is impossible in 2015. The 23rd was a Saturday, the 24th a Sunday and the 25th a Monday. It does, however, match 23–25 May 2014, which the January 2014 newsletter had advertised as Friday to Sunday before later 2014 issues moved the challenge to September.

The wording is also heavily recycled: both years describe a two-day ascent, glacier snow, ice axes, crampons, ropes and a torchlit final climb. The most defensible conclusion is that at least the calendar line in the 2015 copy was stale. The newsletters are not reliable evidence that a new climb took place on those exact dates.

This is more than a typo correction. It explains why expired event pages should not be rebuilt as if they were clean historical schedules. A useful archive preserves the original wording and then resolves the calendar conflict for the reader.

The Superhero Fun Run date does fit

By contrast, 17 May 2015 did fall on a Sunday, matching the newsletter’s Regent’s Park Superhero Fun Run listing. The copy offered 5 km and 10 km distances, a £22 registration fee and suggested sponsorship of £100 or £200 depending on distance. That makes the date internally coherent, though no Kids Company fundraising result is supplied.

What happened to the April 2015 newsletter?

The supplied broken-link export identifies `/media/2015/april-newsletter-2015`, but no usable page body was found across the archived routes and timestamps checked for this reconstruction. Unlike February and March, there is no title/date/body capture from which to produce an honest summary.

Three things can safely be said:

1. The URL is real evidence of a former page. It appears in the link export and follows the site’s 2015 media pattern.
2. The contents are unknown. A likely publication month does not reveal its stories, figures or calls to action.
3. Adjacent issues cannot fill the gap. February and March repeat campaigns, but that does not prove April did the same. Later events and the charity’s closure cannot be inserted and labelled “April newsletter”.

The old URL therefore belongs here, at an explicit archive-gap section, instead of returning a 404 or redirecting silently to unrelated content. If a genuine copy is later recovered from a recipient’s email, publisher backup or additional web archive, it can be added with its provenance.

What happened after the surviving newsletters?

The February and March issues give no sign that the organisation expected to close that summer. Later official evidence establishes the sequence without requiring hindsight speculation.

The amended Charity Commission inquiry report records that:

• Kids Company met the Commission on 31 March 2015 amid discussion of funding, staff and donor issues;
• on 6 April it said a £1.3m charitable-foundation grant would assist cash flow;
• by 27 May it said government funding had not been secured and downsizing would be necessary;
• on 23 June it warned that restructuring or closure might occur;
• it received a £3m government grant on 30 July;
• it ceased operating on 5 August and entered compulsory liquidation later that month.

A government-commissioned review of financial and governance controls had been conducted in March 2014 and was published after closure in August 2015. The later regulatory and parliamentary record is complex; this newsletter page uses it only to establish dates and the operational endpoint. The dedicated governance record explains the subsequent court and regulator findings in full.

2015 claim and result table

What the last surviving issues reveal

The public story in February and March was built around relationships and tangible acts: a key worker who turned up, a company team spending a day in a school, a storage room making donated beds usable, a £10 florist contribution, a meal, a bus sculpture and a sponsored run. This made support easy to picture.

The record also shows how newsletter production could drift. Reused campaign copy saved time, but the Pico Aneto weekday/date error shows the cost: once an old block was carried forward, readers could no longer tell when the challenge was meant to happen. The repeated raffle and bus items are legitimate reminders; the stale year-specific calendar is not.

Finally, the missing April page and August closure demonstrate why archival honesty is a feature, not a weakness. A complete history does not require pretending every document survived. It requires showing the available evidence, the absent piece and the boundary between them.

Browse the full Kids Company archive for the service, people, campaign and annual records reconstructed from the former site.

Frequently asked questions

Which Kids Company newsletters survive from 2015?

Full bodies survive for the February newsletter posted on 11 February and the March newsletter posted on 13 March. A linked April URL is known, but no trustworthy page body was recovered.

What was the £1,750 Fun Day?

It was a structured corporate volunteering and fundraising package for a team of roughly 15–25 people at a school, with children’s games and activities coordinated through Kids Company. The newsletter does not break down the fee or publish an event result.

Did Safestore donate 1,000 square feet to Kids Company?

The February newsletter says Safestore Deptford donated 1,000 sq ft for beds, bedding and furniture. A stable independent record of that exact allocation was not located, so it remains an attributed Kids Company statement.

How much did the Year of the Bus auction raise?

TfL’s annual report says the sculpture auction made more than £100,000 for three causes: Kids Company, Transaid and London Transport Museum. It does not state Kids Company’s individual share.

Was National Toast Day created for Kids Company?

The first event on 24 February 2015 was promoted as a Kids Company fundraiser, with a £2-per-slice donation idea. National Toast Day continued after the charity closed, but no final 2015 fundraising total was located.

What is wrong with the Pico Aneto date?

The 2015 newsletters say “Friday 23–Sunday 25 May”, but 23–25 May 2015 ran Saturday to Monday. The exact Friday-to-Sunday dates match 2014 copy, indicating that at least the calendar line was stale.

What was in the April 2015 newsletter?

It is not known. The old URL survives in link data, but no reliable title, body or capture was found. This page deliberately does not infer the contents from February, March or later events.

When did Kids Company close?

Kids Company ceased operating on 5 August 2015. The trustees later petitioned for winding up, and the Official Receiver was appointed liquidator that month.

Can I use the old donation, raffle, event or email links?

No. They belonged to time-limited 2015 campaigns run by an organisation that no longer operates. They are preserved only to document the old pages.