I use the term love quite freely. I love cooking. I love the X Factor. I love when the weather is crisp and leaves are on the ground just waiting to be kicked. I of course love my family. In all honesty, I love lots of things. Since working for the Hub though, I have also developed a new type of Love. One I like to call ‘Project Love’.
Project Love occurs when you just LOVE someones project (who’d have guessed eh?!). Of course all Hub members and associates do amazing things but there are just some organisations out there, that us Hosts have a soft spot for. We usually keep them secret (it’s not nice to show favouritism after all!) but today, I just can’t hold my love for one particular project, in any longer. So here goes….
I LOVE KIDS COMPANY!
This is the KidsCo philosophy:
Kids Company aims to promote and support emotional well-being. Our approach is rooted in attachment theory and a belief in the importance of ’loving care’. We start by solving practical problems such as housing, health and nutrition, in the hope of restoring some consistency to young people’s lives, and so reducing their loneliness and trauma. From here, the process of emotional repair can begin.
Experience has taught us that children who suffer trauma, abuse and neglect cope with their pain by shutting down their capacity to feel. Punishing these young people only cements their emotional coldness. We facilitate the healing process through the development of sustained, caring relationships, in which both children’s practical and emotional needs are taken care of.
This week, I received a copy of the Kids Co Winter Newsletter and just felt so inspired. One of the first paragraphs in the opening letter from Chief Exec, Camila Batmanghelidjh reads:
We have had a fantastic year. Of the children funded through our Government
grant, 84% are now in education, employment or training, when they were not
before. One hundred and twenty had no birth certificates and we’ve organised
those for them; 117 gained passports; 106 gained National Insurance numbers;
seventy-three received driving licences; 99 opened bank accounts; 57 started
university. For some, we have negotiated entries into top universities without
GCSE or A level qualifications. This is in the context of 400 young people
with serious emotional and behavioural difficulties whose problems were
compounded by extreme poverty.
This is despite a reduction in other donations due to the financial crisi (eek!) and posta strikes. Kids Co have done lots of other amazing things this year but the things detailed above really stood out to me. Things like obtaining a birth certificate will have such a dramatic effect on a child’s life – to begin a journey of feeling, of identity, of history, of being loved, of being valued. To happen at such an important stage in life can help determine the sort of person that child will become.
Kids Co also provides the opportunity to volunteer in exciting ways – for example, recently they have been looking for elves and a Santa to run their Xmas Grotto! And once, they needed someone to house a dog so one of their children to go into rehab (he refused to go until the dog, his best bud, was given a home while he was gone).
It is because Kids Co places such an importance on the little things, the big things and everything in betweem that I love them. And always will. Well done Kids Co, keep up the good work. You can donate to them here.
Holly x
