Third Sector Research Centre
Seminar Series
TSRC would like to invite you to a seminar on third sector research:
Registration is not required please just come along.
An ‘unusual jewel’: reflections on the demise of
Kids Company
Rob Macmillan
Date: Tuesday 8th December 2015
Time: 3pm – 5pm
Place: Room 427, Muirhead Tower, University of Birmingham
Kids Company, a high profile charity founded in 1996 to work with severely
disadvantaged young people, became insolvent and closed its doors in August 2015
after a period of intense media scrutiny and an apparent stand-off with the UK
government over funding. A number of investigations and inquiries about the charity
are in train, including by the Charity Commission and two Parliamentary Select
Committees. Given the political sensitivity of the issues at stake, the possibility of a
definitive explanation for its closure looks rather remote, at least in the short term.
Yet there is no shortage of analysis and attempts to make sense of its demise. This
seminar will examine the wider debate about Kids Company’s closure in order to
address the broader question of what it can tell us about the relationship between the
third sector, social policy and the state. It will offer a first account of four general field
processes – animation, escalation, distinction and translation – in operation in the
wider conversation about very public closure of a major charity.
Rob Macmillan is a Research Fellow at the Third Sector Research Centre at
Birmingham University. He has been involved in research on the third sector for over
15 years. His main research interests are around the relationship between the third
sector, the state and markets, the changing field of third sector capacity-building and
infrastructure, and the development and application of field theory in third sector
research.