Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids Company shares her views on fundraising and the work of volunteer fundraisers.

"Fundraising is the lifeline of innovation. Kids Company experimented with new paradigms in order to support children who present with complex disturbance. We would not have been able to carry out original work and prove its efficacy if it wasn’t for the fact that through fundraising we had money we could spend which wasn’t being given to us by Government and restricted to their working models.

Once independent evaluations demonstrated that we were getting results of between 80% - 100% positive outcomes for the children we’d made our point – these children are not hard to reach but services out there may be.

Kids Company is now supporting other charities who work with similarly disturbed children. We are providing bespoke training and support, spreading the learning which our children shared with us.

Kids Company is hugely reliant on volunteer fundraisers. They often come up with such fantastic ideas and we’re happy to help them. Most recently, Holly and Sam Branson with Princess Beatrice and their friends endeavoured to set a world record of the largest group of people linked together to run the London Marathon. We designed a caterpillar costume with them and they raised vast amounts of money for a lot of charities. I love the commitment and enthusiasm of people like this. So no idea is impossible for us.

I’m very lucky. Every day I’m reminded of how important our work is as children make a shift from being mastered by their trauma to acquiring mastery over it. There’s nothing more moving than being in a position to restore dignity to a child whose being denied it through abuse.

My philosophy in life is that we can only do really important things when we realise we are personally not that important. Even though I’ve ended up being in the public eye, my real reward is delighting in the level of excellence that my team and the children continue to generate within the organisation. People often ask me ‘don’t you despair when you see so much challenge and deprivation every day?’ It is true that I’m a witness to a great deal of pain, but alongside it I see so much courage from the children. Their ability to forgive those who have harmed them and to seek hope when hopelessness would be easier is what inspires me.

Put simply, I’m in love with excellence and in pursuit of it I get rewarded with energy. If I wasn’t a human being I’d be a helicopter!"