A boy made good

At 15, Trevor Ferdinand, the six-foot leader of the notorious Peckham Boys gang, knew only two things - how to fight and how to do crime. He would swagger down the street, the hood of his tracksuit pulled menacingly over his head, twirling a butterfly switchblade in his hand, inspiring fear in anyone who crossed his path.

People had good reason to fear Trevor. He had no control over his anger: he was cold, feelingless, full of rage and passively suicidal. Instead of going to school like other 15-year-olds, he spent his days shoplifting in the West End, robbing people, smoking weed, dealing drugs and getting nicked for possession, turning his hand to every crime imaginable. Destroy, destroy, destroy - that was all Trevor knew.

Trevor and his fellow smirking criminals in the Peckham Boys were proud of the fact that they had been kicked out of every youth club in Southwark and Lambeth. It was their badge of honour. And so, when a new charity opened on their inner- city doorstep in Camberwell in 1997, they arrived to trash the place and have their fun.

This new charity was called Kids Company, and the story of how the staff - led by their visionary founder Camila Batmanghelidjh - won Trevor's trust and turned him round is one for the textbooks.

This Christmas, the Evening Standard is asking readers to donate generously to Kids Company, a remarkable London charity that takes exceptionally marginalised children - some of them violent young offenders, others just homeless and vulnerable, but all with tragic backgrounds - and turns them into law-abiding members of society.

The charity offers these children a unique joined-up service that includes food and clothing, therapy, help with finding housing, further education and job placements.

Its work - taking London's outcasts and returning them to society as useful citizens - costs £5,000 a year for each individual, a snip compared to the £56,000 burden on the taxpayer to keep them in prison.

And no story illustrates what the people at Kid's Charity do better than this one - because Trevor (not his real name) was not for turning. If they could reform him, they could reform anyone.

"There were about 100 of us and we went to Kids Company to mash up the place," recalls Trevor.

"On the first day we kicked the door down, picked up the tables and threw them across the room, slashed the sofas with knives until the stuffing came out. We swore, we spat, we smoked spliffs, we lit little fires on the floor with boxes of tissues."

Camila stood by and watched. "Why are you doing this?" she challenged them. "You are destroying something that is here for you."

The next day, Trevor and the gang returned even more malevolent. This time they kicked out the windows, slit the backs of the sofas, lit more fires, threw more chairs.

Again Camila stood by, a calm smile on her face. "Have you finished yet?" she asked. "I'd rather you do this to property than to a human being down the road."

For three months Trevor and his gang returned on a daily basis - and each day they would trash the place. Trevor could not understand why Camila did not call the police and have the gang evicted. Instead, she arrived every morning, greeting them warmly.

Most people would have given up on Trevor. But Camila - a psychotherapist with a social conscience - had the ability to look beyond the angry 15-year-old and see a badly damaged small boy who needed help.

One day, she pulled Trevor aside and said: "You are a leader. If you stop mashing the place, the others will follow."

"I had never thought of myself as a leader," recalls Trevor. "One day, I stopped being violent to prove her wrong. Then I noticed - the other guys stopped, too. I started to think, 'This woman has something'. She told me I had courage but for the wrong things. She wanted me to channel it."

It was a year before Trevor confided his most shameful secret to Camila: that he was illiterate. She had suspected as much. He also told her he had made a girl pregnant. "Don't you want to be able to read to your child?" Camila asked him. "It's too late for me," Trevor replied, thinking, if the Government can't get me to read, who can?

Kids Company began working intensively with Trevor, diagnosing him as dyslexic - something his primary school had never picked up. Staff began, painstakingly, to teach him to read and write, starting with sounding out the letters of the alphabet.

They also offered Trevor a daily allowance in the form of food vouchers, taught him to cook for himself, helped him claim housing benefit and pressured the local authority to get him a room in a hostel.

Trevor had been homeless for years, sleeping at different friends' hang-outs. "Wherever the wind carried me after a night of drugs and crime, that's where I ended up."

Kids Company imposed one condition: that he turn his back on drugs and crime.

"F*** your help," Trevor had retorted angrily.

"I can't let you run both sides of the party," Camila had said, standing her ground. "If you want to do crime I won't judge you, but I won't help you either."

Somewhere inside Trevor, the penny began to drop.

To channel Trevor's anger, which was still frighteningly close to the surface, Kids Company sent him to boxing classes at a local gym. And to show him that life could be fun, they took him (and others) on weekend trips to places he had never been - like the seaside, punting in Oxford, and Chessington theme park. "No one in my family had ever taken me anywhere," says Trevor.

In time, Trevor started to tell Camila the sordid story of his life. He had grown up the youngest of four children in a three-bedroom flat in Peckham. His father had been in prison ever since he could remember. His mother, a crack user, never showed any interest in him and never attended a single school meeting - even when it became clear that he had severe learning difficulties.

From 13, he voted with his feet and left both school and home for the cold embrace of the Peckham Boys gang, and a life shot through with crime, drugs and wheeling and dealing.

It is five years since Trevor - now aged 20 - first came to Kids Company. This is what he has achieved. He has learned to read and write. He is halfway through a four-year electrical technician's course at college. He has become financially independent, earning £400 a month doing part-time painting and decorating. And, yes, he hasn't done crime or drugs for three years.

He is still a work in progress, though. Recently, some gangsters came looking for him, trying to recruit him back to the street. When he refused, four of them set his place on fire. Trevor saw off the boys but the fire left him homeless.

Kids Company's in-house solicitor, Tony Owen, immediately wrote to Southwark council, adding Trevor to the list of 18 cases over which they were taking the local authority to court for not providing housing to homeless children. It took three months to get Trevor into secure accommodation, during which time he came perilously close to falling back into bad company.

"What I find amazing," reflects Trevor, "is that one woman could do all this for me. She saw my potential and then she showed it to me. Now I'm running with it. There are people counting on me now - especially my three-year-old daughter. One day, when she is older and I am successful, I will be able to tell her what I was and how I changed. And who I owe it to."