Speaker Meeting, 6.15 for 6.30pm

Having expressed an interest in becoming a Rotarian Joanna (Jo) Hartl was invited as a guest at this meeting.

First-time guests at our meetings are not normally required to do a talk and definitely not a “Job Talk”.  Job talks are required of new members but not before some 3 to 6 months after joining.  However, due to a change in his circumstances, the scheduled speaker could not come to this meeting and, to her great credit, Jo willingly stepped into the breach.  She offered to give us a talk about one particular employment she was in a few years ago.   

Jo, who now lives in Swindon, grew up in Notting Hill and Ealing and some time ago was employed as an administration manager for a large company.  Unfortunately she had to give that up to look after her elderly mother who needed care 24/7.  By the time Jo’s mother died she had developed a fondness for the care worker industry and consequently Jo returned to employment as a care worker co-ordinator.

She was responsible for a huge part of North London and had 65 care workers in her charge, all of them on zero hours contracts.  They were not paid for time travelling between calls, nor were they able to claim any travel expenses.  As a co-ordinator she tried to cluster their calls so that there was the shortest possible distances between them.  Jo found the work quite intense, as indeed did the actual care workers.  Often the working day was 14 hours long.  She had to liaise with the Department of Social Services and write lengthy reports.

She spent a lot of her time campaigning for better conditions for care workers urging particularly that they be employed rather than on zero hours contracts    She wrote lots of letters to MPs and others.  Sometimes they worked and sometimes not.

Jo is clearly a passionate and energised individual.  Just 7 years ago she entered Birkbeck School of Law in Bloomsbury and left 3 years later with a degree in law.

More recently she has been a volunteer at Swindon 105.5 FM Community Radio Station presenting a live programme “People Passion & Purpose” once a month.  She is a member of the Universal Peace Federation which is a global alliance of religious, academic, political and civic leaders, and organisations joined together to promote peace in which all people live together in harmony, cooperation and co-prosperity.

Lynn Withey had much pleasure in thanking Jo for being our guest speaker, much more so because she had just 5 minutes notice.  We look forward to seeing Jo again and perhaps, before too long, her induction into Rotary.