Our speaker this month is Karen Hurley.

Karen was born in the Medway area and has had an interesting and varied career. She has run a successful business in the hotel/catering sector and more recently, Karen’s focus has been related to social justice and housing/homelessness.

Her career has spanned employment in the public sector (local authority and criminal justice) and the voluntary/community sector in various parts of the country. She is currently Chief Executive of a local registered medium size charity called Medway Cyrenians (www.medwaycyrenians.org.uk ) a post held for past four years. Prior to that Karen worked in London homeless charity with a budget 60 times larger than her current one!

Karen has an academic background in psychology and social research, gained as a mature student with OU. Until recently she was a director for a national charity working with offenders. She lives with her partner Pete in Rainham and enjoys watercolour painting, Italy, and her only grandson, but definitely not in that order!

Karen will be talking to us about the way charities can help private organisations improve their employee well-being, team-building and work satisfaction (and therefore staff retention rates) through corporate social responsibility engagement. She will also be talking about David Cameron’s Big Society and the issue of homelessness, which should give us plenty to think about and discuss.

I’m sure you agree, this promises to be a most interesting and intriguing talk, so I do hope you show your appreciation by giving Karen your full support and saving her a sandwich!!