Kathleen Jones BSc; MSc; Past Mayor of Gosport
Kathy was born in Gosport, attended local schools, and afterward gained her BSc at Portsmouth University and MSc at Southampton. She is happily married to Kevin and they have two grown-up sons and four wonderful grandchildren; they have worked and lived in the Gosport area for almost all their lives.
Having been involved in running two businesses, Kev Jones and Kev Jones and Son, for over 30 years Kathy enjoys dealing with people of all cultures and statuses. She also created a small enterprise to coach and motivate people to achieve their full potential by raising their self-esteem.
In 2011 she started working as a freelance business coach, enabling many small businesses to expand. Following always working earnestly in the local community, in 2017 Kathy was elected to the Gosport Borough Council. She worked with many in the Bridgemary community and because Kev Jones’ shops were the hub of the community, she is accessible and well-known to the residents. Kathy and Kev felt it was such a great honour to be elected Mayor of 2019 – 2020 and it was during this year that as well as attending over 350 engagements she augmented a project with churches to get all the homeless off of the streets for 8 weeks of the winter. Following on from this Gosport no longer has homeless people in our town centre.
As well as having worked in the Bridgemary community Kathy has a special allegiance to Bridgemary where her father being a master builder led a team of qualified and unqualified men who were inspired to build homes of their own. From that, the whole of the Woodside estate was built where families were proud of their efforts and had homes of their own which may have been out of reach had not the self-build programme flourished.
One thing that always sticks in Kathy’s mind is that when she visited a lady in Portal Road, she said ‘I always vote conservative because 30 years ago we were given the opportunity to buy our own home, and I am eternally grateful for that. In those days people like us never had aspirations of buying a house and here we are today in our own home.
Kathy is also proud of her husband Kev’s parents Maime and Tony Jones who with a team of amazing volunteers raised the funding to build the church and hall in Fisher Road.
Over the last three years, Kathy has worked tirelessly in the community in many ways in particular running a charity from the Gosport Community Hope Hub called Young Families Help. Their prime aim is to assist families in need particularly in Bridgemary but covering other parts of Gosport as well, where the need arises. You can follow it on Facebook Gosport Community Hope Hub.
Kathy confirms that the conservatives locally did such good work for the Gosport people and is determined to work hard to restore the faith in local politicians like her.
`Kathy's sentiment is that as all sorts of politicians and councillors are elected to represent the people who voted for them, we should be facing up to the issues which impact the residents daily, and not hiding behind party adherence. It's high time we had politicians who cared more about the fate of those they represent and less about being lackeys of the party line.
When Kathy lost her seat, along with 7 other good councillors, due mostly because of the shenanigans at Westminster, culminating in 30% of regular conservative voters staying at home, she said she would not run again. However, due to her view that if good people step down bad people step up she is again running in her home ward of Bridgemary. She trusts that all the wonderful people who voted for her in the last election will support her this time to enable her to continue the good work in the community.
