Woman’s journey of self-empowerment leads to Rotary
If this were a movie it would be a Hollywood salute to grit and gratitude, an inspirational biopic in which a determined woman survives life in a homeless shelter and repays the service organization that rescued her. Here is Janelle Hall, mid-2008, in her worn pink shelter robe, jobless after a turn mopping floors at a laundromat, a refugee from an in-law’s tiny apartment with her then-husband and four young children.
“Hours from the street” is how Hall describes the day she and her family got admitted to the shelter in Clifton, New Jersey. This was shortly after a Rotary district governor had called on Rotarians to set up a program to help families like hers battered by the Great Recession, and one volunteer, Bonnie Sirower, who was a board member at a nearby YMCA, was told about Hall.
“She was looking for a hand up, not a handout,” says Sirower, who was part of a team of Rotary members from District 7490 that spent weeks with Hall and others in need as part of the district program. They provided Christmas presents for her children, a wardrobe for job interviews, a bus pass to get her to those interviews, and then leads to a service organization that offered not only a job but child care for Hall’s kids, free. “It was like divine intervention,” says Hall.
The daughter of immigrant parents from Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, Hall had flunked out of college, overwhelmed with challenges — small children, an emotionally abusive husband, and “bad decisions.” So, with this chance for a second chance, the Rotary team helped locate a possible college and paid for her application fee.
From homelessness to family turmoil, Janelle Hall faced many challenges. Now she’s focused on helping others.
Image credit: Roshni Khatri
“There weren’t any computers at the shelter, forget a laptop,” remembers Hall. “I wrote my essay with a pencil on purple copy paper. My acceptance letter was mailed to the homeless shelter and I still have it today.”
Three years later she graduated from William Paterson University. Soon after getting a job, a coworker said, “C’mon, Janelle, why don’t we get ourselves a master’s degree!”
In Hall’s biopic the pages begin flying off the calendar: a master’s degree in public administration from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2013; a doctorate in public policy and administration in 2020 from Walden University, where another coworker urged they both enroll for a PhD. “Guess who got her degree first?” Hall says with a grin.
Hall is now an adjunct faculty member at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. She has been honored by local and state officials for her contributions to her community. She has written a motivational book titled The Daughter of Destiny, which maps her history and offers “8 steps [that] can lead you to personal empowerment.”
In her own climactic, destined moment of self-empowerment, Hall became the executive director of the United Passaic Organization, a broad-based service group for the city that helps families in need — and the very organization that once helped pay her rent years ago when she was struggling. Her story, not surprisingly, has compelled attention, especially among Rotary members. Early in 2024, for example, there she was addressing 300 people at a Rotary presidents-elect learning seminar in Whippany, New Jersey.
Janelle Hall
- PhD in public policy and administration, Walden University, 2020
- Adjunct faculty, Seton Hall University, 2023-present
- CEO, United Passaic Organization, 2021-present
“Let me introduce myself,” she told the audience, whereupon she removed the pink bathrobe she’d pulled on earlier, the very robe she had worn in the homeless shelter, to reveal a striking blue dress and her proud empowerment. “I am a homeowner and college professor. I sit on the Board of Governors at Fairleigh Dickinson. I have my own business called Beyond Inspired. I am the CEO of the very organization that I once received services from.”
With each accomplishment the room erupted in cheers, almost drowning out her conclusion: “And all the accomplishments I shared with you are thanks to the magic of Rotary.”
“It took her almost an hour to leave the ballroom after her speech,” Sirower reports. “Everybody kept wanting to talk to her. And she made a promise to me at that time that she would start her own Passaic Rotary club to replace the one our district had lost during COVID.”
Within months, Hall had recruited 25 members and soon after, in February 2025, the Rotary Club of Passaic was officially chartered with Hall now serving as its president.
The club has already hosted its first retreat and is planning an international service trip to the Dominican Republic, which won’t be Hall’s first trip out of the country. In 2024 she was part of an organized trip to Ghana that she describes as a “quest for spiritual growth” and part of efforts “to reunite ... Africans and the global diaspora.” The most meaningful part for her turned out to be a visit to an orphanage where Hall distributed 250 schoolbooks donated by a childhood friend and school principal, Tiffany Crockett, who is also a charter member of Hall’s Rotary club.
Janelle Hall helped charter the Rotary Club of Passaic in February and serves as its president.
Image credit: Roshni Khatri
“You surround yourself with change agents. You want to challenge one another,” Crockett says in describing her longtime relationship with Hall.
Hall’s own journey has had no shortage of challenges. She says her husband did not physically abuse her but chipped away at her sense of self in other ways: verbal abuse, denial of control, restriction of access to friends, and a growing isolation. At age 21, “young [and] inexperienced,” Hall married a man nearly twice her age. “My family essentially disowned me because of the choice I made,” she writes in The Daughter of Destiny. She nevertheless kept her father company in the months before his death from leukemia in 2019 and helped her siblings take care of their mother, who had Alzheimer’s, until she died in 2021.
There is much to be thankful for. Her children are grown; three of them are currently in college. Hall herself has “taken back ownership of my name.” “My divorce is final!” she writes in her book. “When the judge banged his gavel, he gave me full custody of my destiny.”
“Your journey in life is how you use your success to help others,” Hall says. “Things may seem dim or dark for a reason. It’s up to you to be a beacon so others can understand that darkness is just temporary.” Roll credits. Close curtain.
This story originally appeared in the December 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.