Ruth Leonard - Chair, Association of Volunteer Managers

Ruth is the Head of Volunteering Development and Operations at Macmillan Cancer Support, where her role is to consider strategically where volunteers could be involved in providing solutions and to ensure that there is a supportive infrastructure to enable these interventions to be co-designed with and delivered by volunteers. Before working with Macmillan she was part of the Samaritans Volunteering Team, which fired her passion for truly volunteer led services and belief in a model of volunteers being managed by volunteers. Ruth feels that volunteer management is about empowering and enabling people to bring creativity and ingenuity to a solution to be able to make a difference in their community. With a background in journalism she is interested in encouraging the voice of volunteers to be heard and fully inform a volunteer programme. She enjoys collaborative working; bringing together and being involved in networks from the wider volunteer involving and statutory sectors to creatively think about volunteering and community engagement issues and has been involved in several cross-sector pieces of work. Her personal volunteering includes being a Samaritans volunteer, a community mediator and a previous trustee with Prisoners Family and Friends Service.