Ruth Leonard is Head of Volunteering Development at Macmillan Cancer Support and Chair of the UK’s Association of Volunteer Managers. https://volunteermanagers.org.uk
For Leonard, volunteer management is about empowering and enabling people to bring creativity and ingenuity to a solution to make a difference in their community.
Her current role is to consider strategically where volunteering can add value to developing solutions and to ensure a supportive infrastructure so people who want give their time can have a quality experience. Previously at Samaritans, which fired her passion and belief in volunteer led and delivered services, Leonard is concerned to enable individuals to bring their own energy and experience to co-design and deliver interventions.
Involved in volunteer management for nearly two decades, Leonard has significant experience at providing leadership on involving and engaging people, and is committed to ensuring others are able to develop these skills. With a background in journalism, she is interested in encouraging the voice of volunteers to be heard and fully inform a volunteer programme.
Leonard enjoys bringing together networks from the wider volunteer involving and statutory sectors and has been involved in several cross-sector pieces of work. She is the Chair of the Association of Volunteer Managers (AVM) in the United Kingdom, on whose behalf she submitted a paper to the Lords Inquiry on the Charitable Sector, which was referenced in their report of 2017. She also represented Volonteurope on a working group from across Europe which provided recommendations for a Policy Agenda on Volunteering, for the European Year of Volunteering 2011.
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ruthbleonard
@struthyb
