Ensuring the wellbeing of you, your teams and your volunteers

7 December 2023 | 9:30am – 12:30pm 

Ticket prices: Members £25 | Non-members £40 | Online via Zoom

This workshop brings together speakers from Sustrans, Crisis UK and the Samaritans to share their experience of wellbeing strategies in volunteering

Bringing a blend of discussing theory and practical approaches to ensuring the wellbeing of volunteers, alongside approaches to ensuring the wellbeing of those volunteer supervisors who may have to manage different volunteer issues, we hope you will take away some ideas of how you can embed volunteer wellbeing as part of your strategy.

The event will round off with a 20 minute optional session, which includes some simple, effective relaxation and breathing techniques to calm the mind and relax the body – useful when you are feeling stressed and entering an unproductive space, followed by a short guided meditation.

This event will cover:

In this session you will have the opportunity to:

• Learn from research done by the Sustrans on how volunteering as an act achieves wellbeing and what makes a happy volunteer. Sustrans will share how they have used their research to further improve their volunteer experience and significantly increase their net promoter score in volunteers being happy to recommend them as a place to volunteer.
• Learn from Crisis UK about new initiatives they have introduced to support volunteers with wellbeing in their volunteering and beyond. In this session you will hear more about how Crisis is working to take a psychologically informed approach to volunteers and about the challenges they are encountering in introducing initiatives such as reflective practice for volunteers and wellbeing assistance programmes and the actions they plan to take to overcome this. They will also tell you more about what they learnt from doing workshops with volunteers about what does good look like.
• Learn about strategies for supporting the wellbeing of Volunteer Supervisors, including understanding what makes having conversations with supervisors about wellbeing difficult and how to have a good conversation and manage the emotional load.
• Learn some simple relaxation, breathing and meditation techniques that can be easily used to support your wellbeing and shared with others to help them.

Agenda

This is a half day event, starting at 9:30am, and will be on Zoom

9:30 – 9:45  Networking, introductions and welcome

9:45 – 10:00  Introductions to speakers and event

10:00 – 10:30  Katie Aartse-Tuyn and Hannah Johnson – Sustrans

10:30 – 11:00  Emma Vizor – Crisis UK

11:00 – 11:10  Break

11:10 – 11:50  Nicky Adams – Samaritans

11:50 – 12:10  Q&A

12:10 – 12:30 Vicky Peake – AVM (Optional relaxation session)

12:30  Event ends

About our speakers/ contributors

Katie Aartse-Tuyn is the current Head of Volunteering at Sustrans – leading UK-wide teams to maximise the impact of volunteering across the charity.  Katie is an innovative leader with 15 years of demonstrable strategic management experience in the third sector.  Katie is passionate about protecting the environment and promoting the impact that volunteering  has on individuals and communities as well as the organisations that involve them. 

Hannah Johnson is a researcher with experience in monitoring and evaluation with an interest in sustainability and society.  After a PhD, 18 years ago she pivoted from pure science into the world of evaluation in the environmental/charity sector.  She has worked at Sustrans for 11 years, and for six of those has been generating evidence to show the impact of 3,500 Sustrans volunteers.

Emma Vizor has worked in the volunteering sector for over 15 years in a range of roles and is now a Volunteering Partner at Crisis UK, where she leads on a range of volunteer initiatives across the UK including the volunteer offer for supporting those experiencing homelessness.  Emma is passionate about volunteer wellbeing and has been leading on implementing new initiatives to support this. Emma is an AVM Events Volunteer; a volunteer role she loves doing – ensuring opportunities for volunteering professionals to learn and network and encouraging sharing of best practice across the sector.

Nicky Adams works as a Senior Lecturer in HR and Leadership at the University of Wolverhampton.  She has been a listening volunteer with Samaritans for nearly 30 years, where she has held a variety of volunteer roles including an organisation-wide strategic learning and development role and senior volunteer leadership roles locally and regionally.  Nicky is currently Branch Director at her local branch, a volunteer role and runs her own consultancy.  She has delivered a range of coaching and learning interventions, much of it in the voluntary sector focusing on relationship building in different environments.  Her PhD research is in leadership development within volunteering. 

Vicky Peake is the Member Engagement and Events Officer at AVM.  Vicky has over 30 years experience in the third sector with diverse communities and beneficiary groups.  Her experience includes: growing high quality services in partnership with volunteers; fundraising and providing fundraising coaching, advice, support and training; and as a trainer and educator.  Vicky is also an experienced and qualified Qigong/Chi Kung teacher and has enjoyed teaching Qigong, mindfulness and meditation in a range of settings since 2004.

Making this event more accessible for you

We will always make captions available on Zoom, as standard. If you require lip speakers, please let us know: we can make up to two places available free of charge.

We may be able to send you slides in advance, if required. Please let us know when you check out.

If you need support to access this event, please let us know when you book. 

See our event and conference FAQs for more information on Zoom’s accessibility. If you have any questions ahead of booking, please do get in touch.

AVM members’ discount

AVM members are eligible for a discount on the event ticket price.  Please log in to your account: your discount will be automatically applied once you are logged in.

If you’re not an AVM member, you can join AVM today to access your discount to this, and future public events – including our annual conference, which takes place every October – as well as other benefits of AVM membership, including:

• Exclusive member-only events, including AVM’s book club  
• A back catalogue of selected past events (AVM Replay), in our Resources section of the website
• Exclusive webcasts (AVM BiteSize), in our Resources section of the website
• AVM Connect, which randomly connects you with another member for a chat, to expand your networks
• AVM’s mentoring programme
• A private member-only group on the Voluntary Voice online forum

Join AVM today to access your discount on your event.

Don’t delay: this event has limited places, so sign up today!

Terms and conditions of ticket sales

You can pay by credit card or request an invoice at the checkout. We do require payment to be made before the event.

The agenda is correct at time of publication. AVM will contact you about any significant changes in advance of the event.

See our full terms and conditions below, and familiarise yourselves with our cancellation policy, and payment terms below. 

We know that plans can change. Depending on when you cancel, we may be able to offer a partial ticket refund, or under certain circumstances we may be able to arrange for your ticket to be passed to one of your colleagues. As your ticket is unique to you, this includes the access links you have been sent, please get in touch with us if you need to pass your ticket on to a colleague. They will not be able to access the conference unless we have processed the swap. Where a non-member is taking a member’s place at the conference, we offer the option of purchasing membership for the non-member, or paying the balance of a non-member ticket.

AVM will not accept liability for any ability to attend this event due to technical issues with a delegate’s equipment. If technical difficulties prevent AVM from hosting this event, we will endeavour to reschedule the conference to another date, and a full or partial refund will be offered if the new date is unsuitable.

Full terms and conditions are below.