Thursday 5 March 2026 | 9.30am to 12.30pm | Online via Zoom
Ticket prices: Members £43 | Non-Members £65

Challenge perceptions, reframe your teams, and ignite new ways of thinking about volunteering.

How do your current assumptions about volunteers and paid staff shape the way your organisation works? What might change if we reimagined the idea of ‘one team’ in the voluntary sector? And how could exploring new academic and conceptual frameworks transform the way you lead and structure your team?

This training session is aimed at senior leaders in volunteering who are ready to have their perceptions and preconceptions challenged. Your facilitators, Professor Anne-marie Greene and Professor Jenna Ward, are leading researchers who have spent the last twelve years exploring and questioning the well-accepted norms that define volunteering and organisational life.

In this reflective and engaging session, you’ll be introduced to concepts including master frames, collective action frames, and cognitive and emotional resonance. Together, you’ll consider how these ideas can inform new approaches to working with volunteer and paid teams, reshaping your structures, and leading change. Designed as a safe and intellectually stimulating space, the session will encourage dialogue, curiosity, and challenge – between participants and with the facilitators themselves.

You will:

• Explore how effective it really is to position volunteers and paid staff as ‘one team’.
• Understand how effective volunteer management is influenced by the concepts of frame and resonance.
• Appreciate the similarities and differences between cognitive and emotional resonance, and how they impact the delivery of change.

About the trainers

Anne-marie Greene – Professor of Work and Diversity and Director of Research Impact at the School for Business and Society, University of York

Anne-marie researches equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in theory and practice. A particular research interest is the interface between work, life, family and community, especially where a sense of calling, mission or activism is required. This often concerns areas of work that stand outside of the standard employment relationship and which are less formally regulated, bringing with them challenges of management policy and practice and issues of inequality.

Research projects have involved volunteer managers and volunteers, clergy, actors, freelance creatives, diversity consultants and trade union representatives. Anne-marie is Artistic Director and Trustee of the Criterion Theatre, Coventry, a volunteer-run charity.

Jenna Ward – Professor of Organisation, Work and Emotion and Dean of the College of Business and Law at Coventry University

Jenna’s research focuses on exploring emotionality within organisations, organising and managing. Prioritising marginalised voices, Jenna employs and develops innovative arts-based research methods that complement her ethnographically informed research designs to observe and probe beyond the surface of both organisations and individual experiences of work and organisations.

Areas of interest include: emotional labour, dirty work, emotional dirty work, visual and arts-based methods, creative industries, health care, death work and the management and organisation of voluntary work and volunteers. Research has included working with organisations such as the Department of Health, the National Trust, the City of London, NHS, Samaritans and, most recently, England Netball.

About the Senior Leadership Series

The Senior Leadership Series: Rethinking, Developing and Leading for Impact is a professional development programme designed for senior leaders who:

• Have regional or national responsibility for volunteer services
• Manage teams of volunteer coordinators and volunteer support staff
• Lead remote or hybrid teams across multiple locations
• Need to influence senior executives and secure resources for volunteer programmes
• Want to develop future-focused leadership skills for the evolving volunteer sector

Each interactive session explores fresh perspectives on leadership, innovation, and team structures – blending research‑informed insight with practical tools to strengthen leadership capability and influence organisational culture.

Facilitated by sector experts and leading academics, the series creates space for reflection, challenge, and collaboration with peers who share a commitment to advancing volunteer leadership.

You can attend individual sessions or the full series, earning certificates for each session you complete and a programme certificate for full participation.

Upcoming sessions:
Reframing Volunteer Teams – 5 March 2026
Leading Leaders – 11 June 2026
Innovation and Change Leadership – 1 October 2026

AVM Members’ discount

AVM members are eligible for a discount on the event ticket price. Please login to your account so that your discount can be automatically applied.

If you’re not an AVM member, you can join AVM today to gain access to this event, as well as receiving lots of other benefits, including access to free member-only events, discounts for all public events and the annual AVM conference. 

You will also have access to the AVM BiteSize webcasts and AVM Replay videos of previous events, including our annual conference. Members also have the opportunity to join our Mentoring Scheme and build their professional network through AVM Connect.

Join AVM today to access your discount for this event.