People
Director
Dr Fidèle Mutwarasibo
Fidèle is a pracademic (scholar-practitioner) who previously served in the voluntary sector at all levels (volunteer, executive, manager and trustee/director) in Central/East Africa, Ireland, and the UK. He still serves on voluntary sector boards and advisory committees. Fidèle joined The Open University’s (OU) Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership (CVSL) as a Visiting Research Fellow in 2017. He served as a consultant on several OU projects between 2018 and 2021. In 2021, Fidèle joined the Open University Business School as a full-time Lecturer in Work-Based Learning. In 2022, he took over the role of Director of CVSL. His specialist interests include leadership, collaboration, public service provision, equity, diversity, inclusion, belongingness, participation, representation, action research, knowledge exchange and racialised minority networks.
For more information, on Fidèle’s professional experience, publications, public engagement and research interest check out his profile on LinkedIn and Google Scholar.
Founder
Professor Siv Vangen
Siv is Professor of Collaborative Leadership, founding director and Chair of the Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership. Her research, which has spanned two decades, focuses on governing, leading and managing inter-organisational collaboration. The aim of Siv's research is to explore the complexity that underlies collaborative situations in practice, to investigate the challenges that are intrinsic to them and to develop conceptual frameworks that can in turn inform collaboration in practice.
Members
Dr Jacqueline Baxter
Professor Dr Jacqueline Baxter is Professor of Public Leadership and management and Director of the Centre for Research and Innovation in online business and legal education. She is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her previous edited books include: Creativity and Critique in online learning: (Baxter et al , 2017); School Inspectors: Policy Implementers, Policy Shapers in National Policy Contexts (Baxter, 2018) and Trust, Accountability and Capacity in Education System Reform (Ehren and Baxter, 2021). She has published over 25 Journal Article and 27 Chapters in books along with a Monograph (Baxter,2016). She is a qualified executive coach, and mentor. Her current research examines how people frame their leadership aspirations, particularly as self-perceived introverts. She tweets at: @drjacbaxter and you can find her bio on LinkedIn. Select this link to view her blogsite: Jacqueline Baxter blog
Dr Francesca Calo
Dr. Francesca Calo (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in Management at the Department of Public Leadership & Social Enterprise. Dr Calo research interests include social enterprise and third sector organisation in health and social care, impact evaluation methods and social innovation. Some of the topics she is currently researching are: coproduction and relation between third sector and public sector; third sector as a facilitator of integration of migrants and refugees; methods for the evaluation of social enterprise and third sector contribution to health and well-being; social innovation processes in rural area. Her research was funded by European Commission, Scottish Government and Italian philanthropic foundations.
Dr Wenjin Dai
Wenjin is a Senior Lecturer in Leadership in the Department of Public Leadership & Social Enterprise at The Open University Business School. She joined OU in July 2018, before that she worked in University of Portsmouth and University of Exeter. Her academic background is in the areas of Diversity, Leadership and Organisation Studies. She graduated with a PhD from the Centre for Leadership Studies, University of Exeter, and an MSc in Marketing from the University of Birmingham. Before moving to the UK, she worked as a managing consultant in Shanghai, China.
Building on her cross-cultural experience, Wenjin's research contributes to the diversity of knowledge in leadership and organisation studies by offering non-Anglophone understandings. She also approaches diversity as a research field through examining workplace experiences and intersectional influences such as gender, ethnicity, and motherhood. She is particularly interested in using ethnographic and arts-based methods exploring context-grounded meanings and lived experiences. Together with CVSL colleagues, she is currently leading an Open Societal Challenge project titled 'Supporting Diverse New Motherhoods for Work Inclusion'. Through working with voluntary and community organisations, the project aims to improve the understanding and practices of supporting ethnicity motherhoods among employers and society.
Dr Daniel Haslam
Specialist interests: the voluntary sector, collaboration, representation, Local Infrastructure Organisations, leadership, ethics and leadership in the voluntary sector, democracy, action research, engaged research, public sector. Connection with CVSL: Daniel was a PhD student in the centre when it was first founded. After finishing his studentship he worked in the voluntary sector before returning to the university first as a research assistant in CVSL and then as a lecturer in the department of Public Leadership and Social Enterprise (PuLSE).
Dr Inge Hill
Inge is Lecturer in Entrepreneurship. Her research investigates micro-exchanges processes constituting entrepreneuring, the enactment of entrepreneurial activities in context. Current research includes a knowledge exchange project on place-based business support in Scotland and England for craft entrepreneurs. Her creative industry research investigates community 'artists'. Inge has over 14 years' of experience as non-executive director for social enterprises, ranging from education to employability and local sustainability social missions. She is currently an elected Council member of the British Academy of Management. She is interested in talking to business support professionals having founded or working for social enterprises delivering business support services.
Dr Helena King
Helena is a transdisciplinary academic, specialising in integrative approaches to understanding health and health services. She is especially interested in the specialised healthcare needs of underserved communities, and the lived experience of health-states in different settings. Helena has a postgraduate certificate in academic practice, an APM project management qualification, a PhD in environmental psychology, and BA in Business Organisation. In addition to academic expertise she has third sector experience in health and social care practice and frontline community services. Her previous roles included a partnerships manager in a regional hospice supporting children and adults with life limiting conditions, a senior manager in a social enterprise helping people experiencing homelessness, and consultancy for a charity supporting people living with HIV. In these roles she has co-designed projects with practitioners, applied for grant and corporate funding, monitored project impacts and wrote reports for public sector and philanthropic funders. Recent research and knowledge exchange has involved working with national charities around policing occupational health, mental health, HIV, and social prescribing approaches.
Ronald Macintyre
Ronald completed his doctorate and MBA at the Open University Business School and teaches here part-time. His doctorate was based in CVSL and focussed on participatory design, organisational publicness and the Third Sector. He continues to research and practice that area as he explores how publics are folded into organisational decision-making. Most recently, he has been exploring critical theories of care and affect within design with colleagues in Australia.
While he does maintain academic connections, Ronald is principally a practitioner supporting public, private and third-sector organisations, mainly in the UK and Ireland. For example, he is part of the framework delivery programme supporting Social Innovation in the Highlands of Scotland and has the South of Scotland Enterprise innovation and business support contract. In Ireland, he works with Enterprise Ireland on their Culture of Innovation programme and with Science Foundation Ireland on their design innovation programme.
He lives on a small croft just outside the village where he grew up in the West Highlands of Scotland and is actively engaged in community development in the area. Over the years, Ronald also has held several directorships and non-exec roles in the voluntary and private sectors.
Liz Moody
Liz Moody is a Senior Lecturer in Work Based Learning in the Faculty of Business and Law at the Open University. She previously worked in the voluntary sector in a governing body of sport in an executive capacity and since as a volunteer board member and community organiser. She has a Master Degree in Business Administration and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Liz joined the Open University to work in Executive Education having worked for several years in health and pharmaceuticals and latterly running her own boutique consultancies working with private and public sector organisations, start-ups, social enterprises and charities. Her engagement in the third sector providing knowledge exchange and training opportunities led to an interest and some research into adult work-based learning engaging curiosity and interdisciplinary approaches to leadership education. She retains an interest in social mobility and recently researched how financial services and in particular Fintech can contribute to democratising access to finance and so support social mobility.
Since joining CVSL Liz has supported the aims of the centre through enabling better access to free learning resources. She has also embarked on a new study which will look at two rural community volunteer networks and relationships that influence the services offered by volunteers to users of their food banks.
Page Munro
Page Munro is a Partnerships Manager at the Open University in Scotland. She has worked at the OU for over 10 years in the areas of external engagement and partnerships. Her primary focus is on the OU in Scotland’s relationships with Third Sector organisations, from individual charities to larger membership organisations. She is currently managing the OU in Scotland’s new Third Sector Strategy which sets out the university’s approach to engaging with the sector, upskilling the workforce and widening access to education.
Dr Steven Parker
Steve's core focus is public management and administration, with a specialist interest in local government and public services delivery. Previously Steve worked as a social worker and manager in local government and this perspective informed his research and teaching interests.
His core interest in CVSL is to enhance the relationship between local government, the voluntary sector and social enterprises. He is particularly interested in procurement and commissioning practice between the public sector and local service providers.
Steve's research tends to centre around public management and administration, and he is currently focusing on:
- The connection and between public management and project management theories.
- Collaboration and engagement between town councils and higher tier local government authorities.
- Local government procurement, with a focus on fragmentation and integration in local government purchasing, and the pursuit of local social value.
- Implementing strategic social outcomes priorities at the front line.
Dr Nik Winchester
Nik Winchester is Senior Lecturer in Management at the Open University. His research is primarily focused on the field of business ethics. His empirical research has focused on the issue of the practice, perceptions and theorising of social justice in the context of global labour markets. His theoretical work has focused on the critique and development of ethical theory in the field, in particular, posthumanist, neo-materialist and discourse ethics. His approach emphasises the dynamic way in which our experience, perceptions and practices of ethics relate to ethical and moral theory. His work in CVSL has focused on the relation between leadership and ethics; current work explores the way in which care flows through leadership practice in a voluntary sector context and the tensions generated as care is enacted. Future research will look more broadly at ethics within the sector and different ways of understanding the relationship between leadership and ethics.
Visiting Research Fellows
Dr Helen Britton
Helen is an educational consultant, practitioner, researcher and entrepreneur. She has worked in pharmaceutical research and development and as a lecturer for regional and national educational organisations. She has utilised her commercial and educational backgrounds to develop, accredit and deliver a range of commercially viable mainstream and community-based training opportunities. These have included Access to Science and Technology pathway modules and a fully resourced institutional wide cross-curricular learning support initiative. Linking her interest in construction and building restoration, with her interests in education, training and skills-development, she has initiated, raised the funding for, and delivered many capital projects involving multi-agency delivery. In addition to her work in education and training, Helen runs a successful property restoration, renovation and lettings business. Her research interests encompass the discourse around sustainability, resilience, trust and collaboration
Dr Carol Jacklin-Jarvis
Carol's main focus is in research, teaching and interactions with voluntary organisations in the everyday reality of leading in and through voluntary and community action. She completed her PhD at The Open University in 2014, with a particular focus on collaboration between voluntary and public sectors in the context of children’s services. More recently her research has explored:
- Leadership of grassroots associations
- Leading voluntary organisations through digital transformation
- The development of leadership in voluntary and community settings
- The voluntary and community sector’s contribution to leadership of place, including the importance of infrastructure organisations.
She is also a trustee of Voluntary Sector Studies Network and a volunteer in her local community, currently developing a new homelessness project and fundraising for a baby bank. She previously acted as CVSL Director and prioritise sharing insights from her own research and from the Centre through workshops and other learning activities with sector organisations. For more information about her work on these topics or to enquire about a workshop, please make contact with her via email. From 2024 she will be a Visiting Fellow, formerly Senior Lecturer and CVSL Director.
Dr James Rees
James is Deputy Director of the Institute for Community Research and Development at the University of Wolverhampton. He was previously the Anthony Nutt Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership. Recent research has focused on the role of the third sector in service delivery, cross-sectoral partnership, commissioning, and organisational change and the role of citizens and service users, drawing on a range of theoretical traditions in the fields of governance and organisational studies.
Sally Vivyan
Sally is a visiting research fellow at CVSL, having been an affiliated PhD student until September 2023. As well as her PhD, Sally holds an MSc in Development Management from the OU and a BSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics. Sally’s research focuses on the practice of small charities in the UK voluntary sector with special interests in refugee charities, environmental charities and grant making practice. Sally helped to run an international development NGO for 12 years prior to her PhD and now works in grant making with particular focuses on climate change and education in the UK, Ghana and wider global south.
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