About the Speakers

Cliff Allum is an Associate Fellow at the Third Sector Research Centre, University of Birmingham, UK. He is a researcher and writer focusing mainly on the area of volunteering.  Prior to this he had been involved in both the UK and international voluntary sector including roles as CEO of Skillshare International and President of the International Forum for Volunteering in Development.  He has been a volunteer in grass roots football coaching and is currently involved in tennis coaching and tennis tournaments. Cliff is also National Treasurer and Trustee of the WEA, the largest voluntary sector provider of Adult Education in the UK.  He lives in Birmingham, UK.

Dr. Peter Devereux is coordinator of the SDG Unit he developed at Curtin University as well as the Sustainability, Ecology and Communities unit at Murdoch University. He is a co-chief investigator on a longitudinal research study of Australian Volunteers. He is on national and international volunteer research committees and coordinates the Western Australian SDG Network. Peter has focused on volunteering for development and sustainability policy, research and practice for 30 years and publishes and presents extensively in this area. Previously he worked on Volunteering and SDGs research in Myanmar; UN Volunteers HQ; as environmental adviser in Nicaragua, UN volunteer in Fiji, and manager of AVI’s Perth office.

Jean Tan is the Executive Director of the Singapore International Foundation (SIF), a non-profit dedicated to international peace-building and development. Prior to SIF, she served at the ministries of Manpower, Foreign Affairs, and Information and the Arts. Jean is a graduate of the National University of Singapore and was awarded the Singapore Government Merit Scholarship to pursue postgraduate studies in the United States. In her spare time, Jean volunteers on the Board of the International Forum on Development Service, a global network of volunteer-driven development agencies, and chairs its annual conference committee. She also serves on the Global Public Diplomacy Network as a Founder Board Member and on the Board of SG Enable, an agency dedicated to serving persons with disabilities.

Paul Reddish took up the post of Chief Executive of Volunteering Matters in September 2019. Volunteering Matters supports over 100 volunteering programmes throughout the UK, which in turn involve 30,000 volunteers.  They support communities to lead social change in critical areas such as isolation and loneliness, skills development, youth social action and the improvement of mental health and wellbeing.

Paul is currently chairing the national volunteering co-ordination response, made up of key leaders from across both government and the voluntary sector.

Prior to his current role, Paul was CEO of ProjectScotland help hundreds of young unemployed Scots every year to get on in life by helping them increase their skills and find what they really want to do through meaningful placements within Scotland’s not for profit sector, and also has held a number of senior roles in Royal Bank of Scotland Group.

As a volunteer, he is a founding trustee of one of the Scotland’s first community sports hubs – Inch Park Community Sports Club – who use sport as a tool to engage young people in some of Edinburgh’s most deprived areas.

Diana Djalalova is a public figure, federal expert, mentor of social projects, and Deputy Chairman of the Council of the Russian Association of Volunteer Centers. From January 2017 to the present she has been devoting her professional life to the Association of Volunteer Centers and the development of the infrastructure for supporting volunteering in Russia. Winner of the Moscow Masters 2015 competition in the Best Moscow City Youth Work Specialist nomination. Speaker of the international session with the participation of the President of the Russian Federation “Youth 2030” at the WFYS – 2017 (also organiser of the Festival), organiser of the All-Russian Mutual Aid Action #ALLTOGETHER (2020) that united more than 119,000 volunteers throughout Russia in helping people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Carmen Choy joined Standard Chartered Corporate Affairs in 2008 focusing on sustainability, sponsorship and brand management in Hong Kong. She was relocated to London in 2015 to lead Seeing is Believing, the Bank’s flagship community investment initiative that had contributed USD100million to eliminate avoidable blindness in Africa, Asia, Middle East and Latin American. She was relocated back to Hong Kong in 2019 and is now double hatting as Director of Employee Volunteering and Employability, managing global employee volunteering strategy and community investment programmes in youth employability.

Before joining Standard Chartered, Carmen worked for Deloitte on tax accounting, Invest Hong Kong of the Hong Kong Government on communications and the University of Hong Kong on community relations and fundraising.

She holds a MSc in Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an undergraduate degree in accounting from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.