Robin Simpson has been Chief Executive of Creative Lives since September 2005.
Before joining Creative Lives (previously known as the Voluntary Arts Network and Voluntary Arts) he was Deputy Chief Executive of Making Music – the national the national umbrella body for amateur music making, supporting over 2,000 amateur music groups throughout the UK, including choirs, orchestras, and music promoters.
Previously Robin worked as General Manager of The British Federation of Festivals, supporting the volunteer organisers of more than 300 festivals of music, dance and speech & drama across the UK.
A keen amateur French horn player, Robin is a member of the Northampton Symphony Orchestra. Robin is a perennial ballroom dancing student, a frequent theatre-goer, an enthusiastic reader of contemporary fiction and an insatiable consumer of classical and world music.
Robin recently announced his intention to retire as Chief Executive of Creative Lives in May 2026.
In September 2025 I celebrated 20 years as Chief Executive of Creative Lives (formerly known as the Voluntary Arts Network and Voluntary Arts) and announced my intention to retire in May 2026. Over the past few months I have been reflecting on my 20 years at Creative Lives through 20 blog posts highlighting my favourite memories and our most significant achievements.
I have also written an article for Arts Professional reflecting on the changes in the perception and understanding of everyday creativity I have seen during my career:
Thirty years of everyday creativity: What has changed?
When I started as Chief Executive of the Voluntary Arts Network (VAN), in September 2005, I was keen to develop a culture of knowledge-sharing and openness within the organisation. I inherited a very disparate organisation with 20 staff in 5 offices across the UK. Given that I was going to be working from home and not seeing my staff or Board members that frequently, I wanted a way to unite us and make us all feel involved. I was also, as a first-time Chief Executive taking over from the person who had led the organisation for most of its existence, wary of the need to build the confidence of my Board and staff in my own abilities and motivations.
At the end of my first week in post at VAN I sent my first email newsletter to all staff and Board members. I called it ‘The Inside Lane’ (an allusion to driving the VAN) aimed at my colleagues inside the organisation. [The first edition of The Inside Lane was subtitled “A week behind the VAN wheel …” and the following weeks were headed “More VAN journeys …”, “Moving through the VAN gears …”, “Clocking up the VAN miles …”, “Mirror, signal, manoeuvre …”, “A week on the open road …” etc until the VAN metaphor ran out of petrol and was quietly parked in December 2005.]
The Inside Lane became a weekly ritual for me: this afternoon I will be sending edition 934, having only missed, over the past 20 years, those weeks when I was actually on holiday. In this weekly email (rebranded as ‘Our Creative Lives’ in 2024) I have reported on what I have been doing – where I’ve been and who I’ve seen. I also told everyone where I was going to be the following week and finished with a cultural highlight – a play, book, film or concert that I would recommend.
Reporting on my activities each week made me assess each meeting, seminar or conference and try to identify something I got out of them. I found this a very useful way of reflecting on the week. Psychologically, sending the email newsletter on Friday afternoon always gave me a sense of ‘closure’ and allowed me to switch off for the weekend. It also provided me with a valuable record of my activities – written while the memories were still fresh – which made writing quarterly Board reports etc much easier. [This series of blog posts, reflecting on my 20 years at Creative Lives have been put together using the relevant entries from The Inside Lane.]
The degree of openness I employed about leads I was following and where I thought they might take us served to develop trust with my staff and often resulted in people offering constructive comments or alerting me to connections I would otherwise have missed. Taking a blanket approach to sharing this information amongst all staff threw up personal interests and contacts that I had not anticipated, rarely from the people I would have thought of consulting about a particular topic.
Telling everyone my plans for the following week – apart from being a practical guide to where to find me, for anyone who wanted to get hold of me – also provided an opportunity for people to bring to my attention things that might prove useful in relation to the meetings I would be attending etc.
The ‘cultural highlights’ section was partly intended as a bit of light relief but was also a deliberate attempt to connect (in an organisation where most of the staff and volunteers are themselves involved in some voluntary arts or crafts) with those people in the organisation with whom I didn’t have much direct contact. For the staff beyond my direct reports it was often easier to send a message to the Chief Executive responding to his comments on a new film or book than to bypass their manager on a work topic. Writing about my own cultural experiences was also intended to ‘humanise’ the Chief Executive – emphasising my own wide-ranging cultural interests (to improve my credibility as the leader of an arts organisation!) and sending a constant message about the importance of having a life outside work. This ‘pick of the week’ section quickly became the most popular part of the newsletter (with some Board members sheepishly admitting it was the only bit they read!).
Over the years my newsletter also included snapshots, on a rolling basis, of what each of our staff teams was doing. My cultural ‘picks of the week’ became a public blog: Cultural Dessert and I started a photo blog documenting my travels around the country: Cultural Outlook. For a while I shared my reports of external meetings, conferences and advocacy work (but not our internal meetings) through another public blog: Cultural Playing Field).
The role of Chief Executive can be very lonely and it’s extremely difficult to know whether you are doing a good job. Writing my weekly email newsletter and related blogs became an essential part of the way I work, giving a shape to my week, forcing me to reflect on my work and proving effective in sharing information and bonding a disparate organisation.
The archive of those 934 weekly newsletters now provides a detailed history of Creative Lives from 2005 – 2026. As I approach my retirement it has been wonderful to explore this diary of my time as Chief Executive and to reflect on how much the organisation has achieved. I have been incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to lead Creative Lives over this fascinating period and immensely grateful to all the staff, Trustees, freelancers, volunteers, partners, funders and friends who have helped the organisation to make such an amazing impact.
Edenderry is a small, historic market town in north County Offaly in the Midlands of Ireland, sitting by the Grand Canal on the edge of the Bog of Allen, about an hour west of Dublin. Over the past five years this little town, with a population of around 8,000 people, has become disproportionately famous within Creative Lives and the wider sector we engage with, as a result of our long-running Creative Places Edenderry project.
In 2021 we secured a substantial three-year grant from the Arts Council of Ireland, under its new Creative Places national programme to work in Edenderry. Creative Places is the Irish equivalent of Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme. The Arts Council said its panel “considered this to be an excellent application” and it was the most fantastic coincidence that this good news arrived on Thursday 10 June 2021 in the middle of our 30th birthday celebrations.
The grant was the result of months of work by our Ireland Director, Damien McGlynn, who had been developing our bid, aiming to build on an existing network that his predecessor Kevin Murphy had helped to establish in Edenderry a few years earlier. By October 2021 the first meeting of the new Creative Places Edenderry steering committee had been held. Early in 2022, Damien met the organisers of the town’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, the local Women’s Shed, a line dancing teacher, local library staff and some tattoo artists – all on one day!
When Damien left us in September 2022 to become Director of Create, we recruited Seonaid Murray as our new Creative Places Edenderry Coordinator. Seonaid came to us from the Black Box in Belfast and had also been one of our volunteer Creative Advisers. It would prove to be an inspired appointment.
In June 2023 I made my first visit to Edenderry with Seonaid. In the morning we joined the weekly visual art workshop for people who identify as disabled, at Edenderry Parish Centre, led by art therapist Eleanor Farrelly. It was wonderful to see a packed room of enthusiastic participants for whom these weekly sessions had become a real highlight. We were joined by Sally O’Leary, the Arts Officer at Offaly County Council, who emphasised how impressed she had been with the range of creative activities that Seonaid had managed to start. That afternoon we met Nesrin El Azaly and Eithne Quinn – two local volunteers from the Creative Edenderry network. It was lovely to chat to them in the famous Eden Deli – the café Damien had quickly established as the social meeting place for the project. We also met recipients of our first round of creative grants at Edenderry Library. It was fantastic to see how our grants had quickly created connections between groups – most of whom hadn’t previously known each other. My visit was really enjoyable and a helpful reminder of why we embarked on this place-based development project.
The Grand Canal, Edenderry
In November 2023, I returned to Edenderry for a full day of discussions with people who had taken part in Creative Places activities, alongside Amanda Smethurst, one of the team evaluating the national programme for the Arts Council. It was a fascinating day. We heard how our events had brought people into Edenderry Library who had never been there before and who had now become members. People praised the programme for its inclusivity and one woman told us she had recently attended her first Muslim wedding because of friends she had made through Creative Places Edenderry. We heard from the mother of a teenager with Asperger’s who had gained confidence from playing with his band at one of our events. The local Community Development Officer told us that the project had had a noticeable effect on people from the two ends of the town connecting more with each other. Among the many positive stories it was clear that our programme was making local residents feel more proud of Edenderry.
In May 2024, Seonaid and I took part in a community panel session to choose four artists to receive commissions. It was very interesting to see how the Edenderry residents on the panel based their decisions almost entirely on the concept of each proposed project and were much less concerned with how well the applications were written. It was fascinating to watch the panel working gradually towards a consensus.
In August 2024, Seonaid and I were back in Edenderry to visit some of the people, places and organisations that had been part of the project. It was great to see the wonderful new mural at The Cabin, the wooden fish that now adorn the Grand Canal wall, and the Wings of Edenderry glass sculpture, newly installed in Edenderry Library. It was very moving to hear from two local residents how helpful they had found the activities as they coped with bereavement. And it was fascinating to hear how the project is changing people’s opinions about the place where they live, increasing a sense of identity with, and pride in, the town. We also visited the studios of Eden FM – the community radio station which has become an important link between many of the organisations involved in Creative Places Edenderry – and our visit quickly turned into a 30-minute radio interview.
From our experience in Edenderry I believe the Creative Places programme in Ireland has advantages compared to the Creative People and Places model developed by Arts Council England, simply because there is less money involved. The Arts Council funding we have received for Creative Places Edenderry is around a tenth the level of funding that the first round of Creative People and Places projects received from Arts Council England. This has necessarily focussed the Creative Places projects in Ireland in smaller towns and has made the creative activity more sustainable. We have had to develop initiatives that don’t require huge budgets and rely more on local artists and community groups. I am genuinely amazed how many creative groups and individuals we have found within the 8,000 residents of Edenderry and it has been wonderful to see so many people discovering that they are ‘artists’, building their skills and confidence and making important contributions to the quality of life in the town where they live.
The Cabin Mural, Edenderry – created by Sharon Regan and the local community as part of our Creative Places Edenderry project
Based on the strength of our work, the Arts Council continued to fund the project – first with a fourth year grant and then, in June 2025, with new funding to extend Creative Places Edenderry for a further two years. This makes it a six-year project, giving us a rare opportunity to explore how our place-based development model can work over a longer period of time.
Through the Edenderry project we have demonstrated the valuable role that a national organisation like Creative Lives can play in managing a local place-based development project. As Creative Places Edenderry Co-ordinator, Seonaid has benefited from Creative Lives’ award-winning governance, line-management, financial management (by the wonderful Lindsey Jackson), marketing and communications (utilising the services of our excellent Profile team, Gareth Coles and Kelly Donaldson). She has also had the peer support of our team of staff and freelancers working on similar place-based projects in England, Scotland and Wales.
We have seen distinct advantages in Creative Lives – a national organisation – working with local partners such as Offaly County Council and the Council Municipal District of Edenderry. Creative Lives brings national (and international) learning and profile to the Edenderry project and our Co-ordinator is able to act as a neutral outsider. This has helped us to focus on the long-term goal of the project to develop a sustainable cultural eco-system within Edenderry, rather than just creating a model that depends on Creative Lives to service it. Our plan for years 5 & 6 of Creative Places Edenderry focusses on helping the local community to take more control of their own creative activities and supporting local organisations and individuals to apply for funding from a wider range of sources rather than relying on the small amount of funding distributed by the project.
During the period we have been running Creative Places Edenderry, Creative Lives has also made it part of our practice to ensure that each of our place projects engage freelancers from within the relevant local communities. In January 2026 we welcomed Jenny Bergin – a local artist who has been a stalwart supporter of the project since it started – as our new Freelance Project Support Worker in Edenderry.
One recurring message from everyone I have met in Edenderry is how much the success of the programme is a result of the excellent work Seonaid is doing in connecting people, artists and activities that were already in Edenderry but needed the catalyst of the Creative Places programme to bring them together, raise their profile and realise their potential. I was very impressed with Seonaid’s work from my first visit, and I remain so today. Creative Places Edenderry is an achievement I am immensely proud of.
Cultural Playing Field 