Robin Grimwade

Pronouns: he/him

Robin has over 20 years international experience as a management executive, strategist, and change leader. He’s held various management and leadership roles with public, private, and not-for-profit organizations both within Australia and the United States.
Throughout his career he’s played a key role in strengthening the linkages between modern business practices and the natural resource, recreation, tourism, and park management sectors.

He’s played an active role in the shaping of natural and cultural resource planning policies; led major community planning, infrastructure, and business transformational projects; and spearheaded numerous public-private partnerships that have included the adaptive reuse of public assets for tourism, community recreation, and environmental education.

Robin has authored numerous technical papers, taught at universities and consulted on the formulation and review of management plans for local, regional, and state national parks, historic sites, and world heritage areas. He’s also played a key role in establishing an ongoing international program of benchmarking and best practices in parks and recreation management and the creation of a strategic alliance to conduct an ongoing program of research to improve the management effectiveness of parks and protected areas.

Prior to relocating to the United States in 2003, Robin was a CEO with the New South Wales Government in Australia where he successfully navigated complex political and business environments and balanced divergent economic, social, and environmental goals. This helped transform Australia’s most prestigious and intensively used parklands from a 100% reliance on tax funding to financial self-sufficiency in four years, creating a center of excellence and an internationally recognized model of urban sustainability.