Colin Atkinson

Colin is a Sport Developer in the Sport Culture & Integrity team at Sport Northern Ireland.

He is responsible for managing the delivery of the Sports Governance Academy initiative from a Northern Ireland perspective, by working in partnership with The Chartered Governance Institute and the Home Nations Sports Councils. Colin is passionate about establishing good governance culture and practice in sports organisations - without good governance organisations can never truly be successful in delivering their aims and objectives.

In his current role, he is responsible for ensuring organisations work through appropriate governance action plans to implement their *adopted Code of Good Governance (*organisations in Northern Ireland can adopt the Code of Good Governance for Northern Ireland, the Code for Sports Governance (UK) or the Governance Code for Sport (Ireland), depending on what they deem most appropriate for their region of working).

Areas of work include a range of initiatives to help organisations with on-going improvement (the Sports Governance Academy is one of the initiatives). These initiatives are also designed to enable organisations to move beyond pure compliance with their chosen Governance Code, to a place where they fully own and decide the choices that are right for their organisation.

Colin has been working in governance with sports organisations for the last ten years. His former roles include Rangers FC, Glasgow Community Planning and HMRC.

Colin’s background is with football and he is currently vice chair of the Irish FA Club Licensing Committee.

He holds a degree in Psychology (Queens University Belfast) and a MBA (Ulster University).