About us
A community anchor for health equity in Glasgow
We exist because geography, income, and social circumstance should never determine the quality of care a person receives — yet in Glasgow, they frequently do.
We exist because geography, income, and social circumstance should never determine the quality of care a person receives — yet in Glasgow, they frequently do.
Vibrant Health Advocates Glasgow is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation working at the intersection of community development and health equity. We exist because geography, income, and social circumstance should never determine the quality of care a person receives — yet in Glasgow, as in many post-industrial cities, they frequently do. Life expectancy in some parts of the East End and Govan remains sharply lower than in the city's more affluent neighbourhoods, and behind that statistic are thousands of individuals who feel invisible to the systems nominally designed to support them.
Our approach is grounded in the principle that people are experts in their own lives. We do not arrive in a community with ready-made answers; we listen first, then build programmes that reflect what residents themselves identify as their most pressing barriers to good health. This means our advocacy work looks different in Drumchapel than it does in Pollokshields or Springburn — because the communities are different, the pressures are different, and the solutions must be too.
Registered with OSCR (the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator), we are governed by a board of trustees drawn from health, social care, community development, and lived-experience backgrounds. Our staff team includes qualified health advocates, wellbeing coordinators, and community outreach workers, all supported by a dedicated network of trained volunteers. We are funded through a combination of public grants, charitable trusts, and the generosity of individual donors who share our belief that every Glaswegian deserves access to good health. We hold ourselves accountable to the people we serve, not to a single model of delivery.
Vibrant Health Advocates Glasgow grew out of a recognition that advocacy services in the city were fragmented, hard to find, and rarely embedded in the communities that needed them most. A small group of health professionals, community workers, and residents with lived experience of navigating Glasgow's health system came together in the years following the 2014 Scottish Government's commitment to reducing health inequalities, frustrated that commitment had yet to translate into meaningful ground-level support.
They began informally — accompanying neighbours to appointments, running kitchen-table sessions on understanding medication, signposting people to services they had never known existed. Word spread quickly. Demand outpaced what volunteers alone could sustain, and within two years the group formalised as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation, enabling it to seek grant funding and hire its first paid staff members.
The Glasgow branch draws on the wider Vibrant Health Advocates network for shared learning, resources, and advocacy frameworks, while remaining firmly rooted in this city's particular geography and culture. The Clyde runs through our work as much as through the city itself — we understand the pride Glaswegians take in their communities, the distrust that decades of top-down intervention can breed, and the extraordinary resilience that defines neighbourhood life here. That understanding is not incidental to what we do; it is the foundation everything else is built on.
Vibrant Health Advocates Glasgow exists to dismantle the barriers that prevent people in Glasgow's most disadvantaged communities from achieving the best possible health and wellbeing. We do this through one-to-one advocacy, community education, and systemic change — working with individuals to navigate health and social care services, while also speaking up at the policy level to ensure that those services become more equitable, accessible, and genuinely responsive to the diverse needs of Glasgow's population. We believe that health is not a privilege to be earned but a right to be secured, and we will not rest while a person's postcode continues to predict their prognosis.
Our board brings together professional expertise and lived experience that we consider essential to governing a community-anchored charity responsibly. Trustees serve in a voluntary capacity and provide strategic oversight, financial stewardship, and governance assurance, working closely with our staff team to ensure that every decision we make stays true to our charitable purpose and to the communities who depend on us.
We are actively committed to trustee diversity and to centering the voices of people with direct experience of health inequality in the leadership of this organisation. Our trustees are drawn from health, social care, community development, and lived-experience backgrounds, and they give their time and expertise because they share our belief in what is possible when communities and systems work together rather than at cross purposes.
Chair
Treasurer
Trustee
We are always glad to hear from people who share our values — whether you are a potential funder, partner, volunteer, or someone who simply wants to understand what we do and why it matters in this city.
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