About Us

Rooted in Perth.
Ready for wherever you go.

Who We Are

A small organisation with deep local knowledge

Vibrant Health Advocates – Gamma is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation rooted in Perth and Kinross. We work with young people at one of the most significant transitions of their lives: the months around leaving school, when the scaffolding of routine, community, and institutional support drops away all at once.

Our programmes are delivered in secondary schools, community venues, and online, and they are free to every young person who takes part.

Our staff and volunteers understand the particular shape of growing up in Perth — a town with strong community identity and real opportunity, but one where many services and social networks are thinner for young adults than they are in larger cities, and where the pull to leave for education or work often means leaving behind your entire support system in one go. Our work is calibrated to that reality.

Peer mentor and young person in Perth

Out in the community, Perth city centre

Transparency

How we are funded and what that means

Our funding mix

We are funded through a combination of Scottish Government grants, local authority partnership funding from Perth & Kinross Council, charitable trusts, and individual donations.

We publish our accounts annually with OSCR and are committed to full transparency about how every pound is spent.

Direct 87p per £1

Approximately 87 pence in every pound we receive goes directly into programme delivery.

Workshop session in a Perth school

The very first sessions — a school library in 2017

Our Story

An afternoon that became a blueprint

Vibrant Health Advocates – Gamma grew out of a series of conversations between a school nurse, a community youth worker, and a parent volunteer who had all noticed the same pattern: young people in Perth were leaving school without reliable, plain-language knowledge of how to look after their own mental health, and without a clear map of the adult services available to them.

The three of them ran a pilot afternoon session in a school library in 2017. Forty-two young people turned up — far more than expected — and stayed long past the scheduled finish, asking questions nobody had thought to answer before.

That afternoon became the blueprint for everything that followed.

From that pilot, we developed structured multi-session programmes, built partnerships with secondary schools across Perth and Kinross, trained our first cohort of Peer Connectors, and began the work of making sure no young person in this community steps off the cliff edge of school-leaving without a net.

Our Mission

Why we exist

Vibrant Health Advocates – Gamma exists to ensure that every young person leaving school in Perth and Kinross has the mental-wellbeing literacy, practical life skills, and confident knowledge of available services they need to step into adult life with resilience and self-awareness.

We believe that transition from adolescence to adulthood should not be a cliff edge, and that equipping young people with honest, accessible tools — before the moment of crisis rather than after it — is one of the highest-impact investments a community can make in its own future.

Leadership

Our Board of Trustees

Our board of trustees brings together expertise in mental health practice, community development, financial governance, and lived experience of the challenges facing young people in rural and semi-rural Scotland. They provide strategic oversight and ensure that our work remains anchored in the needs of the young people we serve, rather than in what is convenient or comfortable for us as an organisation. We are grateful for their rigour and their commitment.

FM

Fiona Mackintosh

Chair

DR

David Rattray

Treasurer

CS

Catriona Sinclair

Trustee

Every school leaver in Perth deserves to feel ready

Whether you want to volunteer, donate, or partner with us — there is a meaningful role for you in this work.

Get in touch