About Us · Vibrant Health Advocates

Who we are

Rooted in Carnoustie, shaped by community

Vibrant Health Advocates – Caldera is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation rooted in Carnoustie, the Angus golf-coast town best known internationally for its Championship Links but less often celebrated for its young people.

We are here for the teenagers who grow up here, finish school and then face a transition into adulthood with precious little preparation for the health decisions, workplace pressures and daily logistics that immediately confront them.

Our approach is grounded in evidence and shaped by lived experience. Every workshop we design begins with listening: to young people in Carnoustie and Arbroath, to the teachers and youth workers who know them, and to the employers and further-education colleges that receive them. We triangulate what those conversations tell us against the research on adolescent wellbeing, health literacy and early workforce transitions — and then we build sessions that are honest, practical and age-appropriate. Nothing is watered down; nothing is condescending.

As a SCIO, every penny we raise stays in the communities we serve. We are governed by a voluntary board of trustees who bring professional expertise in public health, education, youth work and finance. Our small staff team — most of whom grew up in Angus — are supported by a network of trained peer facilitators, many of them recent graduates of the programme itself. That continuity of community knowledge is one of the things that makes Vibrant Health Advocates – Caldera genuinely distinctive.

Caldera team members in conversation on the Carnoustie seafront, clipboard in hand on an overcast afternoon

Young people in a Caldera workshop, hands-on activity around a community kitchen bench

Our story

From a kitchen table to a coastal movement

Vibrant Health Advocates – Caldera grew out of a series of conversations that took place around a kitchen table in Carnoustie in the early 2010s, between a recently retired school nurse, a youth support worker at Carnoustie High and a parent whose daughter had left school unprepared for what came next.

All three had watched the same pattern repeat itself year after year: bright, capable young people hitting the transition out of school and discovering, often at some personal cost, that no-one had taught them to manage their own health, advocate for their own needs, or navigate the adult world’s quiet complexities.

The founding trio began running informal lunchtime sessions — twenty minutes, a handful of S5 pupils, a list of things nobody tells you — and the response was immediate and unmistakable. Young people were hungry for this.

Within two years the sessions had become a structured programme; within four, the organisation had achieved charitable status and a formal partnership with Angus Council.

The name ‘Caldera’ was chosen deliberately: a caldera is a landscape shaped by upheaval, out of which something new and fertile grows. For the founders, it captured exactly what the school-to-adulthood transition feels like — and what it can become, with the right support.

Our purpose

Mission

Vibrant Health Advocates – Caldera exists to ensure that every young person leaving school in Carnoustie and the wider Angus coastal communities does so equipped with the practical health knowledge, emotional literacy and self-advocacy skills they need to build a healthy, independent adult life.

We believe the transition from school into work, college or training should be a launchpad, not a cliff-edge — and that young people from all backgrounds deserve access to the kind of candid, hands-on preparation that helps them not just survive, but genuinely flourish.

The people behind the work

Board of Trustees

Vibrant Health Advocates – Caldera is governed by a board of trustees who give their time voluntarily and bring a breadth of professional expertise matched by a deep personal connection to the communities we serve.

Fiona Rattray

Chair

Alistair Glennie

Treasurer

Priya Duthie

Trustee

Alongside the board, our staff team and trained peer facilitators — many of whom first encountered the programme as participants — keep our work grounded in the realities of growing up and starting out on the Angus coast.

About Vibrant Health Advocates – Caldera