A Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation built by the community, for the community.
Vibrant Health Advocates – Copper is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation registered in Scotland and rooted in Motherwell, North Lanarkshire. We exist because anxiety and poor sleep are not niche problems — they are among the most common reasons people in this community feel unable to live the lives they want. Yet for many residents, the path to support has historically meant long NHS waiting lists, expensive private therapy, or self-help resources that feel abstract and disconnected from the texture of everyday life in a post-industrial Scottish town.
We sit in a deliberate gap: between clinical services and doing nothing. Our workshops are psychoeducational rather than therapeutic — they teach skills grounded in cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and evidence-based relaxation techniques. Facilitators are trained lay practitioners supervised by qualified professionals. Sessions are structured, skills-focused, and delivered in plain language, because the most effective techniques in the world are useless if they are buried in jargon.
We are governed by a committed volunteer board of trustees who bring expertise in community health, finance, and lived experience of the issues we address. Day-to-day delivery is carried out by a small paid coordination team and a group of trained community facilitators — many of whom first came to us as participants. That arc, from attendee to facilitator, is one we are particularly proud of, and it speaks to the kind of organisation we are trying to build: one that grows its own capacity from within the community it serves.
Vibrant Health Advocates – Copper began with a conversation in a community kitchen in Motherwell in the aftermath of a period when local mental health referral waiting times had stretched beyond anything reasonable. A small group of residents — some with professional health backgrounds, some without — sat around a table and asked a straightforward question: what if we stopped waiting for the system to catch up and just taught each other what actually works? The first pilot workshop ran in a back room of a local library with nine participants and one borrowed projector. The feedback was immediate and unambiguous: people were hungry for this, and they wanted more.
From that informal beginning, the organisation took formal shape as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation, securing its first grant funding to employ a part-time coordinator and train a cohort of facilitators. The name reflects the founding group's belief that health is something you advocate for — actively, collectively — and copper, that warm, enduring metal so bound up in the industrial story of Lanarkshire, felt like the right metaphor: not flashy, but solid, conductive, and built to last. Several years on, we continue to be led by the same commitment to practical impact and community ownership that started around that kitchen table.
Vibrant Health Advocates – Copper exists to improve the mental wellbeing of adults across Motherwell and the surrounding North Lanarkshire communities by providing free, accessible, skills-based workshops that address anxiety and poor sleep through proven, non-clinical techniques. We believe that effective mental health support does not need to be complicated, expensive, or delivered only by specialists in clinical settings — it needs to be practical, respectful, and close to home. We are committed to meeting people where they are, both physically and emotionally, and to building a community in which looking after your own mind is as unremarkable and as widely supported as looking after your physical health.
Vibrant Health Advocates – Copper is governed by a volunteer board of trustees who give their time because they believe in what this organisation does and in the community it serves. Our trustees bring a range of professional backgrounds — from community nursing and social work to finance and local business — as well as, in several cases, personal experience of the challenges we address. They are supported by a small staff team and a wider network of trained volunteer facilitators who deliver our workshops across the ML postcode area. Together, they are the reason our programmes are both financially sound and genuinely impactful.
Margaret Docherty
Chair
Colin Fairweather
Treasurer
Yvonne McAllister
Trustee
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