About Us
We exist because health inequalities do not respect postcode.
Rooted in Bearsden. Serving all of East Dunbartonshire.
Vibrant Health Advocates - Ascent is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation rooted in Bearsden, East Dunbartonshire. We exist because health inequalities do not respect postcode. Bearsden is one of Scotland's most prosperous suburbs, yet within it — and across the surrounding East Dunbartonshire area — minority-ethnic families face disproportionate barriers to health information, preventive care and confident NHS engagement. Language is often the first barrier, but it is rarely the only one. Cultural assumptions embedded in health communications, a lack of familiar faces in clinical settings and historical mistrust of institutions all compound the gap.
We address those barriers with a model that is community-centred from the ground up. Our programmes are co-designed with the people who will use them. Our Health Advocates are recruited and trained from within the communities we serve — South Asian, East Asian and Middle Eastern families who have built lives in this part of Scotland and who understand, from lived experience, what it means to sit in a waiting room and not fully understand what is being asked of you. This is not charity in the old sense; it is partnership in the truest one.
As a SCIO registered with OSCR, we are governed by a volunteer trustee board that brings together expertise in public health, community development, legal affairs and lived experience of migration and resettlement. We are transparent with our finances and rigorous about our impact — publishing annual reports and outcome data so that our funders, partners and the communities we serve can hold us to account. We are proud of what we have built, and we are clear-eyed about how much further there is to go.
Our team in Bearsden, East Dunbartonshire
Ascent began in 2017 when a small group of women — mostly South Asian mothers with children at Bearsden Academy and Westerton Primary — started meeting informally to share information about local health services. They had noticed the same thing: friends and neighbours were missing appointments, misunderstanding diagnoses and delaying seeking help, not because they didn't care about their health but because the system's communications assumed a cultural and linguistic baseline that many did not share. One of those women, a retired practice nurse, started running informal kitchen-table sessions in Urdu and Punjabi. Word spread quickly.
Within eighteen months the group had incorporated as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation, secured its first grant from the Robertson Trust, and trained its first cohort of Community Health Advocates. The name — Ascent — was chosen deliberately. It reflects the aspiration of the communities involved: not to be lifted by others, but to rise under their own knowledge and agency, with the right support beneath them.
Today we operate across Bearsden, Milngavie and parts of Bishopbriggs, with a network of over forty trained advocates and partnerships with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, East Dunbartonshire Health and Social Care Partnership, and a growing cluster of faith communities and cultural associations.
One of our first community sessions, 2018
Vibrant Health Advocates - Ascent exists to close the health information gap faced by minority-ethnic communities in Bearsden and East Dunbartonshire by delivering culturally-tailored, multilingual health education and NHS navigation support that is accurate, respectful and genuinely useful.
We believe that every family — regardless of the language they think in, the country they were raised in or the culture that shaped their understanding of the body — deserves to engage with Scotland's health system with confidence and dignity. We pursue that belief through community-led programmes, trained volunteer advocates, and an unwavering commitment to meeting people where they are rather than where the system expects them to be.
Ascent is governed by a volunteer trustee board whose members bring professional expertise and deep personal commitment to the work. Our trustees include a retired NHS consultant, a community solicitor with experience in immigration and equalities law, and a long-standing leader in East Dunbartonshire's South Asian community. Together they provide strategic oversight, financial stewardship and the kind of critical challenge that keeps a young organisation honest.
Day-to-day delivery is led by our small paid staff team, supported by over forty trained Community Health Advocates who give their time and expertise because they believe — as we do — that health knowledge is a right, not a privilege.
Dr Amara Osei-Bonsu
Chair
Harpreet Kaur Sandhu
Treasurer
James Forsyth
Trustee