A Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation bringing trusted health information to the real spaces of student life.
Vibrant Health Advocates – Indigo is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation based in Dunfermline, Fife. We were founded on a straightforward observation: the students who most need health support are often the least likely to seek it through conventional channels. Cost, stigma, travel time, timetable clashes, and simply not knowing where to start all act as barriers. We decided to remove those barriers entirely by bringing the information to students, rather than asking students to come to the information.
Our work centres on the learning landscape of Dunfermline — the Fife College campuses, satellite learning centres, and the social and transport corridors that students navigate every day. We deploy trained health advocates to these locations on a regular schedule, operating bright, approachable pop-up stalls where any student can stop for a conversation, pick up a resource, or ask a question they have been too embarrassed to ask elsewhere. The tone is always friendly, never clinical, and always led by what the student in front of us actually needs.
As a SCIO, every decision we make is governed by our charitable purpose: improving the wellbeing of students in Dunfermline. We are accountable to the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator and to the community we serve. Our trustees bring expertise in public health, education, youth work, and financial management, and our team of advocates is drawn from and trained within the local community. We believe that sustainable change in student health outcomes is built through consistent, trusted, human presence — and that is exactly what we provide.
Our board at work — purposeful and connected
That first afternoon told us everything
Vibrant Health Advocates – Indigo came to life after a small group of Dunfermline residents, many of them with backgrounds in community health and further education, began comparing notes on the same recurring problem. Young people leaving GP surgeries without answers, students withdrawing from college not because of academic difficulty but because of untreated mental health struggles, first-year learners who did not know a single person to ask about contraception, substance use, or where to get an emergency food parcel. The clinical infrastructure existed — the problem was reach.
A pilot pop-up outside a Dunfermline learning centre in the early autumn of our founding year drew more students in a single afternoon than any of us had expected. They were not looking for a diagnosis; they were looking for someone who would speak to them plainly and without judgement. That first afternoon told us everything we needed to know about what was missing and what we could offer.
We incorporated as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation to give our work a stable, transparent legal home — one that would allow us to attract funding, build partnerships with NHS Fife and Fife College, and hold ourselves to account. The name 'Indigo' reflects both our visual identity and our values: a colour associated with depth, clarity, and the bridge between the warm and the cool — between empathy and evidence.
We have grown steadily since those early sessions, refining our model, training our advocates to a consistent standard, and embedding ourselves in the rhythms of Dunfermline's student year. The work is the same as it was on day one: show up, be useful, be kind.
Vibrant Health Advocates – Indigo exists to improve the physical, mental, and social wellbeing of students in Dunfermline by making trusted, accurate health information genuinely accessible — delivered through consistent, face-to-face wellbeing pop-ups at the edges of the town's college campuses and learning sites, in the spaces where students actually spend their time. We believe that geography, cost, and stigma should never determine whether a young person can access the knowledge they need to look after themselves, and we work every week to close the gap between the health information that exists and the students who need it most.
Vibrant Health Advocates – Indigo is governed by a board of trustees who give their time voluntarily and who bring a breadth of professional experience from across Fife and beyond. Our trustees oversee strategy, finances, and governance while remaining closely connected to the frontline work — several of them volunteer at our pop-up sessions alongside our trained health advocates.
Chair
Treasurer
Trustee
Together they ensure that the organisation remains focused on its charitable purpose, financially sustainable, and responsive to the real needs of Dunfermline's student community.