Northern Ireland Community Development Health Network Ltd

Community Development and Health Network (CDHN) champions community development to eradicate health inequalities in Northern Ireland, recognizing health as shaped by social determinants like poverty, deprivation, and marginalisation. Core values of social justice, diversity, integrity, and collaboration drive their grantmaking, emphasizing community empowerment, co-production, and resilience-building through grassroots leadership. They believe systemic change arises from amplifying marginalized voices via networking, policy advocacy, and evidence-based campaigning, prioritizing partnerships that foster authentic community agency and long-term health equity.

They fund community-led interventions tackling social determinants including poverty alleviation, unemployment support, health literacy campaigns, and mental health challenges through peer support networks, therapeutic peer groups, and resilience-building activities. Priority beneficiaries encompass carers facing exhaustion, ethnic minorities and travellers experiencing exclusion, older people combating isolation, unemployed and low-income individuals, youth aged 14-25 at risk of disengagement, women in deprived areas, and communities enduring interface tensions or multiple disadvantages. Supported activities feature co-produced place-based projects like community-pharmacy partnerships addressing neighbourhood health needs, grassroots mentoring for under-represented minorities, capacity building workshops, outreach for mental wellbeing, advocacy training, and holistic programmes enhancing empowerment, social cohesion, and preventative health equity via person-centred, trauma-informed approaches.

They exclude lifestyle-focused initiatives, sports performance activities, one-off events, core running costs, capital items, or unrestricted support, favouring ongoing relationship-based interventions with measurable inequality reduction. Distinctive for mandating genuine community-pharmacist collaborations and co-design rooted in lived experience, they prioritize grassroots voluntary groups serving hyper-local deprived neighbourhoods, ethnic enclaves, and interface communities, embedding evidence from projects into policy to sustain empowerment for multiply-excluded populations like low-income carers, isolated elders, and marginalised youth.