The Ann Brown Trust

Ann worked in Farset as a Manager concerned with the development of her own community and battling for improvements in the problems faced in daily life.

She extended her job by a big voluntary effort and was particularly active in health issues and the well being of the young people in West Belfast.

She understood that one small community cannot achieve health and well being alone, but must work with others and for the good of others.In this spirit she took a leading part in cross community and international work through Farset and her voluntary commitments.

Ann died prematurely in July 2002 from breast cancer and her friends and colleagues have set up the Ann Brown Trust to honour her work and to try to extend that work and the values Ann stood for into our present and future.

So the first initiative of the Trust is a conference in Belfast on Health Inequalities.

The Conference

The close links between Ann, her values and work and this conference we believe are self evident.The conference aims to bring together people from the communities worst affected by health inequalities with politicians, policy makers and professionals.We hope that they can together explore and confront the issues involved, the choices that face us as a society and what those choices say about our beliefs and the sort of society we wish to build.

Above all we aim that the conference should play some part in bring about ACTION and reductions in HEALTH INEQUALITIIES.

Effective methods of closing the gap are already known and tested. The World Health Organisation report, "Closing the GAP in a generation" sets out the rationale and ideas.All we have to do is find our way of using them.

Farset Youth and Community Development Limited

Farset Youth and Community Development Limited was set up in 1987.

It grew out of people involved in community work in and around the Shankill area.  It aimed to support the community to face up to and try and resolve the many problems it faced.

Its early initiatives included a large youth training scheme, a city farm and a community laundry.

The need for working with other communities and statutory agencies soon became apparent and new initiatives were developed in co-operation with North and West Health & Social Services Trust and Youth Training Schemes in Paris and Limerick.

Evolving from these initiatives came a large ACE Scheme, the Farset Enterprise Park, The Somme Association, The Farset Inishowen & Border Counties Initiative, and a range of Conflict Resolution work here and in Eastern Europe.

Farset International which opened in 2002 provides a base now for much of our work as well as being a resource for local communities and their work.

The work leading up to this Health Inequalities Conference has taken up much of our energy over the last 15 months.

We believe it is a vital issue for our whole society, not just disadvantaged communities and will be working with the conference working group to see how we can best follow up on the conference.

At the same time we are planning a number of other social enterprise initiatives, including a sailing club on Mackie’s Dam, which we hope will take shape during the next 12 months.