We have officially celebrated 85 years of supporting disabled people across Northern Ireland at a landmark Anniversary Celebration and our Strategic Launch in the Long Gallery, Stormont. The event, generously sponsored by Minister Gordon Lyons MLA, brought together service users, carers, health and social care professionals, statutory partners and elected representatives to mark our extraordinary legacy and unveil its ambitious new strategy for 2026-2031.

Eighty-Five Years and a New Beginning

Speaking at the event, our CEO Elaine Armstrong, said:

“Cedar has a track record of adapting, pioneering and responding to new challenges. We began supporting a single condition and grew into something with far broader impact. We moved from doing things ‘for’ disabled people to doing things ‘with’ them. The strategy we are launching today is a product of working in full partnership with disabled people. Eighty-five years is a remarkable inheritance – but what we do with it, where we go from here, is what today is also about.”

Cedar was founded in 1941 as Northern Ireland Centre for Orthopaedic Development (NICOD) and has grown from an organisation centred on a single condition into one of Northern Ireland’s most respected disability organisations, now employing 650 staff and supporting over 3,000 disabled people each year. Its services span residential and supported living, community inclusion, and employment support, delivered under a three-pillar pathway: Live, Connect, and Work and Learn.

Strategy 2026-2031: Opportunity, Choice and Inclusion for All

The centrepiece of the event was the launch of Cedar’s five-year strategic plan, which sets out Cedar’s ambition to deepen its impact across three areas of a person’s life: how they live, how they connect, and how they work and learn. Built in full partnership with disabled people, the strategy is grounded in Cedar’s enduring purpose of supporting disabled people to experience opportunity, choice and inclusion, and sets out a vision of an inclusive society for all.

The strategy also commits Cedar to workforce investment, quality governance, and the embedding of co-production at every level of its work ensuring that disabled people continue to shape, inform and lead the organisation into its next chapter.

Ministerial Recognition from the Department of Health

A video message from Minister of Health Mike Nesbitt MLA was also shown at the event, in which he noted that Cedar has been serving disabled people in Northern Ireland since 1941, seven years before the NHS came into being, and he praised Cedar’s person-centred approach as a model for the wider health and social care system.

The celebration featured personal testimonies from current service users, a panel discussion bringing together lived experience, practitioner perspectives and the voice of Cedar’s User Forum, and closing remarks from Andrea McFarlane, Chair of Cedar’s Regional User Forum -reflecting Cedar’s long-standing commitment to co-production and disability-led governance.

Andrea McFarlane, Chair of Cedar’s Regional User Forum, closed the event with a call to the future:

“Eighty-five years is a foundation. The best chapters of this story are still to be written. And they will be written by disabled people, with Cedar, for a Northern Ireland where opportunity, choice and inclusion aren’t aspirations – they’re simply how things are done."

Access our new strategy here: