​When Aghileh later arrived in the UK as a refugee at fourteen, she experienced a different kind of isolation. Without English, navigating school and adolescence was painfully lonely. She cried for a year from homesickness. Yet over time, she found - and gathered - people who, like her, lived in an in-between space. Foreign not only by nationality, but by experience. People who didn’t quite belong anywhere.

Community, for Aghileh, was never theoretical. It was survival. It was the difference between fear and resilience.

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Today, as founder of Families in Action Together and the Baby Bank in Harrow, she recreates what sustained her childhood: an open home, shared resources, collective care.

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She explains that community is “ an open door that doesn’t really close.”

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FAcT welcomes all  people in - refugees, single mothers, families in poverty, women feeling isolated after COVID. There is no requirement to explain or justify hardship. As she gently tells those accessing support: you don’t have to tell me your story unless you want to.

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Aghileh believes you cannot always repay the people who helped you  but you can pass it on.

In sharing contacts, advice, space and time, she extends the same quiet solidarity that once surrounded her family. She knows what it is to feel watched, to feel foreign, to feel alone. And so she builds places where no one has to.

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Her story is one of displacement and determination, but above all it is about belonging, not as something fixed, but as something we create together, door by door, person by person.