About Us
A few local women who stopped waiting to be invited
We live here too. We know the Sunday-night maths of which bill can wait. The school run. The week that’s gone before it’s begun. So we made something that fits into a real life, instead of asking you to find a spare one.
Her Way Forward is a Community Interest Company, which is a plain way of saying the bottom line isn’t profit. It’s people. Whatever we make goes straight back to the women who come through the door.
Who it is for
Building the space we need
It started with a conversation that kept happening. A woman saying she’d love to exercise, but not there, not like that, not in a room where she had to leave half of herself at the door. We heard it enough times. Eventually we built the answer.
Our primary community
We centre women from ethnic minority and Muslim communities, the ones the usual gyms and studios quietly overlook. We kept seeing them leave a class more alone than when they walked in. So we built a different one. One where you don’t have to leave half of yourself outside.
Open to all women
No woman who wants to be here is turned away. We ask one thing in return: that you respect the community we’ve built together, one that keeps the voices of often-unheard women at its centre.
Why we exist
The gap that led us here
The gap in Wandsworth
Wandsworth is not short of gyms and studios. For many of us, none of them fit. Sometimes it’s the cost. More often it’s the quiet feeling of walking into a room that was never made for women like us. That gap is real.
Why community-led matters
When the women who show up also help shape it, you get it right. They run sessions, tell us what’s working, push us when we fall short. That’s the whole point, not a side benefit.
What makes it different
Not a gym class. A community.
Safety
Women-only
You can relax here. No men, no judgment. Just women looking after themselves and each other.
Inclusion
Culturally aware
We think about dress, language, dietary needs, prayer times. You don’t have to explain yourself here.
Access
Local, low-cost
A five-pound class, a short bus ride away. The week money’s tight, you come anyway and we sort it quietly.
Belonging
Connection first
You’ll leave with more than sore muscles. A few numbers in your phone. Someone who notices when you miss a week.
How change happens
From first session to a steadier week
It begins with a room that’s easy to walk into. Everything else, the confidence, the friendships, the harder conversations, grows from there. At the pace of a real week.
A first step that feels possible
A first session you can afford and actually get to. You don’t need experience, the right leggings, or any confidence yet. Turning up is the whole ask.
Trust builds slowly
Week by week, it stops being a room of strangers. Names get learned. Someone asks where you were last Monday. You start to feel held by something steady.
Support grows around her
Then the harder things come within reach. A health check over tea. A workshop on the worry that’s been keeping you up. Help finding help, from people you already trust.
The women behind the work
Leadership
Her Way Forward is run by women from the same community it’s for.
Nasiya Vorajee
Co-Founder & Director
Nasiya co-founded Her Way Forward because she kept meeting women who needed somewhere like it. Nowhere to send them. Years of work with families and local networks across Wandsworth showed her exactly where women get let down. That’s what shapes everything we do.
Shannon Lee
Co-Founder & Director
Shannon co-founded Her Way Forward and keeps the engine running: the partnerships, the operations, the unglamorous work that lets a small organisation stay reliable. She builds the foundations. So the promise we make to women is one we can actually keep.
Yee Mun Thum
Secretary
Yee Mun keeps Her Way Forward honest on paper. As Secretary, she makes sure we meet our duties as a Community Interest Company, that the records are accurate and the governance sound. It’s the least visible job here, and the one that lets women trust us with the rest.
Accountability
How we stay accountable
We keep our books open. The women who trust us deserve to see how we’re run. Her Way Forward is a registered Community Interest Company (No. 16948255), and our governance documents, accounts, and policies are public.