Supporting Refugee and Migrant Families Through Collaboration | Starship Community
Starship Community is a multidisciplinary team based at Greenlane Clinical Centre, providing coordinated services to children, young people, and their families. Within this team, dedicated members focus on health promotion, advocacy, and support for those from refugee and migrant backgrounds.
One of the Starship Community team members is Jamila Slaimankhel, a New Zealand-registered pharmacist and one of four Regional Community Health Promoters at Refugee/Migrant Services. For the past seven years, Jamila has worked to connect service providers with communities, coordinate health promotion activities, and offer cultural advice when needed. Her work is guided by the needs and requests of the communities she serves.
Jamila works closely with Fadumo Ahmad, Director of the New Zealand Ethnic Women’s Trust (NZEWT), to enhance the wellbeing of ethnic communities, particularly in Central and West Auckland, through health promotion, empowerment, and advocacy. NZEWT runs a variety of workshops tailored to community needs, including past sessions on family harm prevention and financial abuse.
A recent initiative, ‘Kai Ora – Tangata Ora: Healthy Food, Healthy People’, is a weekly workshop series focused on improving women’s wellbeing, hosted by NZEWT with Jamila’s support. Fadumo, a former WHO representative for Somalia and experienced midwife, came to New Zealand as a refugee in the 1990s. What began as the Somali Women’s Association in 2001 evolved into NZEWT in 2007, now serving women of all ethnicities—including Māori and European. As Fadumo puts it, “It’s not about culture or ethnicity – it is who they trust.”
In addition to advocacy across immigration, housing, social services, and health, Fadumo is passionate about capacity building and empowering women and family. NZEWT’s long-standing sewing programme is a testament to this, alongside a wide range of other initiatives: a Multilingual Playgroup, Business School, After School and NCEA Tutoring Programs, SKIP Parenting, Computer Literacy classes, a Food Delivery Program, and a Community Garden—many based at Wesley Community Centre in Mt Roskill.
Inspired by NZEWT’s model, similar programs are now being developed by the Noor Foundation, established in March 2025 by Sharafat Salarzi to support underserved communities in South Auckland. Noor Foundation primarily supports refugee and migrant women affected by family violence, where Sharafat plays a key role in both advocacy and direct support. In collaboration with Jamila, they run parenting and healthy lifestyle workshops to empower mothers and strengthen communities. Both Sharafat and Jamila share that in Islam, “the mother is considered the central pillar—not just of the family, but of society.”
Jamila, Fadumo, and Sharafat voiced that their lived experiences, subject expertise, connectivity, and passion help them understand the needs, challenges and the strengths of communities and motivate them in their work to make a difference.
Referrals to Starship Community can be made via Centralreferrals@adhb.govt.nz.
You can visit NZEWT and Noor Foundation websites to find out more about their work and how to engage with them.
