Rahma Health has been named Business of the Year at the 2025 Telstra Best of Business Awards National Gala in Brisbane, standing out among a highly competitive field of Australia’s leading small and medium businesses. The awards celebrate innovation, impact, and excellence across diverse sectors.
Founded by Dr Naba Alfayadh, Rahma Health is an Australia-based charity creating culturally and psychologically safe health and parenting resources for multicultural communities worldwide. Its work focuses on Arabic-speaking families affected by war, displacement, racism, poverty, and intergenerational trauma, bridging critical gaps in healthcare access.
Celebrating Purpose-Driven Success: Rahma Health Wins Big at Telstra Awards
What’s your vision for Rahma Health?
There is so much inequity in childhood around the world, and that sets up inequity for our entire lives. Our first five years affect our physical health, mental health, and set our academic and earning potential for the rest of our lives. There is so much inequity in the support and information that parents have access to, which causes disparities which last lifetimes.
We see this inequity in Australia between children who are born into poverty, family violence, or in remote areas when compared with children born into privilege. This inequity is even more stark at a global level – children in countries with broken health systems miss out on the evidence-based health and parenting information that could transform their lives, simply because of where they were born.
I established Rahma Health to start healing our world and start creating a more equal, loving world that respects human dignity, starting with the essential first five years. We are creating a blueprint in Arabic for health and parenting resources, and then we will expand this model to other communities. Every child, regardless of the language their parents speak or the country they live in, deserves access to the information that will give them the best start to life. That’s the world we’re building, one family at a time.
Dr Naba Alfayadh: What’s the most important message that Rahma Health is telling?
We spent eight months researching what love is – and this is at the heart of everything we do. We are envisaging a better future for humanity. We want humanity to walk down a different path through loving our children.
Love is the most energising, incredible, joyous experience. It is so powerful that many philosophers and religions describe it as the purpose of life and the peak of the experience of being alive. One of the most important gifts we will give our children is love. The love we offer will shape their mental health and impact their physical health, academic performance, behaviour, and lifelong wellbeing.
Yet despite love’s fundamental importance, many people have not experienced unconditional love in their own childhoods – whether due to living under threat of death, parents in fight-or-flight responses from trauma, years in refugee camps, active war, intergenerational trauma, emotionally unavailable parents, financial hardship, substance abuse, colonisation, parental loss, family violence, and other factors.
For many refugee families, becoming parents marks the first time they’re experiencing unconditional love – switching out of survival mode and fight-or-flight responses for the first time in their lives. This generation of parents is committed to breaking the cycle of lovelessness.
I want Rahma especially to support parents to break cycles of lovelessness and cruelty and to start loving their children in a healthy, authentic, wholehearted way. We want to teach the world about what love is and the behaviours of love, and to create a revolution in how we respect, cherish, and love our children. Like exercise or healthy eating, being able to love correctly and openly requires research, self-reflection, and intentional effort. We, our life partners, our children, and all our loved ones deserve pure, unconditional, authentic love. We deserve to learn this important, foundational work so that we can enjoy living and loving every single day.
When we change how we love our children, we change the future of humanity itself.
Let’s now cover your background. Tell us about your experience as a refugee leaving war-affected country. How many members of family are here and still back home?
We left Iraq in 2003, six months after the American invasion began. It was a very dangerous time and many people lost their lives. Our school got bombed, which made my mum realise how close the danger was. My mother hired a taxi and we drove through the chaos to Amman, Jordan, where we stayed for about a month before being resettled in Australia.
I remember the day of the invasion very clearly. I remember watching the monstrously large grey metal aeroplanes that invaded Iraq – it felt like an alien invasion. These huge aircraft flew in and, for what felt like hours, vomited enormous tanks with the capacity to pulverise everything I’d ever known. I remember sitting with my family at the window, watching the tanks and aeroplanes agitate the sand and create a hurricane around them. All of us sat there in complete, eerie silence, waiting to die.
I remember the bleeding people, the soldiers, the overwhelming fear. That trauma stays with you for a long time. It took me two decades to start feeling like the world could be safe again. For some people, that sense of safety never returns – they get stuck in fight or flight their whole lives.
My immediate family is now here in Australia with me, but war destroyed my childhood in ways that continue to shape who I am. That’s precisely why the majority of my work now focuses on protecting children – whether that’s advocating against violence everywhere, helping refugee families resettle, supporting people to heal after trauma, or setting up equitable systems that give all children the best possible start to life. I know firsthand what’s at stake when we fail to protect the most vulnerable.
What was your experience ike growing up in Australia?
We arrived in Australia as refugees, and just four months later, my father passed away. My mother suddenly became a single parent to three daughters in a completely new country where she didn’t speak the language and had no support network. She was terrified, and we were plunged into profound poverty.
I remember the small, painful decisions that poverty forces on you. For two years of high school, I decided not to have friends because birthday gifts were too expensive for my mum. It really hurt to ask her for money for my friends’ presents, so it felt easier to just not have friends at all.
Education became my lifeline. I got through school and university on scholarships, which helped cover personal costs that would have otherwise been impossible. Those scholarships often provided mentoring and other support, which incredibly expanded my horizons of what was possible and empowered me.
I felt so incredibly lucky to grow up in Australia. I remembered life in Iraq very clearly and was so aware of the privilege, safety and power that were now open to me. I want to use every privilege I have to make life better for other people. I am always aware that I narrowly escaped death in the war and I am so keen to use my second chance at life to help others and to make the world a better place for as many people as possible.
At what point did you realise you wanted to create a business with impact? Why was there such a need for Rahma Health?
I’ve always imagined a better world. Even as a child, it didn’t make sense to me that people treated each other with such cruelty, or that such profound inequality existed. Our inherent equal human dignity and worth should be respected – that’s not idealistic, it’s fundamental. The fact that it isn’t has always bothered me deeply.
The turning point came when I was 15. I was reading The Outsiders and To Kill a Mockingbird that year, and I experienced this profound disillusionment with all the systems I thought were supposed to fix things for us. I realised that all the adults were just as confused and scared as I was. No one was coming to save us. If we wanted the world to change, it was up to us “normal” people to do something about it. Since that moment, I’ve felt a deep sense of responsibility for the world and a determination to see it become better than it is now.
That drive led me to found a charity called Happy Brain Education in 2016, which supports young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds. I’ve since handed that over to a brilliant team that’s leading it now, and I’m incredibly proud of the work they continue to do.
Rahma Health grew from the same understanding: there’s a profound need for trauma-informed, culturally sensitive support that recognises people’s inherent dignity and potential. Too many systems weren’t designed with people like me – or the families I work with – in mind. I wanted to create something that truly serves the people who need it most, that honours their experiences and helps them build the lives they deserve.
How will this award help you continue your important work? What does the future hold now?
The Telstra Awards have truly opened up the next chapter in Rahma Health’s journey. In just the three days surrounding the Awards, we formed so many new partnerships, learned new skills, and gained incredible mentors.
We learned so much from the other finalists. Dr Samantha Pillay, a urologist from South Australia who leads Continence Matters, is pioneering in AI. Conversations and mentoring from her have truly taken Rahma’s approach to AI to the next level. We have also formed a partnership with the amazing team at Knowby, who leverage AI to translate into 140 different languages. They have donated their software to Rahma forever, and we will be delivering our parenting training through their platform – enabling us to reach families in languages we never could have accessed before.
The judges we met have also been incredible and have committed their personal time after the awards to offer mentoring and guidance. Marcella Romero from Arriba Group, for example, will support Rahma to explore the business model of becoming an ecosystem of companies – having other companies that are achieving our global mission as well as the health promotion arm through Rahma Health. Dr Zoe Condliffe is someone whose leadership I have personally admired for a very long time. She will also be an advisor to Rahma as we grow into the next phase of our journey.
At Rahma, we want to lead a global revolution that gives every single child the best start to life. We are only at the start of our journey. The future holds so much!
How big is the company? What are your business values?
Rahma is not work for our team – it is a life purpose and a life calling. It is a life mission. I feel that it is my personal life mission, and I know that my whole team feels that too.
Rahma Health has a huge global impact due to our incredible network of volunteers and partner organisations. We have 70 volunteers and 50 partner organisations who work with us. Our core team consists of three people, all with lived experience of migration and seeking refuge: myself, Dr Naba Alfayadh, who came to Australia as a refugee from Iraq in 2003; Mohannad Dahalan, our Head of Operations and Technology, who arrived in Australia just over 12 months ago as a refugee from Gaza; and Kawthar Al Tamimi, our Community Engagement Manager, whose family was displaced and who has dedicated nearly a decade to supporting refugee and migrant families through grassroots community work.
Rahma Health deeply respects the community we work with, and we are honoured to be leading the healing for our community. Our whole team feels that this is the best work we can possibly be doing. We are so grateful that we have been trusted by our community to share this knowledge. It benefits us and heals us as well as our communities, as we come from a lived experience background and have experienced the same issues.
Our values reflect this deep commitment. We take care of our own health, our families, and our colleagues first, before work – because we cannot pour from an empty cup. We care profoundly about our community and want to produce work that truly heals our people and gives our children the best start to life. We work very hard to produce the best resources possible and hold ourselves to very high standards, as our community deserves this. We want to start a worldwide revolution in parenting and want Rahma to be a household name that’s known globally. Finally, we help each other to grow, develop, and make progress towards our full potential – because when we thrive, our community thrives.
Telstra’s Best of Business Awards
Telstra Business Group Executive Amanda Hutton praised Rahma Health’s transformative impact on women, families, and communities. She highlighted Dr Alfayadh’s inspiring leadership and ability to leverage technology and global partnerships to build a scalable platform that ensures vulnerable groups receive essential health guidance and support.
Rahma Health was selected from more than 20,000 nominations nationwide. Other winners include Social Protect (ACT) for Building Communities, Comtrac (QLD) for Embracing Innovation, DICE Australia (NT) for Indigenous Excellence, Revo Fitness (WA) for Outstanding Growth, and Li-ion Energy (WA) for Promoting Sustainability. Each winner demonstrated exceptional contributions to their respective fields.
Telstra’s Best of Business Awards continue a 30-year legacy of supporting Australian small businesses. Past winners, including DJAARA and The Push-Up Challenge, have leveraged the recognition to achieve significant growth and impact. Nominations for the 2026 progra