Access to her free, safe study spaces, born from a teenager studying on a bathroom floor.
Oluferanmi Balogun knew the problem from the inside. Growing up in overcrowded housing in North Bermondsey, she often had nowhere quiet to study, so she worked on the bathroom floor. It was not a one-off. For a lot of young people in crowded homes, the lack of a decent place to study quietly sets them back before they ever reach an exam.
She turned that into a solution. Balogun founded Room Too, a youth-led social enterprise that transforms underused spaces into welcoming study and social hubs for young people aged 15 to 19 across Southwark. The spaces are free, open 24 hours, safe, and staffed by DBS-checked firefighters, built specifically for the teens who have nowhere else to go.
The work got recognized. Room Too earned Balogun a Young Innovator Award, honoring a venture built to attack the quiet inequality of overcrowded housing with something practical and immediate.
"She studied on the bathroom floor. So she built the room she never had."
It would have been easy to treat a crowded home as a private hardship to simply get through. Balogun treated it as a design problem affecting thousands of other teens, and built the fix at scale. The person who lived the problem built the most honest version of the solution.
This is the builder ANF exists to spotlight. Turn the hardship you lived through into the thing that spares the next kid from it.
She had no room to study. Now other teens do.
