In a year of remarkable highs and lows, we’re glad to be ending this year with a big celebration! FRIDA is 10! We’ve been around for one impossible and beautiful decade. What started out as one staff member, and a small community with aspirations to change the way funding worked has blossomed into a staff of over 30 people, all working towards FRIDA’s foundational purpose: to be fully embedded within the feminist movement, to respond to the needs of young feminist activists everywhere, to be fully participatory in every aspect of its grantmaking work and to continue learning with every step.
Our community as much a part of FRIDA’s legacy as we are. So thank you for standing by us and contributing to FRIDA’s magic as #FRIDAturns10.
As part of marking our 10th birthday, we’re highlighting 10 of FRIDA’s most complex and exciting journeys. We hope that you continue to journey with FRIDA into the next decade of feminist magic and invite you to consider a recurring contribution which helps us to support young feminist movements sustainably and long term. After all, our work in the past decade is built on the belief that #thefutureisfeminist.
- FRIDA is the first and only fund of its kind, led by young feminists for young feminists and unapologetically radical and participatory. It was built to be the engine room for an ever growing, ever changing feminist movement and is now giving over 2.5 million USD to young feminist movements across the world.
- FRIDA is a bold disruption of philanthropic conventions and business-as-usual, advocating for change and for more and better funding for young feminist activists. Our RM ethics policy is just one of the ways we’re working towards upending traditional funding practices, and pulling back the philanthropic curtain.
- FRIDA’s mandate has meant funding the movements that are at the core of young feminist organising, with an increasingly intersectional stystems-change approach. Young feminist organising is a living breathing movement that grows to meet multiple challenges and embraces all of the complexities inherent in true transformative change. Climate and Environmental Justice is just one of the complex issues that young feminists continue to organize around.
- The Revolution might not be televised, but it will be tweeted. FRIDA’s holistic security approach for young feminist activists combines the healing, wellbeing and spiritual connection with how to best secure their data and organizing online, along with our own internal work on digital and holistic security centre the sustainability of movements.
- FRIDA continues to centre working for and with girls especially in light of the ageist dynamics that cause girl-led movements to be sidelined, minimized as “cute” and perceived as too “risky” to financially support. We continue to learn how to better center girl-led work by working with Teenage Girl Advisors. Most recently, the development of the safeguarding policy emphasises our collective commitment to centering and protecting girls voices.
- We’ve blossomed by embracing feminist diversity and decolonized perspectives. As FRIDA was just a seedling, inspiration was drawn from a beautiful mosaic of feminist movements throughout the Global South. Through the FRIDA Memory Project in 2018, early FRIDA community members spoke to the importance of African feminist networks in nurturing our roots while others highlighted how young feminist solidarity in the Middle East informed our approach to creating safe spaces for young feminists.
- In 10 years FRIDA has grown in capacity and reach. This year, we welcome 95 new grantee partners from around the world into the FRIDA community, growing our total number of grantee partners to over 200! It’s our biggest ever cohort! (Watch this space for more information on the new cohort of FRIDA Grantee Partners).
- Over the years FRIDA has been lucky enough to work with incredible artists and designers from around the world. Their designs have brought to life FRIDA’s work and communicated the vibrancy of feminist movements in creative ways. From our new website by the incredible Munira Yussuf, to our latest annual report, which brought our 2019 to life using afro-futurist visuals, inspired by Octavia Butler.
- Care is Political. FRIDA has continued to centre care in the ways that we work particularly as our community is vulnerable to burnout, emotional trauma and fatigue. Our 2017 self-care solidarity storms highlighted how grantee partners, advisors and feminist globally interpreted and practiced care. The FRIDA community also shared resources spanning from tailored self-care plans to live streaming punk feminist bands and guided breathing exercises. Most recently. We created a set of digital security tool for young feminist activists as a response to a heightened use of online platforms during the pandemic.
- The Future is a bright one. With the upcoming release of a brand new participatory strategic plan that focuses on diversifying the incredible FRIDAverse and how FRIDA can better support young feminist movements to flourish on their own terms, we know that we’re on route to an even better decade, and we’re excited to have you along for the ride.
We hope you’ll join us in celebrating #FRIDAturns10 by continuing to support young feminist activists around the world, who rely on flexible recurring funding to create the radical feminist futures we imagine. Being a resource ally to FRIDA directly supports the work of activists who are pushing boundaries, policies and imaginations to be bigger, better and more expansive. We hope you’ll consider being a part of our celebration, our legacy, and the FRIDAverse by donating on this #GivingTuesday.
