FRIDA’s 2025 Annual Report is out!
In 2025, FRIDA announced Nada Chidiac and Paige Andrew as our new Co-Executive Directors. Paige, previously Chief of Programs, and Nada, previously Resource Mobilization Co-Manager have brought a wealth of experience, institutional knowledge and insight to their roles and into the wider FRIDA team and network.
FRIDA has always been an incubator for young feminist leadership across the global majority. We are excited to continue this legacy through the hands of FRIDA staff who have worked directly to ensure that our mission of resourcing young feminists remains at the forefront of what we do even amidst a shifting sector and global context.
A Note from Nada & Paige
This past year reminded us that moments of tension and backlash are often where the most important work happens.
Across the communities and movements that FRIDA partners with and serves, we witnessed organizations navigating safety concerns, political uncertainty, funding challenges, and also, a growing pressure to respond to urgent and interconnected crises – all with less financial resources.
At the same time, we saw extraordinary pushback, commitment, and space taken up by young women, girls, and gender diverse youth who continue to build new ways of organizing and caring for their communities.
In this context, FRIDA’s role as a fund that focuses solely on resourcing and accompanying young women, girls, and gender diverse youth has felt both exceedingly necessary and deeply relational. Beyond moving resources, our work is about fighting for continuity during moments of uncertainty. This means supporting groups that may not yet fit conventional funding models, and helping ensure that the importance of youth-led grassroots work is not lost during periods of increasingly complex and overlapping crises.
Over the past year, FRIDA continued to provide flexible grantmaking and accompaniment to our community of 171 partners in 84 countries. We deepened relationships with grantees and strengthened collaboration with peer funders and ecosystem partners in an effort to remain responsive to evolving needs on the ground. We are continually reminded that trust-based and flexible support is not simply a funding approach, it is a long-term investment in collective capacity, and it is a political commitment, one which means working towards ensuring movements are able to access resources they are owed.
This year has also highlighted some of the broader tensions facing philanthropy. Demand for support continues to grow while grassroots groups, who often face the brunt of crises, are operating within increasingly uncertain funding environments.
While young feminists have been mobilizing, innovating, and taking risks across movements for decades, they continue to face some of the deepest funding gaps for being too ‘informal’, too ‘young’, or too ‘political’. We continue to see government institutions slash youth and gender equity budgets, while youth-led groups continue to mobilise and respond to the immediate needs of their communities.
As new Co-Executive Directors, we have spent considerable time reflecting on what these political shifts and sustainability means in this moment, not only for our organization, but for the broader ecosystem we are part of – and more importantly, for youth organizing. Looking ahead, we remain committed to the work and leadership of young people and to deepening partnerships. We know this work cannot happen in isolation – as we enter our 16th year, we know that we have been able to do so with the collaboration and shared stewardship of our community.
We are deeply grateful to our grantee partners, advisors, partners, donors, and community members who continue to shape and sustain this work alongside us. As we move into the coming year, we do so with humility and determination.
