Our Mission and Values
FRIDA provides young leaders with the resources they need to amplify their voices and bring attention to their work, and the support, flexibility and network to keep their vision and influence alive.
OuR MISSION & VALUES
FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund is the only youth-led fund focused exclusively on supporting global young feminist activism to advance social justice movements and agendas. FRIDA was created by young feminist activists, their allies, and key organizations, namely, Association of Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) and Central American Women’s Fund (FCAM), from the women’s movement, to fund brave activism led by young women, girls, trans and queer youth.
Our Vision is a world where young women, girls, trans and queer youth are recognized as experts of their own reality, enjoying their human rights and building a more just and sustainable world through collective power and transformative leadership.
Provide accessible and strategic funding for newly established young feminist-led initiatives through a participatory grantmaking process, that puts funding decision power into the hands of applicants;
Strengthen the capacity of young feminist organizations to leverage additional resources for their work and enhance their impact, including more skills, information, and networks; and
Increase commitments of donors and allies, and build partnerships to resourcing young feminist activism and their issues, through resource mobilization, knowledge-building, and philanthropic advocacy.
FRIDA was built on five core values that continue to define our decisions, practices, and relationships.
Flexibility – FRIDA aims to be flexible in its strategies and approaches to supporting young feminist activism. Flexibility is key to responding to the challenges faced by young feminist groups and shifting social and cultural contexts.
Resources – FRIDA is committed to mobilizing sustainable financial and non-financial resources to support young feminist activism. FRIDA approaches resource mobilization as a potential for advocacy, cooperation and relationship building with different funding sectors that typically do not support young women, girls and trans youth movements. FRIDA operationalizes this by collaborating across youth, women’s and trans rights movements and beyond.
Inclusivity – FRIDA is committed to ensuring that young feminist organizations who are seeking support, have collective ownership and actively participate in our decision-making and capacity-building processes as a means of ensuring our programs reflect their needs. FRIDA operationalizes this by connecting grantee partners with advisors, other progressive peers and other experienced feminists and changemakers.
Diversity – FRIDA believes that diversity in experience, identity and opinion are crucial to a strong feminist movement. We embrace diversity both internally and externally as a fundamental element of our vision and mission. FRIDA operationalizes this by supporting diverse feminist strategies, organizations, and movements.
Action – FRIDA is committed to developing strategic opportunities for young feminists and is prepared to share the risks involved in resisting and transforming oppressive structures and systems. FRIDA operationalizes this by supporting young feminists as a new cadre of progressive leadership for civil society.
In addition, FRIDA emphasizes feminist principles throughout all of its work. These principles include: non-hierarchy, collectivity, participation, diversity, and inclusion. We recognize that there are multiple feminisms and we foster opportunities for expressing those principles in our work. We define young feminist activists as individuals under thirty years old from across the gender spectrum committed to advancing gender equality and women’s rights through explicitly feminist means.
As a young feminist fund, FRIDA focuses on providing grants and opportunities to young women, girls, and trans youth with the goal of transforming power imbalances in social justice movements and the philanthropic community, sparking more creative and intergenerational movements. This focus reflects the recognition that while young women, girls, and trans youth are actively involved in processes of social change, they often lack visibility, access, influence, and support – structures that are enjoyed by more established activists. This asymmetry of power is especially evident when young women, girls, and trans youth come from marginalized communities and countries that lack strong youth-friendly and feminist policies and programs.
By increasing young feminist groups’ access to resources, leadership opportunities, and capacities that they have identified as critical to mobilizing progressive and political change, radical shifts to movements’ landscapes and social change trajectories occur. Intersectionality and diversity in experiences, identities, and ideas are indeed crucial to strong feminist and social movements. Therefore, FRIDA supports young feminists and intergenerational leadership as a critical strategy to expand, rejuvenate and sustain feminist movements and organizations, now and into the future.
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