As one of the only youth-led funds focused on resourcing young feminist movements, FRIDA’s commitment to supporting and sustaining emerging and grassroots movements is highly evident within our participatory Call for Applications (CFA). Since its inception FRIDA’s CFA has been an opportunity for young, informal, unregistered and/or newly founded groups – groups that generally have a harder time securing funding from traditional philanthropy for a myriad of reasons – to apply to join the FRIDA community. Today, the CFA continues to be an opportunity for young feminist organisations to access much-needed resources that enable them to do transformative work. This work, and a myriad of other actions that young feminist activists take continue to sustain and build the feminist movement globally.
The CFA process allows the FRIDA community and applicants to decide which groups receive funding and are welcomed into the FRIDAverse. Within this participatory process, FRIDA challenges and changes the power dynamic around who makes funding decisions and centers the expertise and knowledge of young feminists working on the ground.
The Call for Applications is traditionally an open call, allowing young feminist organisations working in any majority country [Western, Eastern, Southern and Central Africa; South West Asia; North Africa; the Caribbean; Latin America; Central Eastern Europe; Caucasus; Central and North Asia; South, SouthEast, East Asia & The Pacific] to apply for FRIDA’s flexible funding regardless of the thematic or issue which inspires their work
FRIDA has spoken publicly about the significant challenges to our financial sustainability as a result of major and abrupt shifts in our funding landscape. These included the conclusion of several large grants, as some donors moved away from supporting feminist funds, driven by both a shrinking civic space influenced by anti-rights agendas and pivots toward more localized funding approaches.
These challenges have not been unique to FRIDA and have rippled through the sector as a whole, posing a threat to what feminist movements have been building for years.
This has brought a quiet reckoning — a time to take stock of FRIDA’s mobilisation and partnership efforts and how we intend to meet the moment – all the while ensuring that our community of current and future grantee partners continue to be resourced and remain central to our work.
Paused in 2023 due to internal capacities, our Call for Applications has remained a critical point that we have consciously moved towards even amidst these challenges.
In our last CFA in 2022, FRIDA received over 1000 applications and the process took 9 months and required a sizable budget and human capacity. Given current internal capacities and resources, we decided to host a community-led CFA in 2025. This CFA is an opportunity for FRIDA to welcome new grantee partners to the community while remaining committed to balanced human and financial capacities.
FRIDA’s 2025 grantmaking budget has earmarked $120,000 USD in financial support for new groups. As FRIDA continues its’ political commitment to multi year funding for grantee partners we will also continue to support 188 current grantee partners within the Grantee Partner Journey. In an effort to ensure we are able to offer adequate support to current and new grantees, FRIDA will welcome 24 new grantees from within the 6 regions where we fund.
Rationale Behind a Community-Led Call for Applications
As one of the only funds focused specifically on teenage girls and young feminist movements that holds an open call, interest in FRIDA’s CFA is naturally very high. While our grantmaking platform and systems are equipped to receive well over 1000 applications, our current internal capacities and budget are not. An open call necessitates communication and advocacy materials for outreach and significant human resources for the operations of a comprehensive participatory process encompassing several checks and stages to ensure fairness and equity.
As our budget for new grants is limited, receiving over 1000 applications while only being able to award 24 grants would not be the best use of FRIDAs resources or the time of young feminist activists.
What does the process look like?
FRIDA’s CFA 2025 took place via an open nomination process. In an effort to keep the decision-making within the young feminist community, FRIDA Alumni, long-term grantee partners and Advisors nominated groups in their region to join the FRIDA Grantee Partner Community. Nominations needed to meet criteria that were guided by FRIDAs participatory grant making Regional Strategies [see the Resourcing Connections report for more on this]. We ensured that the criteria set allowed for emerging groups with little access to other funding to be nominated. In a similar fashion to the traditional open call for applications, FRIDA did not place restrictions on thematics and regions. In an effort to support young feminist organising in spaces which remain underfunded, we ensured that nominations strongly considered countries and emerging thematics/ thematics we do not yet fund – an action which we have always prioritised within our CFAs.
Post the open nomination process led by FRIDA alumni, long-term GPs and advisors, FRIDA invited 171 groups to apply for funding.
What comes next?
24 new grantee partners will be welcomed to FRIDA and begin their their GP Journey, which includes financial and capacity strengthening support from the FRIDA community.
FRIDAs grantee partner journey, due to commence later this year with the new GP cohort, is a strategy developed by FRIDA staff using learnings captured from the implementation and evaluation of our past Grantmaking strategy which was implemented from 2019-2024.
Follow along as we launch the GP Journey later this year as a part of the 15 years of FRIDA Campaign
