Nurturing Roots, Flourishing Movement
While we focus on building a better future,
We cannot forget the past.
Nurturing Roots, Flourishing Movement
While we focus on building a better future, We cannot forget the past.
Memory Project
Our history started long before 2008, when the idea for a young feminist fund began to take root. Today, FRIDA continues to be the only youth-led fund exclusively supporting young feminist organizing.
This year, on International Women’s Day, we tried to pay tribute to the women who paved the way before us, acknowledging that their individual lives are a part of our collective story. We wanted to reaffirm and acknowledge that while dedicating our work to young women and girls, we are not separate from our elders . Our work is informed by, built from, and intrinsically linked to theirs. It is for this reason that we celebrate their resistance, which defied systems that denied young women and girls entry to platforms of power.
We continue to throw light on some very inspiring women whose initial push, advise, support and envisoning has helped become FRIDA what it is today. In recognising that our memories are a part of our resistance, we embark on a journey to document our beginnings through the life stories of our founders.
Each story is a reflection, a reliving of memory, sharing of symbols and artefacts, and a reaffirmation of the belief that young feminist organizing can change the course of history.
Thanks!
The stories, wisdoms and dreams you read here are the soil from which frida was born.
Our gratitude to Christy Selica Zinn, the collector/transcriber of these stories. Christy is a young feminist consultant working at the intersection of women’s rights, youth development and organisational change in Sub-Saharan Africa. She is especially interested in the physical body as a political entity and bearer of memory. She is based in Durban, South Africa and is a companion to FRIDA’s grantee partner, Kusimudzana, in Mozambique.
We are grateful for Christy’s time, energy and love that she put into each of these. “It is hard to describe the beauty of listening to the fraction of their many stories that can be told in the space of only an hour: sensing the passionate energy from which FRIDA was born still running through their veins, springing from their hearts and out of their mouths into their words,” she said.
We are also thankful to Pearl D’Souza, the illustrator and designer for this project. Pearl is an illustrator and graphic designer based out of Goa, India. Her work tells stories – real and imagined, her own and others. She strives to create work that adds value and beauty to the world we live in.
Once again, we are thankful for all the stories and lives that made FRIDA possible. Let us continue to honour, today and always, the infinite ancestry of womxn who have raised us, encouraged us, and reminded us that we have wings.
