Our Journey

The Beginning
FRIDA was born from collective calls by feminists globally at the 2008 Association for Women’s Rights in Development [AWID] Forum to close the significant gap in funding available for feminist organizations, particularly those led by young feminists. Calls for action were spurred on by the rise of youth-led groups and movements and the higher demand for funding support to advance sustainable solutions to the rights violations, violence, inequalities and discrimination faced by girls and young women.

In 2010, at a meeting convened by the AWID and the Central American Women’s Fund, a group of eight young feminists from Africa, Asia, The Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, The United States, and Eastern Europe came together in Beirut Lebanon to share ideas, discuss, debate, and work together to refine the vision, mission and primary goals of a new fund that would serve the needs of young feminists globally

“As a group, we reviewed what we knew: that young feminists are organizing around diverse issues, often in difficult and restrictive contexts and that our ability to raise resources is often limited, especially when questions of age, experience and capacity are weighted against us. We sought to question the possibilities that could emerge if progressive young women’s activists received the resources needed to help tackle social and economic inequalities, confront fundamentalisms, and address the impacts of global concerns such as armed conflict and environmental justice. We discussed the opportunities a fund like this could provide for young feminist activists to influence international funding agendas and to mobilize additional resources for our movements. We explored the possibility of creating a funding mechanism that would address some of these issues and that would be developed by and for young feminists themselves.” – Amina Doherty, FRIDA’s first coordinator

Over three days, the group spent time outlining visions for a fund that would strengthen and support a younger generation of feminist activists and, in a much broader sense, would contribute towards a strong, well-resourced and multi-generational women’s movement that was inclusive, fun, self-critical and progressive in its politics and values.

The Name
In the envisioning of FRIDA, the group of young feminists from across the world who met in Beirut discussed several tensions that a fund like the one they were envisioning might face – challenges of location, language, and communication in connecting with  young feminist collectives across the global majority; the
challenge of locating “new” resources for feminist organizing, the question of how to support young people’s activism without reinforcing the concept of “youth” as an identity, and, amongst other things, the size and frequency of grantmaking. In the naming of these challenges, the group agreed to design the fund in ways that sought to address these tensions without being held back by them.

They agreed to the following values:

Flexibility in all systems and processes…
Resources that are varied and that contribute to stronger feminist movements globally…
Inclusivity across a broad range of identities…
Diversity in levels of action and forms of organizing…
Action and accountability to the political visions and agendas we seek to promote…

These core values formed an acronym for the Fund:
FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund.

“Though there were concerns about whether the name would be seen as a form of tribute to Frida Kahlo, and we struggled with the possibility of the Fund being identified with one individual (and region), we also valued the connection with Frida known globally for her inspiring and passionate work as an artist but also an important non-conformist revolutionary figure. After further discussions we discovered that the name Frida is popular in many languages around the world with a broad range of meanings from ‘Peaceful Leader’ to ‘beautiful, beloved.’ At the end of the day, we agreed on the name – FRIDA to represent a fund that would employ a feminist approach to its grantmaking and overall strategies. We acknowledged that different groups and individuals will have different understandings of what feminism means and that many groups will choose not to self-identify as “feminist”, but as a fund, FRIDA would be committed to supporting groups and initiatives whose political vision is in line with the vision the Fund is promoting” –  Amina Doherty

More than just financial resources

“We talked about our dreams for building a culture of resources mobilization that recognized ‘resources’ as more than just money – and how the fund could act as a platform for building a more democratic culture of dealing with resources within our feminist movements” – Alexandra Pittman

From its inception, FRIDA aimed to provide accessible, strategic and responsive funding for young feminist-led initiatives.

The focus on flexible, core funding echoed FRIDA’s commitment to strengthen young feminists’ capacity to leverage more resources for their work while respecting the analysis, strategies, and actions as defined by young feminist collectives themselves.

As a core part of its own work as a young feminist fund in a sector marred with patriarchal capitalist ideals and structures, FRIDA aimed to challenge traditional philanthropy by advocating for, amongst other things, a dissolution of power in relationships between those seeking the funds and those providing them, an inviting of a more participatory way of grantmaking and a foregrounding of the labour, contributions and frameworks of young feminists as integral to freer, happier and more just societies.

More on FRIDAs historical moments below