Despite shrinking philanthropic resources, young feminist orginizers are engaging in work that stitches communities together, pushes back against human rights infringements, and helps to build the better world we all dream of. And through 2025 FRIDA supported young feminist organizers through the dispersal of both financial and non-financial resources:
🌿 Through the 2025 Call for Applications FRIDA welcomed 24 new grantee partners.
🌿 A total number of 188 core support and 172 special grants were awarded reaching a total $1 842 500.
🌿 In September 2025, FRIDA held its very first reverse call for applications, challenging the power and labor differential in resource mobilization hierarchies.
🌿 And through FRIDA’s Grantee Partner Journey, we strengthened our financial and non-financial support to grantee partners, enabling young feminist organizers to receive capacity strengthening resources.
FRIDA supports young feminist organisers and movement building in global majority countries by providing financial resources to grantee partners through initial and renewal rounds of funding. Additionally, through philanthropic advocacy and partnerships, FRIDA influences and raises funds to sustain young feminist organizing
FRIDA prioritizes multi-year partnerships with grantee partners because we focus on supporting collectives, not projects. Both grants and the overall journey are designed to foster grantee partners’ growth while holding onto flexibility as a core value. FRIDA conducts a renewal process as part of its grantmaking strategy annually. This process focuses on renewing core grants for active grantee partners in years 2 and 3 of their grantee partner journey.
In 2025, FRIDA renewed core and special grants for 112 grantee partners. Additionally, FRIDA provided transition grants to 52 grantee partners to support the continuity and sustainability of their operations after completing their journey with FRIDA.
This table represents core grantmaking towards FRIDA’s active grantee partners through renewal processes.
From growing conservatism and rapidly shrinking civil society space to the destruction of our shared ecosystem, the world as we’ve known it is facing challenges that can often feel insurmountable. Yet in the midst of these difficult realities, young feminist organising provides a resilient and hopeful bright spot. Young feminist activists are part of a long history of youth activism and resistance, and we were excited to be able to extend support to 24 new grantee partners in their individual and collective journeys to liberation. Their work stitches communities together, pushes back against human rights infringements, and helps to build the better world we all dream of. In the Class of 2025 Zine you will find brief biographies of some of FRIDA’s new partners as well as information on the regions they are based in. Due to an increasingly hostile global political context, the amount we shared about some of our partners and their work varied depending on their risk profile and regional contexts.
In 2025 we strengthened our support for grantee partners through the implementation of FRIDA’s Grantee Partner Journey. FRIDA spent a considerable amount of time reflecting on how a structured system of financial and non-financial support for grantee partners could function – enabling young feminist collectives to receive capacity strengthening support from the very initial stages of joining the FRIDAverse, until their transition out.
Learning Spaces
In October 2025, FRIDA hosted a milestone learning space titled “Telling Our Stories: Strengthening Reporting Practices in Our Feminist Movements.” This webinar was designed specifically for grantee partners who joined the FRIDAverse in 2022, marking the culmination of their multi-year journey and facilitating their gradual transition toward alumni status.
Over the past 3 years, these groups have been the beneficiaries of sustained accompaniment projects, including regional welcome calls, focal point accompaniment, grant renewal cycles, and capacity strengthening in the areas of crisis response and deepening collective organizing. As they approached the final stages of their FRIDA journey, many expressed a shared need: to reimagine reporting not as a donor obligation, but as a space for reflection, learning, and storytelling.
Grounded in insights from the pre-assessment survey conducted with grantee partners, the webinar created space for collective learning between FRIDA’s Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL) and Resource Mobilization (RM) teams, together with focal points, advisors, and grantee partners. Through real examples from grantee partners in Madagascar, Albania, and Nicaragua, interactive reflections, and report building tools, participants explored how reporting can serve as a bridge between internal learning and external storytelling.
This session reflected FRIDA’s broader aim: to move away from compliance-driven reporting toward narrative sovereignty, care-centered evaluation, and feminist accountability.
In September 2025 FRIDA held its very first reverse call for applications.
Following on from the Re-Imagining INGOs (RINGO) project – which issued a ‘call for proposals’ to international actors (INGOs and funders) to provide support for locally-determined endeavours – we gathered young feminists and funders to flip the concept of resource mobilisation on its head. We began to imagine what it might look like if funders were the ones to apply to feminist collectives to be able to fund them.
As a fund focused on resourcing young feminist organizers, FRIDA is often the first formal source of funding for newly established groups. We commit to providing flexible, core support for up to a period of four years, facilitating space and time for groups to become more firmly rooted, build stronger networks, and start to build and strengthen a sustainable feminist ecosystem of their own. An important part of FRIDA’s Transition Strategy is providing grantee partners the space, network and resources to utilize the partnerships, potential and community inherent in their relationship with FRIDA to mobilize and begin to tap into larger pools of funding.
