Across the world, young feminist organizers are defending bodily autonomy, resisting authoritarianism, protecting their territories and lands from exploitation, and fighting against a global rollback of human rights. They do this work with creativity and courage, grounded in lived experience and a clear understanding of the intersecting realities of race, gender, class, and disability.
…and their work is urgent.
Despite decades of trends and rhetoric around ‘localisation’, ‘equity’ and ‘movement building’, mainstream philanthropy continues to underfund the very actors and infrastructure necessary for change. These are young feminist organizations and groups that hold communities together after disasters, defend rights in the face of repression, and provide basic services where institutions have failed. Most young feminist groups operate with shoestring budgets and unpaid labour, whilst facing constant precarity created by short-term and project-bound funding that prioritizes funder objectives over what movements actually need to stay alive.
Youth-led groups – particularly those led by girls and gender-expansive youth – receive pennies in the funding ecosystem, not because they are ineffective, but because philanthropy is still biased towards scale, fluency in English, and solutions that are bureaucratically comfortable; ones that provide them with the metrics, impact indicators, and reports that extract the labour of grantee partners, but add little true value to revolutionary and paradigm shifting grassroots organising. The majority of grants remain tied to projects and restrictions, signaling that philanthropy and institutions still put more trust in their own knowledge instead of the hard won expertise of their grantee and movement partners.
Crisis after crisis, from armed conflict to climate disasters, we have seen how large institutions move slowly, and while youth-led groups tend to respond immediately to the urgent needs of their communities, they remain the most under-resourced. In today’s turbulent political climate marked by conflict, polarisation and backlash, these groups are asked to do more with even less.
At FRIDA, we know that young feminist organisers have the knowledge and expertise to decide how to best respond to their needs. We know that young feminists are constantly adapting, experimenting, and innovating in the face of adversity. Everyday we see how young feminists are contributing to feminist discourse and challenging regressive patriarchal, white-centric and racist narratives. 15 years of witnessing and resourcing young feminist movements means that we know that flexible core funding works and that young feminists are the stewards of their own dreams, movements and communities. We have done this long enough to have a proof of concept for why FRIDA was created in the first place. Young feminist groups need the backing of sustained and trusting resourcing that allows them to grow and organize.
Giving is political. Every philanthropic decision- who gets funded, who gets scrutinized, and who gets trusted, shapes whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced. In a moment of escalating backlash against gender justice, funding young feminist movements is not a neutral act of generosity or charity. It is an investment in the people defending rights, rebuilding community, and imagining alternatives where none existed before. This Giving Tuesday, give flexibly, give boldly, give to young feminist power.
