Founded in 2008, the FRIDA young feminist fund is still something of a newcomer in the arena of giving for women and girls. But even at its young age, this funder operates at a broad size and scope, making more than than 700 grants in 2021 alone, according to the group’s 2022 annual report, to groups of young feminists in areas including Latin America, the Caribbean, the Asia-Pacific region, Central Europe and North and sub-Saharan Africa.
FRIDA’s scope might suggest that it’s a big, staffed-up, top-down institution. Instead, it’s something far more complex and interesting. FRIDA’s commitment to intersectional feminism isn’t just reflected in its grants; it’s a commitment that extends to the way it carries out its grantmaking and, for that matter, virtually all of its decision-making. FRIDA can perhaps be best understood as a radically democratic collaborative of young feminists with a passion for deeply examining its principles and practices that also happens to move hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
FRIDA’s methods may seem radical, but that hasn’t stopped the funder from attracting support from far more traditional foundations, including the Gates and Ford foundations and other funders including Comic Relief, the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund and the Swedish International Development Agency. The organization has also benefited from MacKenzie Scott’s largesse; last year, FRIDA received $10 million from Scott, a donation FRIDA gratefully acknowledged, while also calling out the donor’s connection to “one of the most exploitative companies in the world.”
“Spreading power across and around”
FRIDA was doing participatory grantmaking long before it was a trend. In addition to the funder’s Global Advisory Committee, which itself is made up of regional committees that are selected every two years through an open application process, grant applications are reviewed and voted on by both current grantees from past cycles and the applicants themselves. Rather than choosing recipients, staff are charged with helping applicants through the process, assisting with screening to assure applicants meet FRIDA’s criteria and checking applicants’ references.
FRIDA issues open calls for applications every two years; in between grantmaking rounds, the organization solicits feedback from all stakeholders to refine its processes. That feedback is complex and thoughtful, as reflected by its 144-page 2022 report “Resourcing Connections: Reflections on Feminist Participatory Grantmaking Practice,” which, among other things, answers the question “what segments of FRIDA’s model brought joy and excitement, and what (respondents) found challenging and think should be assessed or changed in the future.”
This kind of widely distributed decision-making model may have far more moving parts than the traditional one, said OluTimehin Kukoyi, FRIDA’s senior advocacy officer, media, but it is also central to the funder’s mission. “We’re not going to get our feminist liberation from top-down processes. Instead, we’re going to get it by spreading power across and around,” she said.
That attitude toward shifting power extends to how grantees use the money FRIDA moves to them. “We don’t tell people what to do with their money. We believe that people come to us for money because they know what they need,” Kukoyi said. “If they use that money toward providing housing for members of their community or for providing any other life-related resources, we don’t go to them and say, ‘Provide us receipts for how much rent you paid.’ We don’t do that at all.”
At the same time, Kukoyi said, FRIDA’s staff are aware that other funders do ask for receipts, so they work to help them navigate the more mainstream grantseeking world. While all FRIDA grants are multi-year, the funder limits its support of any single organization to a three- to five-year period. With that in mind, the organization provides support for groups that are aging out of its grantmaking ecosystem so that they’re prepared to apply for funding from, and work with, other funders. Her organization is aware that it’s a participatory grantmaking pioneer, Kukoyi said, and thus wants to be sure that organizations know what to expect from other grantmakers.
A message to other funders: “Trust the legitimacy of your own choices”
FRIDA’s grantmaking practices may mark it as an outlier among funders, but Kukoyi believes that its pioneering approach is one that other, older funders and foundations may want to learn from and consider following. One of the inadvertent results of past philanthropy, she said, is that older movements have successfully established more autonomy. Failing to respond to that fact, she said, puts funders at danger of making themselves “a bit of a dinosaur in this space.”
Kukoyi understands that what she’s suggesting is a big lift. “It’s a legitimate thing for established funders, or people who have been in the funding space for decades or half a century, to wonder whether the way that we’re going about things isn’t too disruptive,” she said. “But the thing is, we’ve established that times have changed. The work that [established funders] started decades ago has culminated in an increase in autonomy and an increase in people’s understanding of their material conditions.”
Rather than continuing to pursue an outmoded grantmaking model, she said, “The advice that I would offer to institutional funders who think that they continue to need to handhold those to whom they donate would be to trust that their own selection processes work. Trust the legitimacy of your own choices, and therefore trust the people that you’re giving resources to, to execute in a way that makes the most use of the resources you’ve given them.”
At first glance, that seems like a pretty radical suggestion from a 15-year-old funder of, by and for young people serving highly at-risk areas of the world. But a deeper look at FRIDA’s radically democratic, highly distributed and deeply self-reflective decision-making model suggests that her organization is onto something. At the very least, the success that FRIDA has had to date is a powerful argument against the idea that democracy is an enemy of progress.
Credit:Source link
