FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund is an international fund dedicated to resourcing young feminist organising. Its Strategic Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Framework challenges the linear, compliance-focused systems traditionally used to measure social change, replacing them with a model designed around collective learning, accessibility and feminist movement realities.
Conventional MEL frameworks often expect organisations to translate complex change into fixed targets and standard indicators. This can disadvantage grassroots and movement-based organisations whose achievements emerge through relationships, political shifts, collective action and changes that cannot be predicted in advance. It also allows funders to decide which outcomes count, even when those closest to the work understand change differently.
FRIDA developed its framework through a collaborative planning process led by its Change Team. It replaced conventional terminology with a more accessible structure: ten “dreams” represent its goals, twenty “planets” describe the outcomes it is working towards, and fifty-two “signs of change” replace standard indicators. The framework is organised around five commitments – Bridging, Flourishing, Queering, Co-Creating and Moving – and is designed to recognise that feminist change is relational, collective and non-linear.
The framework connects information from FRIDA’s grant making cycles with its wider learning and decision-making. Rather than treating evaluation as a periodic exercise conducted for donor accountability, it uses evidence to understand collective impact, strengthen connections and make movement-informed decisions. Its language and visual design are also intended to make the framework usable across the wider “FRIDAverse,” rather than reserving MEL for professional evaluators.
What practitioners can take from this
Refrain from imposing non-linear social change into a linear reporting system. FRIDA’s model shows that changing the language and structure of evaluation can change whose knowledge is recognised and allow movements to describe progress on their own terms.