Reflections from Matt Love

2025 was a challenging yet ultimately really impactful year for Love Frankie.

USAID closing its doors was certainly not on our vision board for the year and it resulted in five of our biggest impact programs being shut down overnight. It forced us to take a long, hard look at who we wanted to be as an organisation within the social impact space and how we could best support a sector that was recovering from the shockwaves of the USAID shutdown.

But when I think of the many programs that we delivered in partnership with USAID, the first thing that comes to mind are the individual moments of impact that I witnessed with my own eyes and the enduring impact of the people’s lives we touched along the way.

The Saring Daring program is a good example.

For the past two years, I was in Jakarta for the end-of-program summit which gathered semi finalist teams made up of communications students from six universities to showcase and celebrate the creativity and success of their campaigns, on digital democracy and preventing online harms.

Indonesia is a massive country — 270 million people — and these incredible youth creators would share with me that in a crowded and noisy social media space, they felt respected and supported to have a program designed specifically for them and to be provided with tailored tools to help amplify and give platform to their voices.

It’s through these conversations that I am reminded of the impact of our programs, to hear first hand how meaningful the program was to young people who come from across Indonesia.

Matt with Saring Daring youth teams at the end-of-program summit

What we have seen in our past work are gaps we can bridge with new bespoke program designs.

That was exactly what Saring Daring was. We built it from scratch together with USAID and brought in Meta as a partner to bring it to life.

A key part of the success of these programs comes from convening unlikely partners like USAID and Meta. Our team is made up of a mix of folks that have worked in international development and those of us who are proud alumni of creative and media agencies. Our diverse team background makes us multilingual in being able to speak to both the public and private sector including government, NGOs, brands, media and tech.

Being able to do market and social research, as well as campaign design from a classic creative perspective but also program design from a more development perspective.That has been by design from day one, and it is why we are able to bring partners who do not normally sit in the same room to create even more impact together.

I see a lot of our past programs and campaigns as sandboxes that we were able to co-create, test and then iterate from.

Whether it was about combating human trafficking, wildlife trafficking, countering hate speech or promoting community harmony, we springboarded that work into future programs with our other partners.

The Temasek Foundation and TikTok partnership we convened in 2025 for the Trusted Creators Lab program, was very much an enhancement of that Saring Daring model because we had seen real impact with it, not just in the individual skills of those creators, but also in the way that their messages were received by audiences.

Love Frankie team and partners gathered together

Since 2023, as a business we have been  pivoting because we sensed changes in the international development sector.

I’ve seen more caution around our partners putting funds towards social impact programs because things are changing so quickly. Less government funding was coming through, not only from the U.S. but from governments across the world. The reckoning was not too alarming to us because we have been proactively starting to think about what a diverse set of funders and partners looks like.

One of these pivots has been to work much more closely with philanthropy in the region, namely with corporate and family foundations. We have carved out an exciting and unique set of workstreams where we help guide philanthropists on where and how social impact investments can have the biggest impact, and have co-built a range of programs aimed at uplifting underserved communities and telling powerful stories of hope and resilience.

Matt at the Fondation Chanel Asia Ensemble philanthropy convening

Amidst the ongoing wave of global uncertainty, we’re here and not going anywhere, constantly evolving along with the ever-changing world around us.

We believe that as long as we continue to put humanity at the centre of everything that we do, we will endure.

Think of this report as a reel — a series of snapshots capturing moments that we’re proud of, where we felt our work has helped create a positive effect.

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