Seed Fund Indigenous Women Defeating Poverty

Since our last report,

• we switched gears to meet emergency needs while continuing to focus on our bread and butter—women-focused, sustainable community-led development.

• Our work is right and good with Indigenous women leading the way.

• We inch closer to being the paradigm-change actor we aspire to be in Mexico, Mesoamerica, and the Global South.

GIVING FISH WHILE TEACHING HOW TO FISH

Our 2021-2024 program confronts the painful effects of the pandemic and climate change on PSYDEH’s work with Indigenous women and their communities. How?

• Casa Siempre Viva (CSV), a key component to 2021 work, is a long-missing piece to our field presence, decreasing transportation costs (money and time), increasing in-Region presence, and offering women a safe workspace.

• Professional Indigenous Women Field Corps (IWC) delivers direct, personal support to women, helping them feel less isolated and abandoned, while also supporting them as change-makers.

• Cuando Amanece initiative delivers short-term, emergency assistance demanded by women during this hard time via coaching and financial assistance for their own small economic and social impact projects.

• Government of Ireland and German Lemonaid & ChariTea Foundation join forces with PSYDEH to incubate a network of cooperatives through 2024, in part based on our 2021 social enterprise Bordamos Juntos (including our Etsy Shop).

RIGHT AND GOOD WORK WITH INDIGENOUS WOMEN

Jazmín Manrique, the 24-year-old Otomí Indigenous woman leader pictured above with our field vehicle, a canary yellow 1990 VW beetle that has become our calling card, is one of four female professionals forming the core of our new IWC. Raised in rural, marginalized Mexico, Jazmín has a degree in Sustainable Development from the Intercultural University of the State of Hidalgo (UICEH) and is a fearless coach and community organizer who travels solo through the mountains co-leading what we detail above. As she says, “[I work with PSYDEH] to reach women… to help them be informed and implement proposals based on their own opinions and demands.” 

PARADIGM-CHANGER IN THE FIELD OF COMMUNITY-LED DEVELOPMENT

When reorientating how we work in 2014-2015, we set out to model a new paradigm for how local-focused, Global South nonprofits can sustain their work while innovating a process-oriented prototype for empowering women and their communities to sustainable solve their own problems.

Our new 2020 Annual Report provides visually strong, narrative-centric reporting on how we did this during the hard pandemic year. And these past months have seen us continue to achieve big wins. For example:

• we completed our first collaboration with USA-based company PopSockets. This project, described further in this case study, demonstrates how we can innovate profitable, win-win collaborations with corporate partners.

• Indeed, we are also in mid-stream producing impact-making alliances with Johnson & Johnson, HSBC Bank, the Zoom company, and India-based Tata Group. More on these wins in our fourth quarter, 2021 report!

• The London, UK-based Alliance of NGOs and CSOs for South-South Cooperation (ANCSSC) chooses PSYDEH as its first Mexican nonprofit member.

• PSYDEH’s backstop support team welcomes new staff from Ireland and the USA and soon Belgium and Mexico. For example, we’re thrilled that USA lawyer Ryan Lavigne chooses PSYDEH to use our novel income diversification strategy when securing the resources we need.

• We are thrilled to have just been selected by the USA-based Team4Tech as their first Mexican partner and only their third in Latin America to join their global community of nonprofit allies. Here, Team4Tech supports PSYDEH in linking with global companies like Adobe, SalesForce, and Hewlett Packard Enterprises on Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-focused projects with an aim to making a measured social impact.

*TO LEARN MORE about 2021 returns and progress, be sure to check out PSYDEH's RECENT NEWS page.

Links:

• Check out the "Bordamos Juntos" collection on Etsy!
• Search for us on LinkedIn
• Search for us on Instagram