Educate Indigenous Women Leaders to Defeat Poverty

2020 and early 2021 investments result in our COVID-19 program, PSYDEH's most ambitious fieldwork ever, a key step forward in our work to be a paradigm changer in the community-led development sector across the Americas and worldwide. Concurrently, we make strong advances in modeling to other nonprofits how they can evolve with more success in resource raising, corporate alliances, new branding, and intentional transparency. Let us explain!

Fieldwork

• One of the key parts of our just-launched COVID-19 program (see below), perhaps its crown jewel, is PSYDEH’s social enterprise project Bordamos Juntos (“Embroidering Together”) produced with Ayuda Mutua CDMX. Bordamos Juntos offers a limited collection of embroidered and handwoven textiles crafted by Indigenous women artisans from Hidalgo, Mexico, available for purchase online on our brand new Etsy shop with international shipping options.

• Produced pursuant to Indigenous women's demands in late-2020 and early 2021, our seven-mechanism COVID-19 program mitigates the pandemic's social and economic effects on women partners and their communities, while cementing our progress incubating a Network of women-led collectives since 2015-2016.

• PSYDEH continues making a creative impact with our newest short film "Poderosa" celebrating women partners and friends running for political office in the Fall 2020 election season in Hidalgo. This short was directed by resident filmmaker/photographer Diogo Heber to offer an intimate conversation around how rural Indigenous women leaders view empowerment in the context of our work to protect and promote Mexican's right to vote in fair and open electoral processes.

 Resource Well-being

• The Kroll Charitable Foundation (then called Duff & Phelps), the giving arm of the firm Kroll, selected PSYDEH as one of 22 eligible charities worldwide to receive a grant. We use these funds for our COVID-19 program and have already made a presentation to Kroll employees across the globe. 

• As part of Zoom's International Women's Day celebration, PSYDEH was chosen as one of two women's rights organizations worldwide to receive grant funds from Zoom Cares, their social impact program. Concurrently, we work to build a multi-year relationship with them, including having already made the first of a number of presentations to their employees.

• Building off long-standing relationships in Germany and with crowdfunding platforms like GlobalGiving, PSYDEH now builds a German-speaking country resource raising strategy as well as a market-facing consulting service to support for-profit companies, nonprofits, and especially rural, Indigenous artisans wanting to solve ethically knotty cultural and branding appropriation cases in a win-win manner. 

 Organization Progress

• In spring 2021, we were chosen as the only nonprofit from GlobalGiving’s worldwide network of 6000 organizations to serve on an expert panel for the official launch of Ethos which is GG’s “philosophy and how-to guide designed to help leaders explore, act on, manage, and learn from dilemmas“. Mahathi Kumar, Project Manager at PSYDEH, shared our experience using the Ethos principles to navigate a recent dilemma involving business ethics and cultural and brand appropriation. Our case study, titled “Indigenous Communities, Companies and Cultural Appropriation” speaks to the same dilemma with more detail.

• In early 2021, we used our years-long partnership with the groundbreaking Indian social start-up Chezuba to be selected as the only nonprofit in Latin America for India's largest company, the Tata Groups's TATAEngage Volunteer Program. Here, we allied with one of Tata's expert accountants based in Ambala City in the state of Haryana in northern India to produce a project focused on PSYDEH's organizational promise to be intentionally transparent. Specifically, he has delivered top-quality tools for annual financial reporting and organizational budgeting. 

• With the leadership of Valeria Olivares, PSYDEH's Social Media and Brand Awareness Consultant, we designed our innovative “Se dueña de tu voz” (“Own your voice”) to ally with social media influencers when engaging and connecting women (and men) across Mexico with the aim of promoting women's voices at the nexus of social media and social impact.

Links:

• Check out the "Bordamos Juntos" collection!
• Follow us on Instagram!
• Find out more on Facebook!

In 2020, your donation helped PSYDEH to see challenges as opportunities. 

During the fourth quarter, the entire year really, during these difficult COVID-19 times, we asked ourselves this: is there a way to still thrive, to be more resilient?

Showcasing how we get to “yes,” how we use your gift to make an impact in our work, see below highlights from our FOURTH QUARTER 2020 NEWSLETTER celebrating our progress in the field, with our finances, and as an innovative organization. ***OF COURSE, if you prefer to view the full newsletter, click on the link above or HERE.

 Fieldwork

• We published the English version of our e-book "Narrativas”, the fruit from our innovative storytelling initiative produced with crowdfunds from GlobalGiving (GG). Learn more about this work here.

• PSYDEH continues to promote and support women’s participation in late-October electoral processes in four indigenous municipalities. Our short-film on this work will be released in the 1^st quarter of 2021.

• We finish planning for our 2021-2022 multi-mechanism program. Reflecting local indigenous women feedback, this is our most ambitious fieldwork ever, produced in collaboration with these women to help their families and communities rebuild during and after COVID-19. See this news item for program details, this account on our novel leadership-training planned for our women partner’s network, and this dispatch on one of the mechanisms we call “Bordamos juntos”, innovated with our new partner Ayuda Mutua CDMX.

Financial Well-being

• PSYDEH is thrilled to be awarded a game-changing grant from GlobalGiving’s Coronavirus Relief Fund.

• Since September, we have launched new pieces of our seven-resource stream strategy: our (1) volunteer collaborator’s program, and (2) corporate partnerships program, including one of its key elements, (3) our cause marketing initiative. For details about volunteer collaborator activities, contact Carmen Grab. For more on corporate partners and cause marketing, contact Damon Taylor and Hannah Swenson respectively.

• Our pro bono global law firm partner Hogan Lovells CDMX, in collaboration with TrustLaw (a project of the Thomson Reuters Foundation), helps us to make needed progress in becoming an outfit with 100% financial transparency. Learn more here. 

Organization Progress

• India-based Chezuba helps PSYDEH to link with professionals from across the globe, including employees of the Tata Group, one of the largest Indian multinational conglomerates with 100,000+  workers across the world.

• PSYDEH’s majority-paid field team grows. Necessitated by local indigenous women’s demands and our 2020-2022 COVID-19 recovery project, PSYDEH launches our nine-person, majority-indigenous women field Corps. It operates out of our first satellite-field office “Casa Siempre Viva”, named after indigenous women partner’s regional organization with the same name.

• For over a year now, PSYDEH strategically uses our voice as a community-led development leader to promote more equitable access to resources through online global crowdfunding platforms like USA-UK-based GlobalGiving (GG). Learn more about PSYDEH’s evolving role here, and our novel model for working in this area here. To see the indirect impact of our nudging, and to learn more about GG's new community-led development research initiative, see this article and this report. 

Links:

• Search for us on Facebook
• Search for us on LinkedIn
• Search for us on Instagram

COVID-19 hit Mexico in March and has wreaked havoc since. For example, government programs to invest directly in people (around which we were creatively planning new work) have had their budgets cut or reallocated by 50-75-100% to combat the virus. PSYDEH views these challenges as opportunities. We execute this strategy to make progress in the field, with our finances, and as an organization.

FIELD

• After five months sans activities, we have restarted our seed fund project and a new project around COVID-19 with activities like (a) producing a reliable information series, (b) providing direct food assistance to 100 families through a social-enterprise action, and (c) training on natural resources as local food security.

FINANCES

• We just completed a brand optimization initiative, including myriad website changes, e.g., a new corporate partnerships page, and launching three new short videos for Facebook and Instagram. This work already yields more crowdfunding success as well as in-kind gifts from Microsoft and Google.

ORGANIZATION 

• PSYDEH can now hire foreign workers without residency, thanks to hard work in collaboration with the global law firm Hogan Lovells CDMX and TrustLaw (a project of the Thomson Reuters Foundation). We continue to work with Hogan on our tax-deductible status in Mexico, among other matters. 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PROGRESS IN OUR 3rd QUARTER NEWSLETTER

• ENGLISH
• SPANISH

LOOKING FORWARD

Our 4th quarter report will celebrate progress with our

• "COVID-19" & "Seed Fund" fieldwork,
• new "global collaborator" program, and
• corporate partnership wins.

Links:

• Search for us on Facebook
• Search for us on LinkedIn
• Search for us on Instagram

PSYDEH and women partners do not take COVID-19 wreaking havoc on fieldwork and funding lying down.

Over the past few months, your donation helps us to

• release our 186-page e-book with women partners' stories and portraits
• plan a COVID-19 project to offer short-and medium-term help to women and communities
• publish our 2019 annual report

STORYTELLING AS LEADER TRAINING AND MARKETING TOOL

PSYDEH just released our long-anticipated e-book “NARRATIVAS”. Funded by you, this beautiful tool has 68 high-quality “narrative-oriented” photographs and 32 stories by indigenous women. See HERE to read the book, read featured stories in English, and learn about the initiative. *Note, we are of course mindful of local partners' personal data privacy; click on "Data Privacy Policy" at the bottom of our website to learn more about how we manage such issues.  

COVID-19 PROJECT

To play our part in helping rural and indigenous communities navigate the pandemic, PSYDEH plans a new initiative and launched this crowdfunding CAMPAIGN to fund it. The forward-looking project supports five women-led organizations with (a) trustworthy coronavirus information they share with neighbors and (b) training on sustainable natural resource use while offering short-term (c) food assistance and income-generation help to 100 families.

2019 ANNUAL REPORT

We just published our most detailed and visually polished ANNUAL REPORT. Inside, you’ll read about 2019 work and awards, why our scalable model, our finances, and you’ll find interviews with our UK and USA staff. This high-quality report reflects the work that your hard-earned money funds.

LOOKING FORWARD

PSYDEH’s 3rd quarter report will celebrate: 

• progress with our "Seed Fund" activity
• end-of-2020 strategic planning finished early with partner involvement
• more GlobalGiving wins.

Links:

• Search for us on Facebook
• Search for us on LinkedIn
• Search for us on YouTube

Over the past five months, PSYDEH makes progress on multiple fronts despite serious COVID-19 challenges like seeing hoped-for-funding dry up and not being able to do any fieldwork.

Since PSYDEH’s last report, your investment helps us to 

• pivot by launching a new COVID-19 initiative
• produce measured results in the field
• be celebrated in the press and publish important articles

COVID-19

Information is power, always. This is especially true for vulnerable rural and indigenous communities needing to smartly navigate COVID-19 and its economic and social consequences. Thus, we produce a bi-weekly information series with trustworthy content in Spanish, indigenous languages, and English. See for example THIS episode with practical content like THIS video by a USA doctor whose first 30 minutes of advice are translated by PSYDEH for Spanish speakers. We also are about to start pursuing funding for COVID-19 recovery fieldwork.

MEASURING RESULTS

With our inaugural foray into the social enterprise field, PSYDEH’s wildly successful action-learning embroidery initiative, produced with your donation, connects women’s supply of high-quality artisan goods with global demand for such products. This puts money in women’s pockets. It directs all net gain to update these women’s organizations’ legal documents, a critical step for future fundraising. And with a 161% return on investment, this pilot project tells us that PSYDEH should do more of the same in 2020-2021. 

We also completed our first comprehensive impact assessment. Some key quantitative takeaways are that 100% of women feel better prepared as leaders, and all but one said that they trust PSYDEH and its team. Qualitatively speaking, women partners tell us that we need to deliver more resources to local communities, e.g., high-impact projects, training, and permanent field staff. A PSYDEH staff person shares, "With PSYDEH, I get the opportunity to DO while applying thought leadership on how we solve complex problems facing Mexico and other democracies like growing social and economic inequality.”

IN THE PRESS + PUBLISHING

We are thrilled to be showcased in this human interest story in Mexico News Daily. It does a fine job explaining our complicated work in basic terms.

We've published THIS article on our replicable model and THIS article on how storytelling is key to actionable feedback. PSYDEH also published our 2018 Annual report in English and Spanish. Our 2019 report will be released in early June.

LOOKING FORWARD

PSYDEH’s 2^nd quarter 2020 report will celebrate: 

• e-publishing a 160+page book with 27 women partners' stories
• progress with our "Seed Fund" activity
• lobbying for more resources for Mexico and the Global South.

Stay safe and sane!

Links:

• Search for us on Facebook
• Search for us on LinkedIn
• Search for us on YouTube