PROGRAM IMPACT
Here are some 2022 highlights of what YOU + your PSYDEH partner achieved through our community-led development programming -- (1) economic solidarity Red Sierra Madre (RSM) and (2) digital inclusion Tec para Todos (TPT) -- meeting six different goals in the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development:
With this impact, YOUR donation helps to put women like Graciela Santillan Garcia, the new president of the cooperative La fuerza otomí-tepehua, in the driver's seat to help herself and other powerful women to get sustainably made ethical goods to national and global markets, bolstering the economic development of their own rural areas. As Graciela says,
"In the future, I see that if we continue to work together and stay united, we will obtain good results. Little by little the work we are doing in the cooperative is going to generate and will generate and produce more."
The impact is not solely focused on improving economic and social equality. Women accessing and using digital tools to bring economic benefits to their families and communities increase their gender equality among men and government officials. Hidalgo male citizen, and PSYDEH volunteer Geovany Sabanilla Gonzalez, says,
"It's beautiful to know that people at an international level believe in your work, that they believe in the women of the cooperatives. Personally, it has been a very rewarding experience. Cooperative members are seeing how technology has helped us to learn, communicate better, solve problems in our daily lives, and improve the quality of our textiles. And now women partners know that their textiles can be marketed at a fair price and that there are people out there who are interested in knowing about them and their daily lives, who respect their reality and recognize that they are admirable, strong, and committed women— something that the community sometimes does not see.”
One more beneficiary story.
Yu danxu mpefí di töí produces and sells silk flowers at public markets throughout their municipality to generate income for themselves and their families. Using funds from recent sales, cooperative members decided to invest in new flower molds purchased online for the first time. PSYDEH's field leader Salma Sinai Soto Montes shares that cooperative members wanted to confirm the delivery date for their order and ensure they'd be available to receive the shipment but had no experience doing so.
Using new tech and training, coordinating their order and shipment was possible and these women partners were empowered to invest in themselves, their cooperatives, and their revenue-generating potential. As Salma says, "Cooperative members commented that they had never followed a link to track a package before, and, in fact, they had never ordered anything on the internet before. This experience was new for them, and I could see that it gave them more confidence to learn and understand shipments and online sales. This will benefit their cooperatives in the future."
ORGANIZATIONAL GROWTH
Here are some more 2022 highlights of what YOU + your PSYDEH grassroots non-profit partner achieved through our paradigm-shifting work. We
MEDIA
Check out this beautiful human-story oriented, SIX-PART video series designed for YOU to meet the women entrepreneurs your generous donation supports!
Listen to this recent Australian public radio interview on what we do, with whom, and why our Tech for All program uses tech like renewable energy to sustainably transform rural, marginalized communities.
See below just a few of the thousands of photos we have from the impactful year that was!
THANK YOU
Thank you for your generous support in 2022. We are excited to deliver more and better sustainable returns on your investment in 2023!
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Since our last report, PSYDEH’s majority-women team uses your generous donation to:
Let us explain!
Innovating a proof-of-concept for sustainable development and information and communications technology (ICT)
In late spring, PSYDEH welcomed top professionals representing global companies Viasat (satellite wireless), Clear Blue (solar for the isolated), and Crane Worldwide Logistics. Led by Viasat’s transformational investments -- satellite wireless, solar, computers, professional services, and flexible funds, we incubate a digital inclusion-oriented ecosystem through which these companies and others like Zoom and global non-profits like Team4Tech invest in our sustainable development work. This includes programming we call Tec Para Todos (Tech for All), a standalone initiative and key to producing other programming highlighted below.
With Tech for All, we’ve just built a network of six remote digital work hubs from which PSYDEH staff and Indigenous women partners will innovate culturally appropriate tech access and use solutions for countless vulnerable women and their communities. As an example, earlier this summer, there was a municipal-wide power cut where our main remote digital work hub is located. Donors’ tech investments kept our team led by dynamic women like Salma Sinaí Soto Montes in action. Or, in late May, isolated Indigenous women used our hubs to overcome physical isolation and the effects of climate change when sharing local better practices on animal husbandry projects. Throughout, our staff is supplied with ICT (including personal defense equipment) they need to safely lead our programming in rural, isolated areas.
Mobilizing women to produce micro-economic impact projects while building four sustainable cooperatives (co-ops)
Cuando Amanece helps 164 Indigenous women leaders representing 34 communities to organize themselves into 23 collectives and then co-create their own solutions to their own problems with the aim of MAKING measurable economic and social impact. These 23 collectives use economic seed funding made possible by you and GlobalGiving (average of $5,000 MXN ($244 USD) per collective) to already produce 28 projects, e.g, wood handicrafts, chicken-and pig husbandry for sale and personal consumption, and textile production.
Many of these entrepreneurial women are supported by our flagship 2022-2024 programming, an initiative we call Red Sierra Madre (RSM). Here, we coach 60+ Indigenous women leaders representing 1000s of citizens living in 20+ communities spread across the Sierra Madre mountains. Our RSM “cooperative school" uses a 12-month human rights-based curriculum co-created with Mexican non-profit INCUBA to teach women about why, the nature of, and how we forge economic solidarity. We teach about how to quality control and smartly price local-sourced goods for national and global markets. We also explore the nature of commercial storytelling and digital marketing, and much more.
PSYDEH supplements this economic support and training with something we call “Proyecto de Vida” where external psychologists and leadership consultants, recruited through our new Puentes initiative and remodeled Global Collaborators program, live in our main remote digital work hub while serving local-based women staff and women entrepreneurs. This coaching helps us to navigate personal challenges like abandonment, violence, and sexism while building professional skills like public speaking, how to conduct an interview with the press, and how to effectively debate in a public setting.
Your investment inspires companies and foundations from around the world to do the same.
By choosing PSYDEH, you and GlobalGiving inspire companies, governments, non-profits, and foundations to do the same. The aforementioned companies, the USA-based Kroll advisory firm, the Government of Ireland, and the German Lemonaid & ChariTea are now trusted partners. This trust, in turn, inspires new investors like Adobe to recently select PSYDEH as one of only 15 nonprofits across the globe for what we hope will be a multi-year alliance. Moreover, the USA-based Honnold Foundation has just awarded PSYDEH a large prize for more solar solutions to be integrated into “Tech For All” this fall.
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Since the last report, PSYDEH used your generous donation to
Looking Back At 2021 Fieldwork: agency & solidarity
2021 was more complicated than normal. COVID-19 and climate change cut access to water, electricity, ICT, and local mobility, all of which impacted Mexico’s economic life and our work. PSYDEH responded to these circumstances by using six better practices that reflect local women allies' demands and increase agency and solidarity (key ingredients for sustainable community-led development):
Looking To 2022 Fieldwork: economic & technology tools
PSYDEH leaders like Alejandra Rios Pérez (pictured here) recently launched our most-ambitious programming ever, a three-pillar response to the effects of inequality, COVID-19, and climate change:
2021-2022 Back-office Success: storytelling & resource diversification
With multiple crises and the government's cut of all funding, many Mexican nonprofits are closing their doors. To thrive not just survive when pursuing programming goals, PSYDEH's small, but mighty office team weaves a more powerful story of PSYDEH's perseverance, solidarity, and empowerment, including through a new logo and our five value propositions. You helped us to fully fund one of our GlobalGiving campaigns while we doubled down on our resource diversification strategy with a heavy focus on multi-year support. Examples of success include:
*See this article for more details about our work in 2021.
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Since our last report,
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?
RIGHT AND GOOD WORK WITH INDIGENOUS WOMEN
Jazmín, 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:
*TO LEARN MORE about 2021 returns and progress, be sure to check out PSYDEH's RECENT NEWS page.
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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
Resource Well-being
Organization Progress
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