Empower Mexican Women to Solve Communal Inequality

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:

• RSM - Launched a three-year female cooperative school (9-month program with a 52-hour curriculum integrating learning from national Incuba and global 3M) resulting in 279 total hours of training and 224 hours of coaching feedback for 135 majority-Indigenous women students.

• RSM - 58 women school graduates formed 4 cooperatives – Tierra de Bordadoras, La fuerza otomí-tepueha, Sihuame Tekikame, Yu danxu mpefí di töí – representing a region of 90,000 people living in some of Mexico's most marginalized areas.

• RSM – 4 cooperatives won funding from USA-based WARP, produced 4 local-community impact projects, and created their own social media pages while exploring how to use a voice-amplifying website created with Zoom company in 2021. They also co-led a regional public forum of 175+ women artisans and national and international partners resulting in this powerful human rights-based DECLARATION for government leaders, produced thanks to our Adobe partnership.

• TPT - Launched a three-to-five-year transformative digital inclusion effort with 6 digital work hubs equipped with satellite internet thanks to our Viasat partnership, with 2 of these hubs outfitted with Viasat-donated solar solutions from Clear Blue Technologies, giving over 350 majority-women and girls from 30 communities in 5 municipalities access to and training on how to use tech to innovate solutions to problems.

• TPT - PSYDEH's field office and majority-women team are outfitted with tech tools and have been trained on how to use them to educate beneficiaries, e.g., Viasat donated 42 laptops (PCs and Mac) with access to cloud tools like Google Workspace, Slack, Adobe Express, Canva, or rural digital education tool kits including cell phones, remote battery backs, portable speakers, personal defense equipment, thanks to our Team4Tech partnership.

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

• raised 38 times more resources than we did in 2014. This is extraordinary success and yet most are in-kind, goods and services from volunteers and companies like Google, Slack, and Canva. We hope to rebalance this result to be more funds-heavy in 2023 thanks to our just being selected for the Lightful BRIDGE program, delivered in partnership with GlobalGiving.

• continued multi-year partnerships with PopSockets, Zoom, and Lemonaid & ChariTea, formed 3 new ones with Adobe, 3M, and the Honnold Foundation, and we were profiled in Fast Company and Diginomica while benefiting from 1750 volunteer hours donated by Viasat, Adobe, and 3M partners in Mexico, USA, and Europe.

• shared in-country experiences with three professional groups: 16 professionals from Viasat and Team4Tech in a 10-day immersive experience (PSYDEH’s biggest corporate pro bono project yet), 26 doctoral students from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology (in collaboration with Brazil-based Campus b), and 4 3M professionals (in collaboration with USA-based Pyxera Global).

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!

Links:

• Six-part video series: PSYDEH's Impact in 2022
• Australian public radio: solar power in Mexican communities
• PSYDEH 2021 Annual Report (2022 report forthcoming)

Since our last report, PSYDEH’s majority-women team uses your generous donation to:

• pursue digital inclusion for isolated women and their communities, with the aim to

• increase economic independence, personal growth, and social and political opportunities, while we

• build a transformative ecosystem made up of global investor-donors, women partners, and PSYDEH.

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.

Links:

• Sign-up for Monthly Co-op Report
• Etsy Shop, Bordamos Juntos products

Since the last report, PSYDEH used your generous donation to

• wrap up a hard, productive 2021 meeting emergency needs

• launch 2022 programming to increase economic solidarity and access to information and communications technology (ICT)

• pursue sustainable resource diversification.

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):

• Tackle misinformation

• Offer emotional support with our first women-led field corps

• Defend rights through capacity building and mutual-aid services with Cuando Amanece and Bordamos Junto programming, and normative advocacy on women and electoral politics and economic rights.

• Support digital access when opening the first of five fieldwork hubs.  

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:

• Cuando Amanece mutual aid programming

• Sierra Madre programming to organize women entrepreneurs into a network of cooperatives

• Tech For All linking satellite wifi, cloud tools, low-tech hardware, and solar energy into day-to-day programming work

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:

• how we were selected in 2021 for funding from Kroll advisory firm, Zoom company, and the giving arm of Germany-based Lemonaid & ChariTea. We received professional services investments from Zoom and multi-national companies like HSBC Bank and Johnson & Johnson. We produced our first fee-for-service socially conscious project with USA-based PopSockets. We also maximized the benefits from in-kind donations of licenses and ad buys from Zoom and Google.

• In 2022, we grow many of these alliances while negotiating new ones, e.g., the home satellite wifi company Viasat and their social impact “Tech For Good” initiative.

*See this article for more details about our work in 2021.

Links:

• Sign-up for Monthly Co-op Report
• Etsy Shop, Bordamos Juntos products
• 2021 Year in Review

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, 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

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:

• Follow us on Instagram!
• Find out more on Facebook!