Empower Mexican Women to Solve Communal Inequality

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.

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