Swiss Social Worker Carmen Grab Joins PSYDEH

PSYDEH is thrilled to welcome trilingual, Swiss social worker Carmen Grab. She joins our Mexico-City Satellite team and is focused on global engagement. Her initial duties include coordinating PSYDEH’s new Global Collaborators Program for Mexican and foreign professionals looking for Mexico volunteer opportunities and innovating a strategy for resource raising with and in the German-speaking world, with a particular focus on Austria, Germany, Switzerland.

While only recently starting her full-time collaboration with PSYDEH, she’s already organizing the field visit of two potential foreign volunteer professionals together with PSYDEH’s General Coordinator Jorge Echeverría, helping to launch our new volunteer brochure and producing exciting leads with German-speaking crowdfunding platforms to raise funds and awareness about PSYDEH’s work in German-speaking countries.

As Carmen states:

“What strikes me about PSYDEH are its fundamental values of empowerment, bottom-up development, and participation of its indigenous women partners – among others through giving them a voice and sharing their stories. I wanted to become part of this sustainable impact making!”

Carmen is a graduate of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where she earned her BA in social work with an emphasis in social pedagogy. Her outstanding thesis is titled, “Development Aid in the Field of Indigenous Women Empowerment in Mexico: The Possibilities and Limits of Social Work“. As she writes in the abstract, “[My] thesis … focuses on the possibilities and chances of social work in the examined field of development aid [and] it … questions the role of Northern social work in development aid and to shed light on its limits and risks, such as the phenomena of neo-colonialism and corruption, with the help of critical voices.”

Carmen’s previous experience includes having worked in the commercial area for different companies within public transportation and later as a social pedagogue in a boarding school. For more on Carmen, see her short bio here.