PROGRAM

La invitación | PSYDEH Learn

PSYDEH’s multi-year scalable program model is process-oriented, community feedback-based comprises interrelated projects, and co-led by indigenous partners.

This infographic (RIGHT) illustrates our model in action, in pursuit of the social impact made since 2014-2015.

PSYDEH identifies five focus areas around which to empower women to achieve measurable progress towards the desired social impact and target outcome of marginalized citizen-led, bottom-up, sustainable development of their own strong communities in Mexico.

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Our program is built through innovative partnerships, designed to empower indigenous citizens to learn and organize to protect their own rights and community-wellbeing.

PROGRAM HISTORY & INDIGENOUS WOMEN PARTNERS

Animation: "An indigenous woman creating bottom-up change in Mexico" (English lesson) | PSYDEH Learn

This animated lesson, “The life of an indigenous woman creating bottom-up change in Mexico“, is a fictional story told in the 3rd person about an indigenous partner named Maria using our scalable program to solve local problems.

Program & Project Film & Video: Protecting and Promoting Women's Rights in Mexico | PSYDEH

SCALABILITY

7 Keys to Sustained Community Development | PSYDEH Learn

Alongside anticipated success with the Region’s women leaders, we intend to integrate men and youth leaders in 2019-2020 and to replicate our Program model in Hidalgo’s other two indigenous regions. Per preliminary discussion with leaders in all regions, all are eager to share knowledge and join forces on innovating solutions to challenges facing local indigenous communities. We hope to cement an agreement to document lessons learned around our program by early 2019.

Data on program impact on how Mexico thinks about development policies are expected in mid-2019.

INNOVATIVE PARTNERSHIPS

PSYDEH is the first NGO in Hidalgo to build a forward-thinking Program made up of contiguous projects that reflect community feedback.

We view local citizens, indigenous people, as partners, not just beneficiaries, owners of rights and responsibilities to tell us what they want and need, to co-drive and sustain their own development.

Our work is produced with in-kind support from local government offices of the municipalities’ presidents and their sub-offices of women and indigenous affairs. Such support helps PSYDEH

  • Target respected indigenous leaders spread over rugged and expansive terrain.
  • Underwrite food costs and transportation for workshops and regional forums.
  • Provide dignified meeting space with chairs and work tables.

This help is not one-sided. Our network leaders have linked rural citizens to a government-funded initiative correcting mistaken personal data.

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Other partnership highlights include:

From 2013 to the present, national government funding helps to underwrite our work. 

In 2015, PSYDEH cemented a formal alliance with the Public Sector Leader program at American University (AU), Washington, DC, USA to strengthen local leaders through training that integrates AU’s leader development methodology with that which works in the region. While unable to secure the necessary funding to conduct said training, their leader training theories underpin our own.

In 2016and pursuant to our goal of bringing in new ideas and diversifying funding streams, we were awarded membership into the US-based Global Giving where we run our ongoing “Fruits of Change” global crowdfunding campaign. We also cemented a relationship with the Mexican national private Tec de Monterrey to collaborate on our first Mexican national crowdfunding campaign

2017-2020 are seminal years for innovative partnerships. For example, we:

  • qualified as one of 18 NGOs from around the world partnering with the global communications firm Dentsu Aegis Network via the US-based partner GlobalGiving-facilitated Route2Good initiative,
  • selected as the only Latin American nonprofit to participate in GlobalGiving’s Neutrality Paradox, a multi-year initiative produced in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help global and national platforms navigate complicated questions of fair access.
  • secured a relationship with the Thomson Reuter Foundation’s pro bono legal program TrustLaw, who link us with the global law firm Hogan Lovells’s Mexico City office to help navigate important federal regulatory issues.
  • aligned with Mexico City-based Creativos Obscuro to produce three short documentary films about our work, including late-2019 “Woman Citizen
  • qualified for a collaboration with Google and Microsoft through which we receive in-kind investments like GoogleAds and more.

COMMUNITY WELLBEING

Our first report highlighting program impact on community wellbeing and socio-economic conditions is expected in 2019. Now, we can say that PSYDEH has worked with 800 indigenous women leaders from 45 communities on the value, and various forms, of citizen participation for improving communal self-reliance. Pursuant to a 2013 regional decision to mobilize,

  • In 201420 indigenous women leaders were democratically elected by 293 of their peers and charged to form the Regional Organization or Advisory Board. 114 of these leaders created the region’s first Women’s Development Agenda.
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  • In 2015, these 293 women leaders replicated the regional organization model at the local level and use this umbrella network (Network) to connect their peer citizens to policy-informing pilot projects. Women leaders focus on economic empowerment by building their first Regional Cooperative to unite the region’s citizens, practice democracy in action and generate income for the region’s artisans and sustainable producers of valuable local products.
  • In 2015-2016, PSYDEH’s program resulted in the “spontaneous” production of high-impact projects valued at $1.5 million pesos, funded by 3rd parties, to address local problems. Spontaneous = women lead projects informed by their work with but independent of PSYDEH.
  • In 2017-2020, women leaders deepen their understanding of ways to participate in Mexican democratic processes, strengthen their organizations’ processes, critique local government development plans and produce up to 8 more local economic projects and up to 4 more capacity building projects consistent with their own development agenda (and b.

RIGHTS TO LAND & TERRITORY

With program success, we envision informed women citizens individually and together championing government transparency and accountability around such issues as the protection and enforcement of rights to indigenous and communal lands, as well as the private sector’s access to resources on and in these lands.

We confront three hurdles to realizing our vision:

(1) scant coordination between government authorities protecting citizens’ rights to use communal property (ejido system) and indigenous land.

(2) low levels of citizen participation and a regional culture where indigenous communities do not collaborate with one another to solve problems, and

(3) little understanding and appreciation of women leaders’ role as powerful stewards of the land and the environment.

Ongoing work to overcome these hurdles includes how we educate women leaders (and male and youth in 2019-2020) on rights and responsibilities and the disciplines needed to use them for collective wellbeing. 

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