PSYDEH’s tree diagram (RIGHT), co-created with women partners, shows how we use human development and leader training (the essential element or the soil), rights, law and local economic projects (tree trunk and branches) to create strategic target qualitative outputs with women (leaves), all oriented towards the pursuit of seven target social impact structural outcomes (fruits of change).
For us, the tree illustrates the social impact we make.
This impact is positive AND represents a significant change in and around pressing social challenges.
This change can be micro-level change or it can be macro-level change. When we speak of “Positive” we speak to that which improves the conditions around the social challenge, be it an element of communal social fabric like a new government policy aimed at decreasing gender violence (macro-level) or varied new sustainable production projects resulting in an increase in the well-being of individuals and their families (micro-level).
“Significant” means movement, ideally structural at the macro-level, of the status quo as measured by qualitative and quantitative data.
PSYDEH AND SOCIAL IMPACT
Our multi-year program made up of contiguous projects makes a micro-and macro-level impact.
In 2013, our legal education and community-organizing work resulted in a collective decision by indigenous leaders to join forces to sustainably develop their communities.
2014 training on rights, leader skills and autonomy led to indigenous women launching four unprecedented region-wide initiatives: (1) the first of a series of regional public forums, (2) the framework for a women’s development agenda, (3) the first women-led NGO, and (4) a cooperative of women artisans.
From 2015-2017, PSYDEH and women used interrelated projects to legalize the regional NGO and Cooperative and create four new local NGOs (Women’s Network), each of whom is in the middle of an NGO incubation initiative ending with each NGO possessing that which it needs to produce its projects—its own mission, vision and values statement, its own professional logo, its own initial set of policy recommendations for government and its ideas for initial projects designed to capacity build and inform fellow neighbors and communities on the issues they believe to be most important. Moreover, each of the women leaders of these organizations will have her own story, told in her own words, about who she is and why she leads.
And each organization and their network itself will have its own story to be used in communicating with friends and funders why they exist and why they hope to do in 2019 and beyond.
Women lead or benefit from 22 impact projects addressing such issues as effective use of rainwater-capture systems and clean-burning stoves.
The 2nd, 3rd and 4th Forums united 700+ women with friends from around the Mexican republic and world on issues like how to make their unprecedented Development Agenda actionable and why women must lead in civic life and fight against political violence.
Women also link with national universities, critique local government development plans, run for public office, and promote their work in photography while selling their goods nationally.
[kkstarratings]