PSYDEH’s “Fruits of Change” Project Action Planning is set for 2017-early 2018

When PSYDEH launched our first ever crowdfunding campaign with the US and UK-based Global Giving in late-September 2016, we invited global donors to invest in a project where we educate and organize poor indigenous women to develop their own communities. And we provide rights and leader training and mobilize women to launch local projects and their own movement to negotiate with government. OUR WORK IS NEEDED. 83% of women partners demand training on smart leadership and how to collaborate to impact. And for Mexico, and democratic nations like it, we explained, our unique model empowering citizens to solve their own problems is the way forward on sustained poverty reduction.

In mid-June, seeing that campaign success draws near, PSYDEH staff with women leaders’ counsel, completed full final project action planning:

OBJECTIVE ONE: Consolidate progress made by the women’s movement by producing the third regional forum where we link over 200 hundred indigenous women and men with government and civil society leaders to promote women as civic leaders and their novel development agenda. (COMPLETED, SPRING 2017)

OBJECTIVE TWO: Strengthen the women’s Umbrella Network of nascent NGOs with a series of five, two-day monthly work sessions for the 20 women leaders of these NGOs. Our goal? Each NGO’s leaders learn how to launch more self-determined projects, e.g., distributing clean-burning stoves or growing organic gardens, as well as right decision-making and management strategies to sustain organizational progress. (TO BEGIN with field appreciative inquiry and then a series of workshops, July 2017 – February 2018)

OBJECTIVE THREE: Strengthen the 20 individual women leaders of the aforementioned NGOs via a three month, six-day, unprecedented storytelling training program, and a novel field research initiative consisting of three planning and evaluation work sessions and 20 field visits with 80 citizen leaders (men and women spread among the region’s four indigenous municipalities) known to make a concrete impact in their communities. Our goal? Investigate the disciplines or the “how” they make a sustainable impact, with an eye to scaling learning in future leader training sessions, and comparing these results with those of PSYDEH’s leader values loosely based on western developed society research. (To begin in the 1st quarter of 2018)