Why We Partner

PSYDEH’s sustainable growth in a difficult Mexican funding climate is based on our outside-the-box thinking when it comes to resource raising and alliances.

One important resource is corporate partnerships, a unique example of which is our multi-phased relationship with Adobe. Headquartered in the USA, Adobe is one of the largest and most diversified software companies in the world empowering individuals, small businesses, government agencies, and global brands to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences.

Where We Focus Our Efforts

Our alliance started when Adobe chose PSYDEH in 2022 as one of only a handful of nonprofits around the world, the only from Mexico, to be an early adopter of their new cloud-based design tool Adobe Express for nonprofits (AX). PSYDEH, Adobe explained, is unique among grassroots organizations using creativity to make an impact. They are especially taken by our creative impact value proposition, how we “view creative processes and expressions as essential tools for building the relationships needed to make a sustainable impact“, including our novel story-telling e-book “Narratives” and extensive high-quality video library on YouTube filled with videos, short films, and animations.

As an early adopter in PHASE ONE, we were given a series of training sessions on how to use Adobe products to make an impact and market this impact to target audiences. We were invited to co-innovate with Adobe creatives new AX features in line with our wish list. We also were awarded valuable licenses for their industry-leading Creative Cloud software (CC) and a flexible funding grant.

In PHASE TWO, we converted initial backing into additional Adobe investments. They awarded us more flexible funding and a VIP invite to have one of our staff attend their 2022 Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, California, USA. We also co-produced this print article and promotional and instructional videos.

In PHASE THREE (2022-2023), we explore ways to grow our alliance while inviting third parties to celebrate our work. For example, the online magazine Diginomica published this piece on PSYDEH. And Fast Company selected PSYDEH as the only nonprofit in the world as one of the “2022 Adobe Creators to Watch.”

Why it is a Win-win Partnership

Our alliance gives wins to both parties.

Adobe Corporate Social Responsibility’s (CSR) investment in PSYDEH reflects the company’s unique commitment to Mexico, LATAM, and the Global South. It shows their novel perspective on how CSR collaborations can be generative and even transformational, including how private companies can co-create products with grassroots nonprofits to achieve business goals.

Second, our AX-focused initiative includes Adobe employees from CSR, new tech solution, and brand communication work areas. This gives their professionals the opportunity to cross-fertilize across departments while making an impact with PSYDEH.

Moreover, Adobe’s multi-phased model is a proof-of-concept for yielding multiple returns for all kinds of stakeholders in the short and long terms. And it is ripe to be replicated, supported, and promoted!

PSYDEH wins, too, learning new experiences and skills, scaling our impact, and obtaining the financial and in-kind resources we need to grow.

Generally, this unique commitment from a global technology company showcases PSYDEH’s ability to create the public-private-partnership ecosystem we and our underserved women partners need to participate in the digital economy. Here, Zoom choosing PSYDEH led to Team4Tech and Adobe choosing us, with all working to innovate and integrate appropriate technology solutions to challenges in our community-led development work.

Second, Adobe’s software has already played an outsized role in PSYDEH’s ability to make impact and then communicate it to local stakeholders and global donors. For example:

We use AX to help local team members and communities speaking Spanish and multiple Indigenous languages to create and then communicate a late-2022 proclamation (English and Spanish) on needed rural development policies directed at men and government. This is powerful and unprecedented, an extension of our work organizing annual public forums at which 1000+ rural and Indigenous women have created and updated their own rural development agenda based on the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

We use CC to produce our 2023 six video series to relate our impact in the words of women staff and partners themselves, e.g., this piece on how we cultivate intercultural cooperation or this piece on how technology connects women and their communities. CC is also how we created this mid-2023 three-minute commercial to inspire more global and national private sector partners, especially in the tech sector, to innovate with PSYDEH.

Lastly, Adobe helps PSYDEH inch closer to our goal of becoming a sustainable operation with progress around four different resource streams. Securing needed (1) financial support and (2) in-kind donated goods and professional services helps us to empower women staff and partner entrepreneurs. With more PSYDEH support, women then organize into cooperatives that harness local resources to create fair trade artisanal goods, with their story (our joint story) becoming the basis for (3) more partnerships with Mexican and global donors. Women staff and partner cooperatives then use digital platforms and tools to (4) earn income by selling goods at the national and global levels.

Why We Collaborate

London, UK-based Wise was launched in 2011 with the vision of making international money transfers cheap, fair, and simple. Today, their multi-currency account helps millions of people and businesses manage their money across the world. Wise’s Sustainability & Social Impact (ESG) team selects eligible charities for annual grants. PSYDEH, for our part, welcomes resource-rich alliances, especially from companies like Wise who offer a critically important service to countless Mexicans living and working across the Americas and the globe.

Where We Focus Our Efforts

Wise selects grantees who are focused on making an impact in areas like women’s empowerment. Their invitation to the grantee is to apply the funds to specific programming with the aim of making a measurable impact.

In March 2023, Wise awarded to PSDYEH a grant for GDP £17,717. These funds are used to underwrite year two of our women’s economic solidarity Red Sierra Madre programming, including empowering women as community leaders and co-leading the incubation of their own network of four cooperatives.

Moving forward, PSYDEH will remain in touch with Wise from time to time, including delivering a 2023 year-end report with qualitative stories and quantitative metrics on how their donation is used, the type of impact we make together, and with whom.

Why it is a Win-win Alliance

Wise’s generous, targeted investment in PSYDEH shows how they are socially responsible and even more, committed to making an impact through their generous financial donation.

For Mexican PSYDEH’s part, this UK-based corporate alliance is a first of its kind. The donation’s short-term/medium-term nature helps us to be forward-thinking. It also shows what is possible for Mexican nonprofits and corporate allies based in places like the UK willing to think outside the box with an eye to engagement-facilitated impact.

3M is a global company with operations in 70 countries and sales in 200, committed to creating the technology and products that advance every company, enhance every home, and improve every life. They work with the USA-based global nonprofit Pyxera Global on myriad projects around the world, including with PSYDEH in the 3M Impact Local Mexico 2022 program.

Why We Partner

3M employees make a social impact by being loaned out as business consultants advising non-profits like PSYDEH on local challenges. Pyxera Global offers companies its unique human interaction design approach to pro bono projects where company professionals work “with and not for” non-profits.

PSYDEH’s sustainable growth in a generally hostile Mexican funding climate is based on our thinking outside the box, including how we define a “resource” and from where it can come. As highlighted in this Spanish article about our resource-stream diversification strategy, one essential source is corporate partnerships. These collaborations come in myriad forms.

With 3M Mexico and Pyxera Global, we were selected as one of only 5 organizations participating in 3M Impact Local 2022, the only one based outside of Mexico City and focused on rural sustainable development.

Where We Focus Our Efforts

Our five-week partnership was organized into three phases:

♦ understand and empathize,

♦ discover and ideate, and

♦ create and deliver solutions.

In week one (understand and empathize), our joint team met in 3M’s Mexico City office with the goal of unpacking the challenge PSYDEH presented before the event:

produce a replicable business plan for one of the four cooperatives we incubate with Indigenous women through our 2022-2024 Sierra Madre Network program with the goal of leveraging our Tech para Todos program using digital tools and platforms to bring their sustainably made ethical products to local, national and global markets.

Thereafter, each of the 3M team’s four professionals dedicated a full 40-hour work week to PSYDEH, including two of the four doing an immersive field experience in our remote rural work areas. The goal was to investigate and ideate around PSYDEH’s challenge using the strategic plan we co-created during week one. In weeks three and four (discover and ideate), 3Mers continued their work part-time before dedicating week five (create and deliver solutions) to proposal preparing and sharing at a program-closing celebration event in 3M’s Mexico City office.

See this project case study to learn more.

Why it is a Win-win Partnership

3M wins in at least three ways. First, this initiative shows how the company is socially responsible. Second, their professionals are given the opportunity to learn about their country and with a high-performing Mexican non-profit. Third, they do so while collaborating with peers from across the company’s teams in Mexico (cross-fertilization) with the aim to strengthen their teamwork, client relations, and problem-solving skills.

For its part, Pyxera Global deepens its partnership with Mexican non-profits like PSYDEH, helping us to secure the knowledge and strategies we need to solve our own challenges while earning income from a corporate partner.

PSYDEH wins by building cachet as a unique Mexican grassroots nonprofit capable of facilitating a win-win partnership with global outfits like 3M and Pyxera Global. Moreover, we managed to convert 2022 program success into a loose commitment from 3M to continue discussions on how we might grow our partnership in 2023-2024. Third, 3M helps our movement of women-led cooperatives inch closer to our joint goal of their becoming sustainable independent entities. The same can be said for PSYDEH where our 3M partnership helps us make progress around resource stream and programming goals: (1-2) receiving unexpected but needed financial support along with valuable donated in-kind goods and professional services, (3) helping us to empower women entrepreneurs to organize themselves into cooperatives, which results in (4) the powerful story we and the cooperatives need to supply national and global demand for local-sourced, artisan goods in exchange for a profit that is reinvested back into our work.

Why We Collaborate

The Lemonaid & ChariTea Foundation is a non-profit organization started and funded by its for-profit parent company the Lemonaid Beverages company. The company makes iced tea (ChariTea) and lemonades (Lemonaid) from the best ingredients, organic & Fairtrade, from cooperatives & plantations around the world. They pay higher prices for the ingredients and thereby support fair, dignified farming. And they go beyond Fairtrade: every bottle sold gives an additional 5 cents to their Lemonaid & ChariTea Foundation. To date, they’ve collected more than 6 million euros for social projects in the regions from which they source their ingredients.

Where We Focus Our Efforts

The Lemonaid & ChariTea Foundation aims to contribute to the sustainable improvement of social, economic, and ecological structures in the Global South, particularly in regions that have been negatively affected by the structures of the global economy. They fund transformational projects that assign responsibility and ownership for the implementation of projects to local partners, focusing on supporting entrepreneurial and income-generating initiatives to promote economic independence.

The Foundation first met PSYDEH when we participated in the German online competition #youforG20 in late-2017. One year later, PSYDEH accompanied their staff visiting existing and potential Mexican non-profit partners in Hidalgo and Puebla. They reciprocated this interest by visiting our target work areas. We then exchanged ideas and proposals in 2019 before suspending negotiations due to the pandemic in 2020. With the reopening of European economies in mid-summer 2021, the Foundation reinitiated the conversation that resulted in a three-year grant we use to produce our 2022-2024 Sierra Madre Network programming supporting Indigenous female artisans to start their own cooperatives through 2024.

Why it is a Win-win Alliance

Lemonaid’s generous investment in PSYDEH shows how they are socially responsible in the areas from which they source their ingredients. Here, they buy agave syrup as a natural sweetener from producers in Hidalgo, Mexico, the state in which most of our programming takes place.

For PSYDEH’s part, this type of corporate-foundation alliance is similar to what we have done with the Kroll advisory firm and, yet, a first-of-its-kind for PSYDEH. The investment’s medium-term nature of three years of funding focused on making a long-term impact helps us to be forward-thinking on operations and programmatic planning. It is anchor funding from which we can attract other institutional donors to co-invest in the same programming. It also shows what is possible for Mexican nonprofits and corporate-foundation allies willing to think outside the box with an eye to engagement-facilitated impact, not just a one-off donation.

Why We Partner

PSYDEH’s sustainable growth in a hostile Mexican funding climate is based on our outside-the-box thinking when it comes to how we define a “resource”. One increasingly important resource is corporate partnerships, a unique example of which is our multi-phased relationship with Zoom, a USA company and the global leader in video communications.

Where We Focus Our Efforts

Our alliance started with a significant financial donation awarded by Zoom’s Latinx employee resource group Somos (ERG Somos), as well as their arranging an in-kind donation of fifteen Pro account licenses. It continued with multiple virtual information sharing sessions, one of which related to our being selected as one of four nonprofits across the world to participate in their Zoom Cares pro bono initiative in collaboration with USA-based nonprofit Team4Tech (T4T).

With T4T, twelve Zoom employees attended four Design for Impact Workshops (DIW) sessions. Their charge was to organize into three teams and present different actionable ideas to PSYDEH around our business challenge: “How might we utilize technology to share PSYDEH’s stories and to promote the voices of Indigenous women in Hidalgo, Mexico?” After receiving three different actionable ideas we’ll pursue in the coming years, Zoom went above and beyond what others have done.

With guidance from T4T, Zoom committed six DIW participants to invest work time over a subsequent 10-week period to implement the one actionable idea PSYDEH felt was most ripe for immediate use: an e-commerce website that will be folded into 2022-2024 programming to organize Indigenous female artisan leaders into a network of cooperatives we call Sierra Madre Network. See this article to learn more details about our multi-phased partnership.

Why it is a Win-win Partnership

Zoom wins in at least three ways. First, Zoom ERG Somos’s investment in PSYDEH reflects the company’s unique commitment to its Latinx and Hispanic staff while showing its and novel perspective that corporate social responsibility should include multiple phases integrating financial and in-kind inputs. Second, their employees are given the opportunity to collaborate with peers across their remote offices while making a generative impact; Zoom’s investment will yield multiple returns over many years. Third, the multi-phased model Zoom innovates with PSYDEH is a proof-of-concept ripe to be replicated, supported, and promoted.

PSYDEH wins a multi-phased commitment from a global technology company that helps marginalized women and their underserved rural areas to develop the technology-based tools needed to win from the digital economy in 2022 and beyond. Zoom’s choosing PSYDEH led to T4T choosing us too, with their recently committing to a long-term partnership focused on integrating contextually appropriate technology solutions in our community-led development work. Third, Zoom helps us inch closer to our goal of becoming a more sustainable operation with progress around four different resource streams: (1-2) receiving needed financial support and valuable donated in-kind goods and professional services, which (3) help us to empower women entrepreneurs to organize themselves into cooperatives, a story we can use to partner with more global donors, as well as (4) these women’s cooperatives have the digital platform they need to supply national and global demand for local-sourced, artisan goods.

Team4Tech (T4T), a US-based education-focused nonprofit, has committed to a long-term partnership with PSYDEH focused on integrating contextually appropriate technology solutions in our community-led development work.

Why We Partner

PSYDEH’s learner-centric, experiential education-based, community organizing work focuses on the rural, isolated communities in which our Indigenous women beneficiaries live. We endeavor to provide these women and their communities with the tools they need to drive their own rights-oriented, sustainable development.

A major challenge to success in this work is increasing access to and smart use of information and communications technology (ICT) in a contextually appropriate manner. Our partnership with T4T is a response to this difficult task.

PSYDEH was selected as one of eight organizations from across the world, their first from Mexico and third from Latin America, to join T4T’s global community of nonprofit allies in 2022 for a three-to-five-year partnership.

T4T’s mission is to advance progress around United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4.4 – “ensure inclusive and equitable education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” To do this, T4T partners with global technology companies like Adobe, Cadence, HPE, Intel, and Zoom to build and implement social impact projects that provide ICT technology grants and training to nonprofit partners with the aim to build their capacities to better educate underserved learners.

Where We Focus Our Efforts

Over the long term, we use this collaboration to innovate an ICT proof of concept for grassroots non-profits working in rural, isolated areas across Latin America and the Global South.

In the shorter term, we expect to enhance PSYDEH’s 2022-2024 field programming by (1) improving digital linkages between our field hubs and the world, (2) increasing transparency and communication between and among PSYDEH staff and women partners, and (3) securing technology hardware and software we need to pursue excellence with our fieldwork.  Another priority is to deliver to rural women solutions to their own local ICT demands.

Why it is a Win-win Partnership

T4T expands their nonprofit partner portfolio to include Mexico, the second-largest market in Latin America, which faces massive ICT challenges coupled with social and economic inequality. They get to work with an innovative organization that approaches their community-led development work through a gender lens, including how what we do always reflects women’s demands. T4T also wins a grassroots-focused organizational partner interested in and capable of forging a win-win, for their organization and their company partners.

PSYDEH wins a long-term commitment from an established US-based nonprofit that is an expert in rural technology integration and who has a large network of global technology companies eager to collaborate on social impact projects. Our partnership also affords PSYDEH and local partners the critical funding and expertise we need to solve long-standing ICT challenges. This type of alliance is exactly what we need to inch closer to our becoming a more sustainable operation.

Why We Collaborate

The Kroll Charitable Foundation (originally Duff & Phelps Charitable Foundation) was established in 2018 to nurture innovative ideas, impact economic and social issues, and enable progress in underserved communities around the globe. The Charitable Foundation Committee selects eligible charities and Kroll employees vote on the donated grant amount. The Foundation also regularly helps to link organizations with Kroll employees on varied volunteer tasks. PSYDEH, for our part, welcomes resource-rich, forward-looking alliances.

Where We Focus Our Efforts

The Kroll Charitable Foundation selects grantees who are focused on making an impact in areas like the environment, education, health, women’s empowerment, and community integration. They also look to grantees wanting to use the initial donation as not just a one-off donation, with the financial grant also sometimes including employees volunteering with their donees.

In 2020, PSDYEH was awarded an $11,000 grant by Kroll employees, one of twenty-two charitable organizations across the globe chosen. These funds are used to produce our 2021-2022 COVID-19 recovery program supporting indigenous women and their communities, including their producing their own micro-impact projects.

We also met Kroll employees at a March 2021 ‘Lunch & Learn’ presentation that aimed to grow PSYDEH’s footprint within the company. Here, we shared with their global staff a little about who PSYDEH is, how women-oriented, community-led development work is THE solution to wicked challenges like inequality in underserved communities, and a few ways in which their people might get involved as volunteers.

Why it is a Win-win Alliance

Kroll’s generous investment in PSYDEH shows how they are socially responsible.

For PSYDEH’s part, the corporate alliance is a first-of-its-kind for PSYDEH. The investment’s short-term/medium-term nature helps us to be forward-thinking. It also shows what is possible for Mexican nonprofits and corporate allies willing to think outside the box with an eye to engagement-facilitated impact, not just a one-off donation.

Why We Partner

GlobalGiving (GG) is the world’s leading crowdfunding platform, connecting nonprofits and donors and giving nonprofits what they need to make their impact by providing organizations with credibility, quasi-flexible funds, tools for fundraising, and access to a global donor network.

PSYDEH does needed, paradigm-changing work in the field of community-led development while modeling what is possible for other Mexican and Global South non-profits navigating a challenging funding climate, including by diversifying resource streams. One of our important streams, maybe the most important, has been crowdfunding with GG with whom we’ve partnered since late-2016.

Where We Focus Our Efforts

GG offers PSYDEH five different ways in which they give us a hand-up and not a handout. First, we use their platform to launch subject-matter-specific crowdfunding campaigns to secure the flexible funding we need to do sustainable-impact focused fieldwork and attract and retain the team we need to sustain this work. Second, we consistently push to co-create win-win opportunities for GG, PSYDEH, and GG’s corporate partners, thus showing other global public and private institutions why they should partner with us. Next, we invest heavily in GG’s strategic initiatives with the aim to give our Global South voice on the need for and ways to provide nonprofits equitable access to resources, not just equal access. Lastly, we see their 7000+ non-profit network as a key source of better-practices learning and sharing.

Why it is a Win-win Partnership

GlobalGiving earns a small percentage of every dollar raised on their platform in exchange for showcasing nonprofits’ work on a polished, easy-to-use platform that the marketplace can trust while incentivizing donors to invest via thematic campaigns run year-round during which GG offers a sizeable bonus/matching fund or their powerful theme-specific initiatives like their Girl Fund,Project of the Month Club and Disaster Recovery initiatives. Moreover, by working to listen to our needs when making unique financial and in-kind investments in nonprofit partners, PSYDEH’s success story is very much theirs. They play a seminal role in our ability to make a sustainable impact in our community-led development work, since joining in late-2016 and now moving forward. Lastly, when invited to have a seat at the table during global efforts to help GG improve, we have done our level best to help them realize their full potential as a democratizing agent changing how resources are distributed across the globe.

PSYDEH wins in so many ways. We raise invaluable flexible funding on their platform via our own novel efforts integrating game theory, animation, and high-quality videos like our first campaign video in 2017 or this 2021 video, as well as through their platform–including special grants GG awards to PSYDEH like the 2020 Project of the Month Club or COVID-19 emergency grant. It is not a stretch to say sans GG’s support we would not likely have survived the pandemic and the Mexican government’s existential attack on civil society since 2018.

With awards like being selected from a field of 7000+ in 2018 as one of their top 15 nonprofits committed to making an impact, GG helps us to build cachet as a unique Global South-based, grassroots nonprofit capable of creating a win-win with the globe’s leading crowdfunding platform (and their corporate and non-profit partners). Indeed, GG has helped us to be chosen for myriad corporate alliances like Bank of America in 2018, Dentsu Aegis Network in 2019, and HSBC in 2021. Moreover, we know it is not a stretch to conclude how GG showcasing PSYDEH as a trusted and vetted Mexican nonprofit makes possible other partnerships like that which we did with Kroll and Zoom in 2021 and will do with others like PopSockets in 2021-2022.

We’re proud to represent Mexico, Mesoamerica, Latin America, and the Global South when participating in different GG initiatives. For example, from 2019 to 2021, we were invited to be the only voice from Latin America on what they initially called the Neutrality Paradox, an initiative produced in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This years-long investment involved design-thinking small groups and eventually resulted in GG launching in 2021 what they call Ethos, their “philosophy and how-to guide designed to help leaders explore, act on, manage, and learn from dilemmas“.  Another example is when we were asked in 2021 to help GG rethink how they can best use their annual Girl Fund inherited from the Nike company to make a sustainable impact.

GG is a key platform for better practice sharing within their global and Mexican network of nonprofits. For example, in 2018, we participated in their annual social impact academy. In 2019-2020, PSYDEH was chosen as one of only seven from their network of 120+ Mexican nonprofits to serve as a mentor for other nonprofits, an opportunity we leveraged into our gently nudging GG to use its unique position to increase impact in the Global South. We publish articles for the GG network’s benefit, e.g. this 2020 English-language article on PSYDEH’s 8-step process for empowering community-led development, or this 2020 Spanish-language piece on our novel resources diversification strategy. Most recently, we continue nudging GG to pursue strategies that result in an increase in equitable access to platform resources during their 2023 listening sessions delivered to their Latin America community of practice network.