Mexican Solidarity

Jacqueline Butcher García-Colín is President of the Board of Directors of the Mexican Center for Philanthropy (Centro Mexicano para la Filantropía, or CEMEFI) from 2006 to 2010, and President of the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR) from 2007 to 2008. Ms. Butcher has a B.Sc. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and also Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Human Development from the Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City). Her research is concerned with volunteering and citizen participation, and she has been widely published. She belongs to the Editorial Board of Prometeo and Voluntas and  is a member of the Technical Expert Group for the Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work assembled by ILO and  the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies.  In Mexico, is currently on the Board of the National Health Foundation (FUNSALUD) and is  Member of the Citizens’ Advisory Council of the National System for Integral Family Development (Sistema Nacional para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, or SNDIF)

• Conceptual Framework for Volunteer Action and Acts of Solidarity.- Graphic “Acts of Solidarity in Mexico” (Analysis of the National Survey on Solidarity and Volunteer Action).- How to Become a Volunteer?.- The Concept of Giving in Mexico.- Nonprofit Organizations in Mexico: Case Studies.- Findings, Challenges, and Implications.

"The authors don't just apply ready-made concepts and research instruments imported from other contexts, but rather investigate, in a bottom-up fashion, the real conceptions of what volunteering is in the eyes of Mexicans...the reader is presented with statistics of volunteering, but also with a deeper understanding of how and why Mexicans volunteer and what it means to volunteer, in their own words. ..Scholars of volunteering have much to learn from the way Butcher and her colleagues conducted their study, and from the original qualitative analyses they applied. ...Those who are interested in understanding Latin American and particularly Mexican civil society will earn interesting insights into different aspects of these societies, including the roles of religion, community, gender and more. ..Those who are interested in philanthropy and civil society in general will enjoy the detailed accounts and the glimpse offered by the authors into the real lives of volunteers and the life histories that brought them to volunteer." (review for the Spanish edition in Voluntas 19:4) "This book offers its readers a valuable insight into solidarity in Mexico...It could turn out to be the greatest challenge for a society such as ours: to learn how to get organized in order to make citizen participation and volunteer work the best way to achieve the common good." (Margarita Zavala, First Lady of Mexico, President of the Consulting Citizens Council of the National DIF System) "This study combines quantitative and qualitative analyses to provide an unprecedented window on the ways in which Mexican citizens engage in voluntary action." (L. David Brown, Senior Research Fellow for International Programs at The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard University) "Scholars of volunteering have much to learn from the way Butcher and her colleagues conducted their study, and from the original qualitative analyses they applied." (Hagai Katz, Lecturer, Program for Nonprofit Management, Gilford Glazer School of Business and Management, Chief Research Officer, Israeli Center for Third-Sector Research (ICTR), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel) "This book is the first to offer a reliable panorama of what Mexican solidarity looks like with firm and trustworthy outlines. Rather than drawing conclusions, it encourages and opens opportunities for more research. It is a book well worth reading and studying." (Jorge Alonso, Professor/ Researcher and Editor of the Desacatos Journal of the Research Center and Superior Studies in Social Anthropology, CIESAS-Occidente, Mexico) "This pioneering study is an important contribution that leads to a greater understanding of the value of voluntary action and citizen participation as building blocks for a stronger and more dynamic organized civil society." (Manuel Arango, Founder of the Mexican Center for Philanthropy)