Mexican Solidarity (PDF)

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)

"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)