Mexican Solidarity: Citizen Participation and Volunteering

Description

This comprehensive volume presents research on Mexican practices of solidarity where citizens were engaged in working towards helping others voluntarily. It set out to investigate the nature and quality of the work and time that volunteers give towards obtaining the common good, in a country where the awareness of the importance of social capital needs to be reinforced for the development of democracy. The purpose of this research was not only to present numbers, facts, and data on a national scale but also to explore the depths of citizen participation in the everyday lives and activities of the Mexican population. Mexico’s Solidarity provides a strong contribution by finding ways to promote and maintain social cohesion through the best volunteer practices. The techniques and findings of this case study on Mexico provide a valuable contribution to the Nonprofit and Third Sector research internationally. "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