Mexico City, make_sense - Week 1
I am doing my Leadership-in-Action project in Mexico City (CDMX) with the local NGO make_sense. Make_sense is an organization that coordinates volunteers for specific social-impact projects throughout the city and state of Mexico, and my project is to assist one of their partner orgs, Genera Territorios, with building financial education and resource budgeting materials for rural women's cooperatives in Amatlán and Ecatzingo. We've been tasked with building an open-ended, culturally sensitive methodology that helps women build financial awareness without devaluing or circumscribing their existing non-financial skills and social capital networks, like traditional patriarchal financial education often does. Hopefully, we will be able to build a system that can track both financial and non-financial resources and assist rural communities in building confidence in their ability to save. So far, we have a prototype using short, culturally appropriate animated videos to present the material in an accessible way, which I suggested we combine with a WhatsApp community to facilitate peer-led discussion. Our lack of understanding of the specific financial challenges in these communities is the main barrier at this time, and hopefully offering an open-ended, collaborative platform will allow communities to personalize it to a greater degree. I'm cautiously optimistic.
I have struggled a bit more with the logistics of the living transition. Triver Coliving, where we will be staying for the six-week duration of the project, is very nice and my three roommates (Yotam from Leeds, Spencer from Cornell, and Arthur from EPFL) are lovely people. The rest of the Laidlaw Scholars are also amazing people and I've been fascinated to learn about everything from feminist urban planning to the Fourier transform through my discussions with them. Food has been quite difficult though. This isn't anything unusual for me: I have an autoimmune condition called EoE that takes gluten and most soy and dairy off the table, and because of my neurodivergence I often struggle to make my body swallow when I'm eating new or unfamiliar food. After an inauspicious start the first night, when a delivery driver turned off his tracker and absconded with my gluten free pasta, I spent the first few days tracking down a grocery store with the food I needed and navigating restaurants with limited options. I now have stocked the pantries and refrigerator with a week's worth of food, and even found a few local foods I can eat. There's this soup with pork and alkali-treated corn kernels that's pretty edible, and I even managed to drink mango juice that I was offered! I could not be more relieved.
The language barrier is less of an issue than I expected. Even though I've only been studying Spanish for a few months, I've been able to communicate fairly competently about commerce with monolingual Spanish speakers, and even to have an in-depth discussion about Mayan mythology with a stranger mostly in Spanish. My vocabulary is growing a lot and I am no longer worried that I could fail to perform necessary emergency communication.
In terms of Changemaker Values, I would say Brave has been key this week because of the challenge of navigating eating. I am experiencing a strong tension between Ambitious and Fast with regard to the pacing of the content building for Genera Territorios, but I am hopeful that the WhatsApp solution will enable us to combine the best of both.
Best,
Peter Tarson
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Dear Peter,
Thank you for sharing your first Leadership in Action reflection. There is a great deal to admire here, particularly the way you balance honest reflection on the challenges of living and working abroad with thoughtful consideration of your project's aims and methodology.
I was particularly interested in the work you are undertaking with Genera Territorios. The idea of developing a financial education approach that recognises and values existing social capital, community networks, and non-financial forms of knowledge is both innovative and responsive to the needs of the communities you are working with. Your suggestion of combining animated learning materials with a WhatsApp community also demonstrates creativity and an appreciation of the importance of peer-to-peer learning and local ownership. Importantly, I was pleased to see your acknowledgement of the limitations of your own knowledge at this stage. Recognising what you do not yet know, and designing mechanisms that allow communities themselves to shape the solution, is often a hallmark of effective and ethical leadership.
Your reflections on adapting to life in Mexico were equally valuable. The challenges you describe around food, health, neurodivergence, and navigating an unfamiliar environment highlight a form of leadership that is not always discussed openly: the resilience required to function effectively while managing personal challenges. It is clear that considerable problem-solving, perseverance, and self-awareness have gone into establishing routines that allow you to participate fully in the project. These experiences are every bit as important to your leadership development as the formal project work itself.
As you continue with your journal, I would encourage you to push the leadership reflection slightly further. You mention the Changemaker Values of being Brave, Ambitious, and Fast, which is an excellent starting point. The next step is to examine how these values are influencing your behaviour and decisions in practice. For example, when you suggested the WhatsApp-based approach, what leadership skills were you drawing upon? Were you persuading others, facilitating collaboration, managing uncertainty, or encouraging innovation? Similarly, how has working within a cross-cultural environment affected your understanding of leadership? Have there been moments where listening has been more important than directing, or where adapting your assumptions has been necessary to move the work forward?
One of the themes that stood out to me was the tension between expertise and humility. Your reflection suggests an awareness that meaningful social impact work cannot simply impose solutions from the outside. I think there is a rich leadership lesson here around co-creation, partnership, and the importance of sharing power with the communities that projects are intended to serve. I would encourage you to explore this theme further in future entries, particularly as you begin engaging more directly with the women and cooperatives who will ultimately use the resources you are developing.
Overall, this is an engaging and thoughtful start. You communicate both the excitement and uncertainty of being in a new environment, while demonstrating a clear commitment to learning from the people around you. I look forward to seeing how your understanding of leadership evolves as the project develops, particularly in relation to collaboration, cultural sensitivity, and leading through uncertainty.
Best wishes,
Ben
P.S. You have brought back undergrad memories of Fourier Series and Transforms :)