Springer Mexican Solidarity: Citizen Participation and Volunteering

A rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis of volunteering in Mexico provides a fresh perspective on civil society in Mexico, exploding myths created by previous studies and offering fresh insights into the growing ‘third sector’ in that country. Review "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) From the Back Cover 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 prac