Mi Valedor (“My Mate”) is a social project that, through a bi-monthly magazine, workshops, and healthcare networks, offers vulnerable groups (homeless people, migrants, older people and disabled people) an opportunity to get back into the workplace and society. These people are the Mates.
homeless people and people who are seriously excluded from society.
training workshops focusing on social skills.
are now in the phase of employment stabilisation.
The Mates
At Mi Valedor (“My Mate”) we support vulnerable groups such as: homeless people, migrants, single mothers, older people, and others who find themselves excluded from society. They join the project voluntarily, by responding to one of our calls for participants, or through one of the institutions that helps recruit on our behalf.
When a new Mate joins the project, they are offered a 40-minute training session and are accompanied on their first trip to sell the magazine. On this first trip, they are given five magazines free of charge.
From then on, the Mates buy the magazines for $10 MXN and sell them for $30 MXN each, generating a $20 MXN profit per copy. In this way, if they continue to sell steadily, a Mate can earn between $2000 and $9000 MXN per month.
Mi Valedor (“My Mate”) is the first street magazine in Mexico and it forms part of the International Network of Street Papers (INSP). Its content documents daily life in Mexico City through photographs, stories, and illustrations, among other artistic works.
In addition, Mi Valedor is a platform where our beneficiaries can express themselves, because it offers them the opportunity to collaborate on each edition of the magazine, either by writing a column or publishing the photos they take during our regular photographic expeditions or our writing workshops directed by professional volunteer collaborators. In this way, the Mates can further supplement the income they receive from the sale of the magazine.
The Creativity Centre is a space where we offer workshops to help strengthen the Mates’ social skills and improve their writing and photography, among others skills.
In these workshops we work with many different kinds of skills, such as administration, finance, art, culture, physical education, and personal development, among others, with the goal of giving the Mates effective tools to get them back into society and the workplace.
In addition to the workshops held on Mi Valedor’s premises, we also partner with different spaces where we can develop other activities and offer health checkups, such as eye exams with Escópica, dental treatment with MEDENT, general health checkups with MAPFRE. Over the last four years, we have had the opportunity to offer workshops in places like the Cultural Centre 77, Digital Cultural Centre, and R.it Consultancy, and to make trips to places like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s “Blue House,” the University Contemporary Art Museum, the Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum, and the Coordinating Business Council (CCE).
