Amistad Canada (AC) has its origins in San Miguel de Allende, a small colonial city in Mexico’s Guanajuato state. San Miguel attracts people from cold climates during winters and, for some, their retirement years. Responding to the vitality and warmth of its community life and an evident need of the local population for more social support, many people in the expatriate community become active in supporting local non-profits that provide services for the needy. AC was formed to help Canadians participate more effectively in such efforts.
AC was established as a Canadian federal corporation and registered under the Income Tax Act in 2009. But its roots can be traced farther back to volunteer work by Canadians in the 1980s in support of the Centro de los Adolescentes de San Miguel de Allende (CASA). Canadians for CASA, formed in the early 1990s to facilitate fundraising, held events in San Miguel and in Toronto. In the early years, Canada’s Ambassador to Mexico attended some of the San Miguel events and the Embassy matched private donations.
When AC was taking shape in 2008-09 and looking for volunteers, those already working with Canadians for Casa were obviously a good fit. The two organizations merged. Especially relevant were several Toronto midwives, associated with Ryerson University’s Midwifery Education Program — they already had ties with CASA’s school of professional midwifery, the first in Mexico. AC’s first project, started in 2010, was to fund a Clinical Coordinator who worked in the CASA Midwifery School and its Maternity Hospital.
2010 was also an important year for recruiting new volunteers — Canadians with ties to San Miguel who could provide leadership in developing AC. Since then several of these people have played key roles in expanding our contacts with Mexican non-profit agencies, developing our donor base, working out operating procedures for a growing organization, and attracting still more volunteers with leadership potential.
A second project began in early 2011 at La Biblioteca de San Miguel de Allende — an institution that has fostered links between San Miguel’s Mexican population and its expat community. The Library’s Canadian Education Project provides scholarships, free classes, and book purchases.
The formula for expanding AC’s activities soon became clear. For a Mexican non-profit to be an eligible partner, it needed to be effectively providing charitable services consistent with AC’s corporate purposes and to have contacts with Canadians willing to be volunteers or donors. When those conditions appeared to be satisfied, negotiations could proceed to define a new AC project. (For more details, see How We Work.)
Over the past decade, the number of partners and projects has grown dramatically. We have several scholarship projects, ranging from helping to enable students from needy families to attend high school, through various levels of support for college and university students. An ambitious project with Jóvenes Adelante provides successful applicants with a full university scholarship from entry to graduation, a computer, and a personal mentor.
Our project with EEESMA supports its unique work in providing education for deaf students. A recently developed project with Caminos de Agua provides training and education related to the harvesting and use of rainwater in rural communities that need to deal with shortages of potable water.
AC’s health-related work includes projects that alleviate hunger and enhance nutrition, assist children with disabilities or serious illness and in some cases directly provide health-related services. Examples: with our partner Patronato Pro Niños we invested in a van that provides dental and medical services for children in rural villages; Feed the Hungry provides hot lunches for school children — AC supports kitchens in several rural schools. (When schools were closed in response to COVID-19 and normal employment was disrupted, FTH quickly switched its work to providing emergency food packages for the families of the school children.)
An important development in 2017 was the approval of AC’s first project outside of San Miguel. Our partner in Jalisco state, Niños Incapacitados, provides counseling and financial support for families with children in the Lake Chapala area suffering from serious illness or disability. That was followed by a second project in Jalisco in 2018, one in Oaxaca state in 2019, and most recently a cervical cancer screening program in Morelos. It appears that wherever in Mexico there is a Canadian community they get involved in philanthropy.
There’s more. For a complete list of AC’s projects and more detail, go to Our Partners.
