Human rights donors are keen to wean domestic civil society off their chronic foreign aid dependence, and so are local rights organizations. Relying on outsiders for money is problematic because it undermines local participation and accountability, and may hurt NGOs’ legitimacy. International donors, moreover, are a notoriously fickle bunch, often moving from one topic to another with the ebb and flow of organizational politics.
To learn whether ordinary people will donate to local rights groups, we surveyed a representative sample of Mexico City adults. We discovered that many people are in fact willing, if asked in the right way, to make small donations. Cumulatively, these small donations could add up to serious money.
We began our investigation by interviewing representatives of all legally registered, Mexico City-based, rights groups. Our research partners in FLACSO-Mexico, a local university, identified 40 such groups and interviewed 34 (85%).
