Nuevo León: Best Practices of Participation in the State of Nuevo León 2023

Recognising, embracing and facilitating the learning of best practices in public participation is an elemental task to improve our public life. From the Secretariat of Citizen Participation of the State of Nuevo León we have taken on the task of generating an annual call, with its subsequent repository to reward those practices that build communities, protect rights, or make substantial improvements to the public.

Practices are those facts, methods, disciplines, tasks, activities, which together make us who we are. As admirers of the commitment of people focused on the common good, since the beginning of the administration, this Secretariat decided to focus on making visible those practices that, by dint of repetition, make organisations exemplary.Under the logic of recognising participatory practices and not the organisations themselves, in the second edition 2023 we expanded the categories for applications to legally constituted, unconstituted (collectives, student groups, or spontaneous interest groups), and neighbourhood organisations. We also deepened the repository through interviews with the winning organisations to understand the problem they solve and how they execute this solution, so that the Toolbox now compiles actions and success stories that can be replicated and used by civil society and government.

The 2023 call, open to people from all over the state, recognised practices focused on people with disabilities, people from indigenous communities, people from the LGBTQI+ community, children, adolescents and women. It also gave an honourable mention to the association Buscadoras de Nuevo León, mostly mothers of missing persons. Although the practice was not a ‘winner’, we did not want to stop applauding them for sustaining a struggle based on empathy and solidarity with the families who begin the painful journey of searching for their relatives

This is how this practice seeks to inspire people who want to exercise their right to participate in order to transform their environment and invite more people to get involved and influence their community. At the same time, it is an effort to show the enormous number of groups and organisations that can be a source of motivation and hope for other groups and organisations in the state. 

• https://participacionciudadana.nl.gob.mx/buenas-practicas/

• https://www.youtube.com/@sparticipa_nl