Adam Gonnerman

This is the last post in a short series on Uberlândia Development Initiatives (UDI), the nonprofit I helped found to support Estação Vida, a community center in Uberlândia, Brazil. The earlier posts covered the neighborhood UDI exists to serve and the story of getting the organization off the ground back in 2020. A few years have passed since then, and it's worth catching up on what's happened. From startup to established Founding a nonprofit is one thing; keeping it running is another. In December 2020, UDI was granted 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status by the IRS — the milestone that made every donation to the organization officially deductible for U.S. donors. That was the piece that had been missing the whole time: a legal, secure way for people outside Brazil to support Estação Vida's work. It then took time to build out banking and a reliable transfer process. In April 2023, UDI made its first donation via bank wire to Brazil. Those funds went toward installing a syst...

In my last post I introduced Shopping Park, an under-resourced neighborhood in Uberlândia, Brazil, and Estação Vida, the community center that's been serving its kids since 2004. What I didn't get into is how a graduate school capstone project turned into an actual nonprofit organization. By 2020 I'd spent about 12 years in project management, earned my PMP certification back in 2013, and was working on a Master's in Management. I needed a capstone project, and the pieces lined up: why not use it to build the thing I'd been quietly imagining for years — a U.S.-based organization that could receive donations and channel them to Estação Vida? The problem I was solving was a practical one. Sending money into a Brazilian bank account from abroad is a confusing process if you've never done it, and even once you manage it, the gift isn't tax-deductible for a U.S. donor. Estação Vida had a Portuguese-language site set up to receive local support, but nothing fo...

In 1997 I spent two months in the state of São Paulo on a mission internship, and something about Brazil got under my skin. I learned Portuguese there. A few trips later, in 2001, I moved to the country, got married, and started a family. Brazil has been part of my life ever since. Years later, I found myself living in Uberlândia — a city of more than 680,000 people in Brazil's interior, the fourth largest in that part of the country. It's a place with a genuinely good public bus system, a federal university, and private schools at every level, and it has a distinct character: a blend of urban ambition and rural roots that creates its own particular mix of ideas and culture. Within that city, though, there's a neighborhood that most visitors to Uberlândia would never see: Shopping Park. It's home to roughly 40,000 people, and it's been forming since the 1980s — largely without the basics that most of the city takes for granted. For years, residents had no reliab...