Scaling Disaster Relief Response in Urban Environments

When I co-founded Doare.org in 2011, the problem felt straightforward: make it easy for people to donate to nonprofits in Brazil. We built a payment platform, partnered with hundreds of organizations, and somehow grew it into the largest donation platform for nonprofits in Latin America. (Still not entirely sure how that happened.)

What I didn’t expect—and what kept me up at night—was how much of the donation pipeline depended on knowing where the need actually was. A nonprofit could sign up on our platform, but if their outreach didn’t match where the crisis was unfolding, the money just sat there while people went hungry three neighborhoods over. Not exactly the outcome we were going for.

Building Tech for Good during Global Lockdowns

I co-founded Doare.org in 2011. It became Brazil’s largest donation platform for nonprofits — over 4,500 organizations registered, payment infrastructure built from scratch, angel funding, the whole startup lifecycle. I left in 2014, but I still think about the problems we were trying to solve.

Watching what’s happening now has brought all of that back, in a way I didn’t expect.

The Nonprofit Digital Gap #

COVID-19 didn’t create the digital gap in the nonprofit sector. It exposed it. Most nonprofits I worked with in Brazil operated on spreadsheets and personal relationships. Donor communication happened through email blasts (if you were lucky) or phone calls. Volunteer coordination meant someone with a clipboard and a lot of patience.