Keep Moving Forward: Volunteering with the Amigos pela Caridade NGO

Leonardo Somavilla (Product Designer intern, iFood) were volunteers in the 7th edition of Potencialize, the volunteer program of Fundação 1Bi, which provides free technology and management consulting to NGOs throughout the country. Below, they share what their one-month volunteer experience at Amigos pela Caridade was like.

The seventh edition of Potencialize was a major challenge for me, and I believe it was for most of my team as well. Like three other teammates, it was my first time taking part in the program, and as a result, we shared the same concerns: “What will the challenge be?”, “Will we be able to help?”, and “Will what we do actually be relevant?” were just a few examples. Without a doubt, these questions stayed with us throughout the process, especially when we met the NGO’s team and learned about the challenge that awaited us.

During the first stage, getting to know and empathizing with Amigos pela Caridade and its vision, we identified several pain points, which left everyone concerned about the timeline: how could we solve all of this in just three weeks? With that in mind, we needed to prioritize what we would do. We took the three main problems and conducted a joint ideation exercise, generating a total of 54 different ideas that could solve them, while also organizing what was already being done that supported our objective. After that, through a vote, we selected four ideas for each problem and then ranked them according to effort and impact to determine which ones we would tackle first, thus arriving at our action plan. This action plan made it easier for us to understand what needed to be done and what we could accomplish within the time we had. As a result, we were able to address, above all, the most pressing pain point: invisibility.

As solutions, we improved the NGO’s website, added it to Google, created a dynamic and empathetic slide presentation to help them attract more partnerships and donations, and developed a complete calendar of posts for their social media channels. The NGO was always involved in every stage of the work we carried out. These solutions were tailored to its needs and were developed not only by the volunteers, but also by the organization itself.

At the end of the program, we saw that although we were unable to solve every problem that came up, what we were able to create was already a great help to the NGO. In addition, we realized that the greatest benefit was not actually the solutions created, but rather the shift in perspective that this experience brought about for everyone involved—the idea that even when something seems impossible, we can keep moving forward!