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...

AI is nipping at the heels of outsourced BPO jobs in countries like India and the Philippines. I know people in the Philippines who can attest to the difficulty of finding such work already, before the full effects of AI are felt. The following video does an excellent deep-dive into the reality of BPO work in what may be the dawn of the AI era. 

 There is a pattern I have seen repeat across organizations of different sizes and industries. Teams adopt an Agile framework, populate their calendars with the right ceremonies, use the right vocabulary in standups, and then wonder why delivery feels just as slow and friction-filled as before. This is Agile Theatre: the performance of methodology without the substance of it. SAFe is perhaps the most visible example, a framework so dense with alignment meetings and coordination layers that the overhead of running it can quietly consume the productivity gains it was supposed to create. I have been thinking about this problem lately, and two frameworks have helped me sharpen my thinking: Agile² and DORA. The piece "Agile²" makes an argument worth sitting with. Agile, in its original form, was a correction to a specific failure mode: process worship. The Agile Manifesto pushed back against the idea that following a detailed plan was the same as delivering value. The uncomfortab...

Once I was pulled into an emergency meeting about a project that had stalled six months earlier. The client was asking pointed questions about decisions made during the initial planning phase, and the original project manager had moved to another company. As I sat there watching my colleague scramble through scattered email threads and half-remembered conversations, I was reminded of a practice that has saved me countless times: keeping a daily work blog. I know it sounds excessive, but hear me out. For most of my career, I've maintained what I call my daily project log using Confluence's blog widget. I set it up right in the center of my personal workspace, surrounded by my other project notes and references. Every day, without fail, I spend five minutes documenting anything relatively significant that happened with my projects. This isn't about writing novels or crafting perfect prose. It's about capturing the small but crucial details that slip away: why we chose ven...

Back when I was working at a startup, we brought on two engineering interns for the summer. Steve was personable and well-liked around the office. He had good technical skills and could handle the tasks we assigned him. When things got slow, you'd find him chatting with the team about weekend plans or the latest tech news. Sometimes he'd even catch a quick nap at his desk during those inevitable startup lulls. Isabelle took a completely different approach. She was equally capable with her assigned work, but when the inevitable downtime hit, she had her laptop open learning Ruby on Rails. This was the web application framework our entire product was built on, but it wasn't something we expected interns to master. While Steve socialized or rested, Isabelle was diving deep into documentation, working through tutorials, and even building small practice applications on her own time. I watched this play out over the course of their ten-week internship. Both interns completed thei...