Atados Project is an online platform that was made to get people to volunteer and make positive changes in society.

The Atados project was born in São Paulo with the objective of mobilising people and generating positive transformations in society through a free digital platform, with projects in partnership with companies, projects of its own authorship, and the strengthening of networks.

What they do?

Atados is an online social platform that connects people to volunteer opportunities in social causes and develops social impact projects.

The project started in São Paulo, when Daniel Morais, graduated in administration from USP- Universidade de São Paulo, got together with four friends who wanted to get involved with some social cause and connect to make a difference. At the time, they didn’t know how. So, they started researching and had some difficulty finding a place for a volunteer, and there they realised there was an opportunity to start facilitating the path of those who wanted the same thing as them: to be a volunteer.

With the idea in mind and the desire to do something, they went after NGOs – Non-Governmental Organisations that make voluntary work possible. They then began to visit these institutions, share their ideas, and realised how impactful it could be for these organisations to have a tool like Atados.

With the aim of making the path as easy as possible for people with the desire to do the same thing as them, to provide volunteer service, they started to build a network, and when they launched the site, there were already more than 100 NGOs registered. Today, this network has more than three thousand organisations, which publicise all types of volunteer actions throughout Brazil.

Daniel says that what was interesting about their trajectory was their visits to NGOs; each of the four friends worked in specific places, Daniel, for example, worked in the financial market. From April 2012, which was when they started, until November, they paid attention to the possibilities of Atados and fell more and more in love with the idea, and then everyone resigned from their respective jobs to focus on the project.

With the visits, they realised the potential of the tool they were creating, they saw that, by bringing a little knowledge and something of a network of connections, they would achieve a greater impact. For example, they saw NGOs with only two volunteer people having 30, 40 or 50 volunteers using Atados as a tool. They concluded that the execution capacity multiplied many times, and networking was also very powerful in connecting projects, opportunities, and the needs of these institutions.

The project will be 10 years old in November 2022. It was born in São Paulo, but there are voluntary actions and projects happening all over Brazil via the platform, with a fixed team in Rio de Janeiro and another in São Paulo.

The project has 40 people divided into teams and many other volunteers. They are divided into network articulation, communication and commercial parts. The last two work by forming partnerships and selling business projects. In addition, they have three large groups that carry out the business projects, a part of technology that creates and develops the platform and other functionalities. Finally, a group responsible for the administrative and financial part, which operates under managerial conditions.

“We have 200,000 volunteers who started working via Atados and more than 3,000 registered NGOs, and out of every 10 volunteer vacancies created on our platform in Web, 9 are effectively occupied by a volunteer,” Daniel says when asked if they are meeting their mission . “This is the main indicator that we are achieving our mission, to bring qualified people to work in NGOs as volunteers.”

Daniel also says that project maintenance happens through partnerships with companies that hire Atados’ services. The initiative is a non-profit association, but it does not live on donations. Daniel goes on to say that, “companies want to create a volunteer programme because they see that, with a volunteer program, it is possible to develop skills in employees, connect with the surrounding community and create social responsibility with an impact across the entire strategy of the company.

The project works with 70 companies, making programmes to structure actions that have a bigger effect and a structure that gets volunteers involved and has an effect from beginning to end.

“In volunteer work, which we believe in, there is an exchange between the volunteer and the public served”, says Daniel

Daniel talks about challenges

“Today we are facing an expansion challenge. We have grown a lot, but we have the ambition to grow outside Brazil as well. We currently have a partnership with a volunteer network in Panama that uses our platform, but we want to take our methodology to more countries. We also want to expand corporate volunteering to medium-sized companies, as today only large companies invest in volunteering.

Partnerships are a success, but Atados has the potential to explore all business categories. The idea is to have a social bias and work with communities close to the companies. We still haven’t managed to make this dream come true, and work extensively with companies; this is our great challenge.”

Daniel continues and now tells an interesting story about one of the many successful initiatives of the project: “In 2014, we wanted to find people who could make contact with a specific cause, that of refugees. At that time, there was not much talk about this topic, and we wanted to expand this knowledge and encourage more people to participate.

It was the year of the World Cup in Brazil, and we had the idea of ​​creating the Refugee World Cup, a side event with the aim of giving visibility to this cause, and making refugees play here in Brazil during the Cup. We were very successful, there were eight refugee teams, and everything was publicised in various media channels.

From there, we started a movement of volunteers to articulate more actions for this cause, and that’s when the idea of ​​creating a language course, with classes in English, French, Arabic, and Spanish came about, where refugees would be the teachers and generate income. The difficulty was great at the time, and it is still difficult for refugees to find work and income in Brazil. We put together a group of volunteers with pedagogues, communicators, and people from the administrative part, so we formed three groups and, with them, we started to articulate this idea, which we launched in 2015, as a pilot project carried out only by volunteers, without any resources, all in the basis of the partnership in the network.

In the first class, we had 800 students enrolled, it was a huge success. This success occurred as a result of a demand from an audience that desired to learn languages in a different way, more connected with a non-Eurocentric culture. Since the beginning of the project, we have managed to mobilise more than three million reais in income for refugees.

We managed to fulfil our mission in this sense, a totally voluntary project that today benefits more than 50 teachers who give language classes to Brazilians and manage to bring the culture, repertoire, and cause of refugees to more people who would previously have to study languages ​​in a more traditional way.

These people can now learn in an innovative way, making an impact and generating income for those who are trying a new life here in Brazil.”

Did you like Project Atados? Daniel Moura makes an invitation

You, an individual who wants to apply for a volunteer position, enter the Atados website and discover a volunteer job that suits you, one that brings together that purpose that makes your heart happy. You can use the filter as per cause, skill, availability, and location. Thus, you will find a volunteer position that connects with you and with which you feel connected.

It is our greatest mission, and the more people participate in these actions, the more we will be fulfilling our purpose.

We are also open to companies that want to establish partnerships by hiring our services, such as corporate volunteer programmes .

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