Where do you picture yourself at age 28? Maybe owning a home and holding a job you like, possibly a Master’s Degree. How about getting your PhD and becoming the founder of two internationally-based nonprofit organizations? Meet Dr. Daniel Weiss.

Daniel is an unassuming, outspoken guy from the Midwest. He has brown hair and glasses. That’s where the superficial similarities between him and the general population end.

Accident, the force by which all great ideas seem to spawn, was an early actor in Daniel’s story too. After college he moved to Chicago and started working at a nonprofit organization eighty hours a week, the common plight of so many well-meaning and idealistic graduates. He loved the gang-involved kids that he worked with and loved his involvement in the community, but after a year and a half he was completely burnt out. Weiss decided to apply for PhD programs in public policy but missed all of the application deadlines. Plan B was the Peace Corps, but he missed those deadlines too. He landed a job with Fundação Esperança, a charitable health organization in Santarém. With no desire to go to Brazil (he wanted to go to Africa,) he only packed for a six-month stay. During his stay there, he fell in love with the people, the country, and the lifestyle and came away very impressed with Fundação Esperança.

Fundação Esperança (the Hope Foundation) was founded by a Franciscan father named Luke Tupper in 1976. After Father Luke's time in the Navy, during which he witnessed the poor health of children in Latin America, he trained to become a plastic surgeon. The memories of the kids who needed his help haunted him, and in 1972 he sold everything he owned and joined the Franciscan brotherhood. He was stationed in Santarem, where the infant mortality rate approached 50% at the time. Father Luke started tooling up and down the Amazon in a boat, dispensing medical care to those who needed it. Eventually, the foundation was established with a base in Santarem. Father Luke died in a motorcycle accident in 1977, but the organization has thrived even in his absence, now celebrating more than thirty years of operation in the Amazon region.

After Daniel's self-proclaimed wonderful experience in Brazil, he was still determined to get back to the US and start his PhD. Soon he was back at the University of Minnesota pursuing his studies. “I returned to the coldest winter in Minnesota history. I was looking at snowdrifts and dreaming of Brazil,” says Daniel. He fast-tracked his dissertation and headed back to Santarem with the idea to start an orthopedic shoe shop at a home for physically disabled kids called Apae. The project had everything – money, tools, materials, doctors – except the physical building to house the workshop. Daniel presented the project to many US-based and local charitable organizations with the invitation to make building the workshop one of their projects. None of them were interested. He got an email from Fundação suggesting that he start an organization himself. Thus, Amizade (friendship in Portuguese) was born in 1994.  Read More...