Who We Are
Snowball Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation based in Naples, Florida. We pay for the things that stand between a local church and its own growth — training it cannot afford, curriculum that does not exist in its language, and tools built for organisations with budgets it does not have.
Why the fund exists
The name is the idea. A snowball starts small and gains mass from what it rolls over. We fund things that behave that way: a trained leader who trains other leaders, a curriculum translated once that serves a language group indefinitely, a platform that lets one pastor reach people every day of the week instead of ninety minutes on Sunday.
What we consistently found was not a shortage of willing pastors. It was a set of unglamorous financial barriers — a tuition line, a translation budget, a software licence — each small enough to be solvable and each reliably unfunded, because none of them makes a compelling photograph.
So the fund is deliberately narrow. We do not run churches, write curriculum or build software. We buy access to those things for people who cannot, and we try to be exact about what a given amount buys. That is what our four projects are.
How we work
We fund access, not overhead
Every project is denominated in a unit a donor can picture: one scholarship, one translated seminar, one sponsored church for one year. If we cannot state what an amount buys, we do not ask for it.
We work through established programs
Building a competing curriculum would be wasteful when a proven one already exists and is under-distributed. We fund distribution of the DNA program rather than duplicating it.
We say what we do not know
We are in our first funding cycle. We have no verified impact statistics of our own, and we do not publish invented ones. Results belonging to our partner programs are always attributed to them. When we have our own numbers, they will appear on the transparency page — including outcomes that fall short.
Leadership
Snowball Fund is led by José Alexandre Almeida, who is responsible for the organisation's programs, partnerships and correspondence with donors. He can be reached directly at the address below.
We are a young organisation and our governance information is still being formalised. Rather than leave this page vague, we would rather say exactly that: additional board and officer details will be published here as they are confirmed. If you are evaluating us before making a significant gift, please contact us — we will answer directly.
Responsible
José Alexandre Almeida
Phone
239 233-2333Address
11708 Longshore Way W, Naples, FL 34119, United States
Our partners — and our relationship to them
Two organisations do the work our grants pay for. Neither is Snowball Fund, and we think a donor should know exactly where the money lands.
Central Church — the DNA program
Central Church created and teaches DNA, the cell-church training program behind two of our projects. They own the curriculum in every language, including translations we fund. We do not author it, teach it, or hold rights to it — we pay for scholarships and translation so more leaders can reach it. See what DNA is.
W2G (Way to Growth) — the platform
W2G is W2G Education LLC, a for-profit company that builds the digital school and live translation platforms behind our other two projects. Snowball Fund purchases licences from W2G and gives them to beneficiary churches at no cost to those churches. Our sponsorship levels reflect what those licences cost us. Snowball Fund earns no revenue from this and does not resell the platform — a donation to us is a charitable gift, not a purchase, and the donor does not receive the software.
We disclose this because the arrangement is easy to misread. It is the same shape as a scholarship fund paying tuition to a university it does not own, or a food bank buying from suppliers. If anything here is unclear, ask us and we will put it in writing.