To equip leaders, empower organizations, and mobilize people to create lasting impact in communities, cities, and nations.
At VER, we believe that meaningful change happens when people, organizations, and resources come together around a common purpose. Through strategic marketing, leadership development, storytelling, transformational experiences, and purpose driven partnerships, we help expand influence and accelerate impact.
Guided by our commitment to Knowing God, Loving People, and Impacting the World, we serve churches, nonprofits, businesses, and Kingdom initiatives by helping them strengthen their mission, engage their communities, and create sustainable transformation.
Whether responding to immediate needs, developing leaders, or building long term initiatives, our mission remains the same: to mobilize people and organizations to bring hope, purpose, and lasting change to the world.
In September of 2017, in the middle of the Atlantic hurricane season, Fred Martins and Gustavo Couto founded the non-profit organization VER – Volunteer Emergency Relief. Noticing that a lot of people in the Brazilian immigrant community had recently moved to Florida and had never been through a hurricane before, Fred and Gustavo started posting videos in Portuguese on social media about how people should proceed before, during, and after a hurricane.
Nothing was planned; they just wanted to spread as much information as they could to the immigrant population. After seeing how serious Hurricane IRMA was becoming, they decided to rent a U-Haul truck two days before IRMA landed in Florida, so they could be ready to help with anything they could. The plan was to wait for Hurricane IRMA to pass. Then they would do a damage assessment of their own houses first, check out the conditions in their own neighborhood, and if everything was okay, they would meet in front of a local church. Everything was okay in their neighborhoods, and like a miracle, not even the power went down. So few hours later, right after the curfew was over, they got together.
With a pickup truck, a few cases of water, and a bunch of tools, off they went. Neither of them would ever imagine that from that simple action, God would give them a mission that would end up putting together an army of volunteers (to later be called the “V-angels”). VER would raise over 200K Dollars in food donations, and deliver over 2000 emergency relief boxes in Broward County, Key West, and Puerto Rico.
VER would be the first non-profit organization to arrive in Key West to do a local assessment of the damages and the real need of the local population. In a record time, only 15 days, VER was approved by the US Government and granted the non-profit status 501 (c) (3). For Fred and Gustavo, there is no doubt that God planned everything

PRESIDENT & CO-FOUNDER

DIRECTOR OF FINANCES

VICE-PRESIDENT & CO-FOUNDER

Co-founder