Succeeding Through Hard Drive

Israeli-born activist runs Web site that links idealists around globe

Ami Dar says the idea for his charity, which now runs one of the most popular

non-profit sites on the Internet, came to him 20 years ago.

Serving as a reservist paratrooper in the Israeli army, Mr. Dar recalls spending long hours “watching the Arab soldiers watching me over the barbed wire.”

He realized, he says, that both armies must have “good guys who will give you their last pair of dry socks if you need it” and “others who might steal yours if they can.” And he began to wonder: “If we have to fight, wouldn’t it make more sense for the good guys on both sides to get together against the sock thieves?”

Mr. Dar’s desire to connect like-minded people across geographic boundaries so that they can bring about social change has motivated him ever since.

While his idea may have sounded simple, figuring out how to put it into practice has been anything but. Mr. Dar, now 39, has had to revise his plans for his organization, Action Without Borders, at almost every turn since its start in 1995. And in many ways, he is still just at the very beginning of what he hopes to accomplish, even though his site now attracts nearly 40,000 users a day and has built up a searchable database of more than 20,000 non-profit groups.

But his determination and his ability to remain flexible have begun to pay off. Mr. Dar beat out 150 other applicants this summer to win the annual Stern Family Fund’s Public Interest Pioneer prize, an award that provides cash to activists with big ideas and few dollars. The $100,000 grant nearly doubles Action Without Borders’s budget. The foundation will give Mr. Dar another $100,000 next year if he is able to successfully carry out his plans for Action Without Borders.

“Ami really impressed the board,” says Michael Caudell-Feagan, executive director of the Stern Family Fund, based in Arlington, Va. “He’s spent a good deal of his life committed to this ideal, but has not had the resources in his hands to devote himself full time to carrying it out. And yet his vision is really clearly articulated, and he has a very high profile among many in the non-profit field.”

A Slow Start

Mr. Dar moved to the United States in 1992, in part because of its “huge non-profit tradition.”

His goal was to build a network of “contact centers,” offices located within churches and other charities, that could help match volunteers with charities that would interest them.

Mr. Dar says he had “the optimistic certainty that if I only spoke with the right people” his organization would be up and running in a matter of weeks. Two months later, Mr. Dar found himself down to his last $10, at which point he set aside his charity plans and took a job setting up the U.S. subsidiary of an Israeli software company, Aladdin Knowledge Systems.

His work in the computer world helped him realize the potential benefits of the Internet before many others did, and Mr. Dar soon shifted the focus of his non-profit plan from physical buildings to virtual networks.

With Aladdin’s blessing, Mr. Dar started his non-profit group in 1995 and housed it in the company’s offices on the 66th floor of the Empire State Building. Using the personal savings he had built up over three years, Mr. Dar hired an intern and another full-time employee to put together what is believed to be the first international directory of non-profit Web sites. Working under the name the Contact Center Network, Mr. Dar’s group put together links to 2,500 sites.

Today, Action Without Borders’s database includes roughly 20,000 non-profit groups, organized by geography and mission, and is available on its Web site, which is now called Idealist.org. Mr. Dar says his only ground rules for inclusion are that groups agree “to work legally, nonviolently, and to not promote any action against any person or group based on gender, color, sexual orientation, etc.”

Russ Finkelstein, who has worked for Action Without Borders from its start, continues to build the site by searching out charities and inviting them to join. Each morning, for example, he checks the Yahoo search engine’s collection of new Web sites for any non-profit entries and then sends e-mail to the organizations he finds.

Mr. Dar has continued to expand Idealist’s services by asking himself: “What do non-profits do and what do they need?”

Because charities put on events, provide programs and services, and put together publications, Mr. Dar has started to build databases to help organizations publicize such things and reach the people who might be interested in an upcoming conference, a big volunteer event, or a recently published book.

And because charities need volunteers, interns, and employees, Mr. Dar has created databases to publicize ways to get involved with non-profit groups.

To date, the most successful piece of Idealist’s package, to Mr. Dar’s surprise, has been its job listings.

“We never planned to become this career center on the Web,” he says. “But we soon realized that the job listings were what drew people back to the site.”

With little publicity, the site has been able to attract about 100 new job ads each week. Many of the jobs are entry-level ones, making the service particularly popular with college career centers. But there are also some listings for directors of development, program directors, and other jobs requiring some years of experience.

The service used to be free, but Mr. Dar started charging employers $40 per ad last October after a shortage of money threatened to put Action Without Borders out of business.

To supplement the listings, Mr. Dar has built an online career center, with advice on how to write résumés, a guide to what to expect from a first non-profit job, and comments from other job seekers. He also sends a daily e-mail alert, which currently goes to 23,000 job seekers each morning, listing the employment opportunities added in the previous 24 hours.

Another popular Idealist feature has been a monthly e-mail newsletter that highlights Web sites and other sources of information for charities and advocates. About 40,000 people in the United States and 100 other countries subscribe.

“It’s still kind of incredible to me,” says Mr. Dar. “You can click on a send’ button and, without paying anything, reach 40,000 people, who can then forward the message if they want to.”

Overcoming Problems

As a largely volunteer effort with minimal financing, Idealist has suffered from sometimes out-of-date information and slow technology.

Action Without Borders’s income, which totaled $121,570 last year, has come largely from personal donations from Mr. Dar and his friends, Aladdin Knowledge Systems, and, most recently, from fees for the job ads. Three foundations — the AT&T, John and Mary R. Markle, and David and Lucile Packard Foundations — were early supporters, giving a combined $100,000 in grants.

Mr. Dar is hopeful that the money from the Stern grant will prove a major step toward fixing the site’s problems. One change: Mr. Dar will be able to leave Aladdin Knowledge Systems and work as a paid employee of the organization for the first time.

Action Without Borders has also just hired its first marketing manager to help promote the Web site. Until now, the site has attracted users primarily through personal referrals and through its links on some 6,000 other Web sites.

With the added publicity, Mr. Dar hopes to increase the number of job listings from 100 a week to 300 a week by the end of next year.

A key focus for Mr. Dar will be reaching young job seekers, those who have just graduated from college or from business, law, or other graduate schools. Mr. Dar plans to bring together charity employers that use his Web site and job seekers for face-to-face meetings by setting up non-profit job fairs in various cities. He is currently planning the first event in Chicago for this fall.

“Since non-profit employers tend to hire sporadically, do not advertise extensively in classified sections, and rarely recruit on campuses, the sector is often invisible to the most talented people it needs to attract,” he says.

Going Global

Another top priority of Mr. Dar’s will be to translate the Idealist Web site into French and Spanish, to help make it more global.

Mr. Dar has a particular interest in helping groups in Latin America. While he was born in Israel, he spent much of his childhood living in Mexico and Peru because his father worked as a sociologist for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Currently about 75 percent of the site’s content and users are based in the United States, while the international information tends to come from countries that have English as the primary language.

Mr. Dar sees bridging large geographic distances as the real power of his work.

“If you really want to volunteer locally, you can probably find organizations to work with on your own,” he says. “But if you suddenly get the chance to take a one-month sabbatical in Uganda, how do you find a volunteer opportunity there? That’s hard.”

In the future, Mr. Dar hopes Idealist visitors will be able to type various criteria into a database — such as “warm climate, a one-month commitment, and helping the environment” — and then receive an e-mail notification when opportunities arise that fit those criteria.

But Mr. Dar says he has no plans to offer donors a direct way to make gifts to the charities in his database, or to provide detailed financial and other information that contributors might seek. Instead he will link to sites such as GuideStar, which publishes the informational tax returns of charities on line, and Helping.org, the collection of non-profit information run by the America Online Foundation.

Making Things Easier

While Mr. Dar says he is cautious about exaggerating what technology can do, he does believe the Internet will prove to be a good way to inspire people to take steps to solve problems they wouldn’t have tackled alone, by linking them with organizations and other people who share the same beliefs.

Mr. Dar says there are basically three kinds of people in the world: those who naturally get involved in everything, those who prefer to keep to themselves, and then all of the rest, who would like to help out more if they could just figure out where to begin.

“People who grew up involved often don’t appreciate how hard it is to take that first step,” he says. “If you come from a family that has never volunteered, no one has ever volunteered, it’s not so simple.”

Says Mr. Dar: “If things were made easier I just think it stands to reason that more people would get involved.”