How One Person Made a Difference
Conversation with Ami Dar, founder of Action Without Borders

Ami Dar founded Action Without Borders in 1995 to help facilitate and promote citizen action around the world, and has volunteered as its executive director while serving as President of Aladdin Knowledge Systems, an Internet and software security company.

In 1996, he launched Idealist.org (www.idealist.org) which has since become one of the richest communities of nonprofit, advocacy and volunteering resources on the web, with information provided by 37,000 organizations in 180 countries, and thousands of users every day. This wealth of information—searchable by location, keyword and area of interest—can be used by any person with Internet access in schools, libraries, work places and homes.

Over the last two years Idealist.org has also emerged as the leading nonprofit career center online, making it much easier for motivated and talented people to start or develop the meaningful careers they seek. Every week, an average of 100 organizations come to Idealist to list their job openings, and every day 50,000 nonprofit job seekers receive an e-mail message with links to new job openings added to Idealist.org in the previous 24 hours.

Ami Dar is interviewed here by Ambika Kapur, Coordinator of Public Affairs and Media Relations, Carnegie Corporation.

KAPUR: Tell us a little about your history and how you got where you are today.

DAR: I’ll tell you the short version, but really, it’s been a very long process for me. I guess it started when I was 24 [Ed-note: he is now 42], when I became obsessed with an idea: you have people, you have resources, you have organizations, you have problems, but how do you create a system where all can benefit from each other? So, I was trying to figure how I could solve this problem and make a living at the same time. While I did that, I waited tables, worked as a translator at a computer company in Israel where I grew up. Then, ten years ago, I came to the United States to see what I could do here. In the first few of months, I met with a lot of people to discuss various ideas, but nothing seemed to work out. In the meantime, I went through all my money, and desperately needed to get a job. So I set up a subsidiary of an Israeli company, Aladdin Systems which sustained me while I still pursued my dreams.

Then, about eight or nine years ago, I saw the Internet for the first time, and realized its potential. I recognized that if you had a good idea on the Web, you could try to do something yourself with limited resources.

One of the first things I noticed while surfing the Web was that there was no one place to go and find information on nonprofit organizations. So, in 1995, I hired someone, who’s actually still here eight years later and I asked him to help me locate all the nonprofit organizations that have web sites and help me start a nonprofit web site. We identified 2500 web sites over a couple of months and arranged them all in a tree format, by country, state, and issue that they worked on. We launched our web site with this information in September 1995, calling it Action Without Borders.

But we soon realized that just a cluster of links to nonprofit organizations weren’t really useful. It was better than nothing, but not if people were looking for something very specific. For instance, if a nurse who spoke French wanted to go to Africa next summer to help in some way, what would we have for her? That’s the kind of information we wanted to provide for people. At the same time, we saw the Web was expanding and becoming more interactive and service oriented. For example, through the Federal Express web site, you could track your packages and on Amazon.com, find books. So, we said to ourselves, why can’t we do the same sort of thing for nonprofits? The staff of any nonprofit anywhere in the world should be able to access our web site and enter information about their organization so that anyone around the globe can find it. Based on that idea, we created a place for nonprofit organizations to enter information and job opportunities about themselves and anyone could go on our site and search for what they were looking for. That was the beginning of Idealist.org

Since then, with the help of people from all over the world, Idealist has become one of the most popular communities of nonprofit and volunteering resources on the Web, with information provided by over 36,000 organizations in 165 countries, and thousands of users every day.

For the first few years of operation, it was pretty hard to sustain the momentum, because foundations and donor agencies really didn’t understand what we were about and since we were a nonprofit organization, we had to rely on grants to support us.

KAPUR: How did you convince foundations that this was a good idea?

DAR: It was very difficult to explain to foundations and other funding sources what the Web was and what we were doing with it. We had to convince them that this wasn’t just a fad, that it was not going to go away, and that it was important. A complicating fact was that we were also working on various issues in various countries and foundations normally fund specific issues in specific geographic areas. So, for a number of years, we got by with a very small staff and few resources, but about three years ago, things started getting better: foundations have recognized the impact of our work and have been supporting us, so we hope to grow more.

KAPUR: It is really impressive, what you’ve been able to do in such a short period of time with limited resources. What are some of your greatest achievements?

DAR: What’s nice is that different things make me proud at different times. It’s been a while now that we’ve been in operation and we’ve even updated the look of our site a few times to serve our users better. Until January this year, our web site was simple. There were organizations listed with their information and recent volunteer and job opportunities that were searchable. But now, we’ve added a news section and consultant directory that recognizes an individual and adapts itself for them. We also added a French site and a Russian site earlier this year. And just two weeks ago, we got a Spanish web site started. This has been really exciting for me.

Currently, we have about 30,000 people every day who come to our web site. We also send out about 50,000 e-mails every day to people, who have subscribed for specific services and information that they want.

KAPUR: What do you feel are your biggest challenges going forward? Where do you want to go from here?

DAR: I think the challenge has been and always is the chicken-and-egg thing, where people come for content and they want to find it. But people come to your site only if you have something for them, and people will post things only if other people come.

For example, in Russia, it has been difficult for us to get started. We have only 15 organizations listed from Russia on our web site. So why should anyone interested in Russian nonprofits come to the site if there are only 15 organizations, but then why should more organizations post more information if no one comes? So, getting the ball rolling can be difficult. Staffing and funding are also challenges we have to constantly face.

Where next? I don’t know. There are so many things we want to do. We have the site working in four languages, so there’s no reason why we can’t work in 20. It’s all set up to be scalable. It can work in Dutch tomorrow, or in Turkish, or in Greek. It’s a question of finding the resources for that. I think the next step will be doing more face-to-face meetings. We’ll be using the site to convene people. In fact, we recently held a national conference for nonprofit human resources staff so they could let us know what works for them and we’ve improved our site according to their suggestions. So using the site, then bringing together people on a variety of issues is, I think, a key next step.

KAPUR: How do you market your web site?

DAR: We don’t do any marketing because we don’t have the money for that. Our traffic is word-of-mouth. For example, we have 300 individuals who join Idealist.org every day and when we look at our site to see how they found out about us, they say word-of- mouth, friend, through the Web, saw an ad on the Peace Corps site, etc. They also come from all over the world, from countries like Benin, Sri Lanka, the U.K., Belgium, Moldova, Israel, Poland etc. So its really personal interest that drives them to our site.

KAPUR: Do you register your site with search engines?

DAR: Our presence on search engines has also grown over time. We’ve been around for a while, so the search engines basically find us. For example, Google ranks its findings according to how many people link to a particular site. And so when you search for the word “nonprofit organization” on Google, Idealist.org comes up among the top listings. Even other words like “nonprofit jobs,” “nonprofit,” “internships” brings up our site all the time. So people who search for this information can find us very easily. This is a cumulative effect because the more they find us, the more they link to us.

KAPUR: Where are most of the people who register on your web site located? In the U.S. or in other countries?

DAR: Seventy-five percent are in the U.S. and 25 percent are from around the world.

KAPUR: Ideally, where do you want to be in ten years?

DAR: It’s a big dream for us to be the Google or the Ebay of the nonprofit world. We’d like people to think of Idealist.org as the one place on the Web that they can go to help themselves and others. But the single thing that drives me is that if any two people anywhere in the world want to work on something together, they should be able to connect with one another. And if people want to reach out to organizations in any part of the world to help them with a project or an issue, they should be able to do that, and we at Idealist want to enable that connection. Sometimes, it just helps knowing that there is someone out there in the world who cares about the same issues you care about. But the question is, how do we get there? If you are a small nonprofit in Mexico and need help with something, how do you get to the point where you can connect with someone who is interested in helping in, say Poland? We want Idealist.org to be the place on the Web that shows the world how not to waste good will, and how to make sure that whatever good will is out there is used in a productive way.

KAPUR: This is a huge project you’ve undertaken. Tell us a little about your personal commitment to it. What motivates you?

DAR: I guess there are three or four different layers. The first layer, of course, is idealistic. In the world, there are all kinds of things that bother me and I want to fix them. And I try to do what I can in whatever way I can to make that happen. I had this illusion when I started, when I was 24 or 25, that in three or four years I’d be able to execute my plans and the world would be a better place. But of course, it’s taking a little bit longer than that! So there’s definitely an idealistic impulse in me.

I also think my background has something to do with where I am now. I was born in Israel and grew up in Peru and Mexico, where I witnessed a lot of poverty. At 18, I was drafted into the Israeli army, where I served as a paratrooper in the Lebanese war of 1982, which wasn’t fun. So I’d say that my experience in Israel, combined with the hardship I witnessed growing up in Latin America, led me to start Action Without Borders as an organization that would make it easier for people everywhere to take action on issues of concern to them.

Then beyond that, once Idealist.org got started and it got bigger, each day became a challenge. I love the challenges—they keep my work exciting, fun and interesting. Also, initially, it was a little frustrating to be working on this alone, but now, we have a team of terrific people and it has become a pleasure just to come here every day.

At the same time, trying to do something about all that bothers me about the world is very rewarding. And at some level I think, I didn’t have any choice in the matter. It’s like asking a writer why you write, or asking a painter why you paint. If I weren’t doing this I just wouldn’t be me. I can’t imagine doing anything else.

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