Ami Dar

Ami Dar (born January 7, 1961) is an award winning social entrepreneur who, by founding Idealist in 1996, created a fundamental change in how the nonprofit sector and people around the world think about their capacity to fulfill humanity’s needs. As the organization’s founder and executive director, he has overseen consistent growth of the website at Idealist.org, which now serves more than 120,000 organizations around the world and has more than a million visitors every month, making it one of the most popular nonprofit resources on the web.

Dar was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Peru and Mexico, and lives in New York. He is fluent in four languages. Dar relates he was a “social justice freak” from a young age and was driven by memories of impoverished children and economic inequities from his early childhood in Mexico City. His social perspective was further shaped by his experiences as an Israeli paratrooper stationed on the Syrian border. These early influences led Dar to his mission, which has long guided his work and now serves as an invitation and the basis for the evolution of Idealist: “Working with others, in a spirit of generosity and mutual respect, I want to help build a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives.” Dar continues to innovate and leverage technology to advance his vision of a world in which no good intention goes to waste and people everywhere can work together to improve their lives and the world.

Early life

Dar was born January 7, 1961, in Jerusalem, Israel, the eldest of three children to a school teacher mother and diplomat father. He was only seven years old when a life defining event occurred. At a red light in Mexico City, Dar was in the back seat of the car when a young boy ran through the rain and looked into the car window directly at him imploring for help. From that moment on, Dar began to focus on what would eventually become his life’s work: helping humanity to solve its own problems. Dar became a self-described “social justice freak” consuming newspapers and struggling to understand the contrast of wealth and poverty around him.

The circumstances of his early life continued to contribute to his mindset. In 1976, Dar and his family returned to Israel and from 1979 - 1982, he served as a paratrooper to fulfill his mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). While at his post atop a watchtower overlooking the Syrian border, Dar had an insight that fundamentally changed his thinking about borders and humanity and how labels define and separate people. Years later that shift in his thinking would become institutionalized in the name and mission of the organization he founded, Action Without Borders, and the resulting massive digital network, Idealist.org, which would transform how people think about helping each other and create avenues for connecting people all over the world. As a public speaker, Dar has often retold this incident, now referred to as the "sock sharer story."

Career

Early years

After his mandatory army service, Dar lived in various locations in Europe and Israel and worked various jobs including as a waiter and freelance English translator. In 1985, Dar took some time to travel in South America and ponder how he could build a network that would make it easier for people to connect with each other to solve social problems. At that time the tools of modern technology included phones, PCs and fax machines. Dar had a flash of inspiration to somehow network them together so that anyone anywhere could connect and take action on any issue, large or small, local or global, that concerned them.

In 1988 Dar joined Aladdin Knowledge Systems (AKS), a software company based in Tel Aviv, as a marketing manager. From 1988 to 1992, Dar served as Aladdin Knowledge Systems International Marketing Manager, and from 1992 to 2000, he relocated to New York City as President of the company to establish their North American branch. During this time he continued to imagine a world where people who wanted to help others could use a network to act on those good intentions.

In 1993, when Dar saw the world wide web for the first time, he immediately realized that he could use it to create his network for good. By 1995 he had founded an early iteration of Idealist, The Contact Center Network, which sponsored meeting spaces in several communities, where people could connect with neighbors who might share interests and ideas for local action.

Idealist.org

During the mid to late 1990’s, Dar’s idea rapidly evolved, first as Contact.org, a simple HTML website with 2,500 links to nonprofit websites in one hundred countries and all fifty United States. This later became a searchable database, and, as Dar’s work began to get noticed, the organization received seed grants from the AT&T, Markle, and Packard foundations.

In 1996 Dar changed the organization’s name to Action Without Borders, a reference to his “sock sharers” insight at the Syrian border, and began calling the online network Idealist.org. In 2000 Dar received a $100,000 Stern Family Fund grant which doubled the organization’s budget and allowed it to grow into the largest nonprofit online community and resource that it still is today.

As Idealist became a prominent force in the nonprofit and social activism world, Dar received numerous awards. In 2004, the Ashoka Foundation honored him as a Fellow,^[1] deeming him one of an elite group of leading social entrepreneurs “who develop innovative solutions to social problems with the potential to change patterns across society.”^[2] On four occasions, he has been included on The Nonprofit Times annual list of the fifty most influential people in the nonprofit sector, and Time Magazine named him a philanthropy innovator.^[3] In 2012, Dar was profiled in Forbes magazine^[4] and in 2014, his career was profiled by Bloomberg.^[5]

Dar continues to direct Idealist’s growth helping people move from intention to action all over the world. His website currently supports more than 120,000 organizations and more than 1 million registered users, with 1.4 million monthly visitors to sites in English (idealist.org), Spanish (idealistas.org), and French (idealiste.org). The organization also hosts Graduate Degree Fairs and online resources on local and global volunteering, nonprofit careers, nonprofit management, and graduate programs in the social good sector. In 2016, Idealist hosted Grad Fairs in ten major United States cities. More than a million jobs, internships and volunteer opportunities have been posted through the years.^[6] It would be nearly impossible to quantify how many people Dar has impacted in the twenty years since he started Idealist. Dar utilized emerging technology in groundbreaking ways to connect people with opportunities for social action and, in doing so, created the largest nonprofit community on the planet.

Dar plans to evolve Idealist even farther. In 2010 he embarked on a series of surveys and conversations with his global community to explore what he termed “the gap between intentions and actions.” Dar and his Idealist team used three questions (The 3Q’s) to discover clues to what holds people back from doing more good in the world. Their research yielded a comprehensive understanding of these “obstacles to action,” and inspired Dar to expand the Idealist network from strictly digital to both online and in person. In 2017, Dar announced his intention to build a whole “ecosystem of possibility,”  with ideas and tools to connect people and problems in new ways, so that no opportunity for action or collaboration is ever missed or wasted.

Dar is an inspiring public speaker and has been invited to speak at numerous conferences and events, including delivering the Commencement Address for City University of New York (CUNY) School of Professional Studies in 2011.

Honors and awards^[7]

Stern Public Interest Pioneer Grant

In 2000, The Stern Family Fund awarded Dar a $100,000 Public Interest Pioneer grant.

Ashoka Fellowship

In 2004, Dar was named an Ashoka Fellow. Fellows are leading social entrepreneurs recognized to have innovative solutions to social problems and the potential to change patterns across society. They demonstrate unrivaled commitment to bold new ideas and prove that compassion, creativity, and collaboration are tremendous forces for change. Ashoka Fellows work in over 60 countries around the globe in every area of human need.^[8]

NTEN (Non-Profit Technology Enterprise Network)

Dar is a Board Member Emeritus of NTEN, the largest community of nonprofit professionals transforming technology into social change ^[9]

Non-profit Finance Fund

Dar was a contributor to the Non-profit Finance Fund’s 2011 publishing, Non-Profit Management 101. ^[10]

Duke University's Fuqua School of Business CASE Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award, 2006^[11]

Time Magazine Philanthropy Innovator, 2005

Nonprofit Times 50 Most Influential People in Nonprofit, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005

References