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Stage 4 Cancer Led Her to Build a Search Engine for Good with Dvora Inwood · find your cause

• Joseph Smalzer: hit with a stage four colon cancer diagnosis and it was very rough for 18 months. When you start doing something real with other people and you are working for something bigger than yourself, the energy just shifts. Alrighty. Thanks everyone for tuning in to this episode of Find Your Cause. Today it's a dreary day for me where I'm at. But please, Dvorah Inwood, the co-founder of Samaritan Scout, please introduce yourself and share usually what the mission is of the organizations that we're interviewing. Thanks for your time today as well. Sure. I'm Dave Inwood. Samaritan Scout is a 501c3. We have a mission of creating a better world by inspiring a culture of service and enabling individuals everywhere to contribute positively. To their community and beyond. And we do this by harnessing cutting edge technology as in an AI-powered search engine to connect people with something really meaningful and local. Awesome. Here at Greater Than Zero Percent, we share some very similar components of our mission. So I'm really excited to get in this conversation and share with you my learnings and love to hear about your learnings. But before we get too far into it, Dvora, why you? Why is this something that you co-founded? Well, it's actually started with my daughter. About seven years ago, she was a freshman in high school and needed to log volunteer hours. That's a thing for a lot of schools. And she kept coming to me frustrated because finding a real in-person local volunteer opportunity is actually much harder than it should be. Google surfaces, big national organizations and the old directory websites. They just are basically empty of anything local and in-person. And she said, Why isn't there a search engine for this? Why don't you build a search engine? Right? I'm going to build my daughter a search engine. I did not do that at the time. I was working at a tech startup that was using AI to match people to jobs where they would thrive. So her question really resonated with me. We do have tech that matches us to things to buy and things to watch. And now it's doing things like your job. So why not do an activity in the real world that could make a positive difference? And I love that idea, but I did not have time for this fantasy AI powered search engine. So several years later I was hit with a stage four colon cancer diagnosis and it was very rough for 18 months. As y anyone who has someone close to them has ever gone through cancer. It's treatments, surgeries, hospitalizations, day to day. But then the worst is over and you're facing a long recovery. So I couldn't work full time. I couldn't really do much of anything, but this idea, I thought maybe I could do this. I'd heard about the loneliness epidemic. You've probably all heard that term. People are online too much, seniors feel isolated. I didn't really understand it until that moment when I just I couldn't ride a train. I couldn't go to work. I couldn't go to my kids' soccer games. And it's depressing. It's a daily fight not to lose hope. The world starts seeming doomed. It's just it's a negative spiral. But when you start doing something real with other people and you are working for something bigger than yourself, the energy just shifts. You just see the world differently. It just was a recovery line for me. I reached out to anyone and everyone who thought they might be interested in something like this. And really quickly there was just a team of people. And that's why me personally, but why this personally is because I really do believe that the world would be better if we all were out there working with other people in a concrete way. So I guess that's personal why me, but it's also about me. Yeah, no, absolutely. This is so exciting. And what skills did you have before this that allowed you to build something like this? Yeah, so I'm not a software developer. I'm a product manager, which means I worked with software developers for many years. Literally sit by them and have to learn to translate English, marketing, business speak to tech capabilities. So one of my daughter's close friends is a software developer genius. And it was a really good team. He's a very big community service person. Will Rosenthal has always been a volunteer. And he's also studying cybersecurity and working for NATO now. But he was a student then. And together we were just a very good team. So I guess that's the skills is being able to work with software developers. Yeah. Yeah. And talk to me about how say say I am because I think we we have a very similar target audience as somebody that wants to give back but doesn't know where to start. And that's usually what I say. And my hopes are that people search, I want to give back, but where do I start? And that greater than zero percent and find your cause comes up and allows them to see the videos of these executive directors and founders of these organizations and then inspire them to wanna get engaged. I think yours double clicks onto the hands-on volunteer in person local component of that as well. But say I'm somebody that is the example of your daughter or somebody that has service hours for high school or whatever schooling that they have. What is the expected experience that they are going through through using your program and your service. So we currently have two ways of connecting people to having an impact. One is, as you said, the volunteer opportunity. It's like a job description. We find it as our web crawler goes to the websites of the nonprofits and it says something very specific. So a student, anyone of any age, could put in their location and they'll get a list of things in location order. They can filter keywords, skills, causes to get something closer to what they want. That's something that the nonprofit has already decided is a role. The second way to search though, and this is a little bit more exciting, I think, for many, is to go to the organization browse. So again, you choose a state, you drill down to a region, and you're looking at organizations and their descriptions. And these are all organizations we found that want volunteers. Now you don't need to go specifically to their weekly food pantry if that's not necessarily what you want to do. You reach out to them directly and you speak with them. And this is where I think we do share a mission of like just go make a call. That's your first step. Let's hear what they need. They probably need things that they have not described in job descriptions because they didn't think it would resonate. You probably have skills you don't know that you even have. And as you guys talk, it's a human-to-human conversation of this is our mission, these are our pain points, here's what I could bring to it. I have some ideas. It's a synergy. And then often students like my daughter in high school, they would create their own little project and they would say, I could give it two years, I could give it three months, whatever. And it gets defined and it gets done. Wow. So was your daughter able to use this before she graduated beyond needing it? Or was this kind of a post post-need on her end at least? For her, yeah. It didn't launch until after she graduated high school. But her younger brother has used it. So What I love is I hear from random people all around the country. I get emails from organizations and I get emails from individuals. So I think it's other people at least, not just my daughter, who are getting something out of it. Why do you think in-person volunteer opportunities is one of the cures of the loneliness epidemic? What do you think about it helps? It's kind of getting a deeper question here. The loneliness, about interconnectedness, about health, about happiness, plus the whole sociology background of what makes a civilization civilized, like what makes us kind to each other or not. And really we need to be, I think, face to face. And not just with the people who already agree with us or follow us online or we follow them, which is nice. It's nice to feel that sense of likeness, but it is about being with people who might not be the ones that you would encounter regularly, but they're good people. They also care just like you do about a better future. And until you're in volunteering situation with someone face to face, you might not recognize that. That's something that you can only know theoretically until you know it for real. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to share or to hear some stories of people that have used Samaritan Scout and if you've been able to collect any feedback from them about their experience. So yes. I have a few. So one woman who for 30 years, she's lived less than seven miles from a place called Sage Elder Care, which is a services for aging in place. They have a funding stream, which is a furniture repair shop that is entirely run by volunteers. So this is mostly retirees, but also some students. They volunteer, they fix chairs, they do woodwork. People come to get their furniture repaired like they would to any store. But everyone doing the work is volunteering and all the money goes directly to Sage. So woman found she loves working with her hand. She built her own garden cage during COVID with like wood and screens and she wanted to do something. So she didn't even know it existed, right? And she probably drove by it. That's one of my favorite ones. But then there's others who they didn't even know what they wanted to do. So they were browsing and seeing what's near them and didn't even realize, hey, I can be a museum docent because I like the history, this revolutionary war sites that need docents. They found it through our site. It just wouldn't have occurred to them to even search for that. So those are some of my undiscovered. Yeah. Like before you built this and after you built it and people started using it, what was your personal experience of that search for having an impact and how has that evolved since you launched it into now? How are you internalizing th this amazing tool that you're providing for other people because you can make that transitive property argument of like you provided this tool and all these other people are using it and helping them find impact and help potentially cure depression and loneliness and find meaning in their lives. How has that from your perspective evolved in your experience of it? In my experience from volunteering itself, I date back to I'm a a little older than you. I dig back to pre-smartphones where I was living in Santa Monica and literally went to the library where they had a book of nonprofits with addresses. And I would have to call them. And I found a place a few blocks from where I lived that I could go volunteer that, you know, from a library directory. So that's where it started, right? And then I think you had these online directories, which never really helped me much because I felt that they got very filled with advertisements or Host an exchange student, which I wasn't in a position to do for most of my life, maybe now, but so what it became was a lot of word of mouth, which is limited. What did other people I know do? They told me. The Google searches didn't really help. And the research shows that most people that volunteer at one organization their entire life and it's one, they can't even remember how they learned about it. What does that tell you? They're not discovering, and much remains undiscovered as a result. So For me, it really wasn't until Samaritan Scout that I saw something called equine therapy. It's like a thing everywhere. I didn't even know about it. Horses, there's a horse. What does a horse do? They used to be a work animal, now they're a pleasure animal, but more recently they're a therapy animal. So for people, for veterans, for people on a a spectrum who have trouble communicating with humans, there's something about connecting with horses. And there's research about this too. This isn't made up. It's Every state has at least I've noticed five of these. And I went to one in New Jersey near me. So that I discovered through Samaritan Scout. Wow. Wow. And then your search for meaning and your and your experience and evolution of impact, how has that been for you? Have you been able to see this ⁓ all these people make these connections and obviously it's gotta feel good that you're doing this for other people. I don't get paid to do this. I do this all the time now. Have a roster of volunteers and student interns and I'm up late at night obsessive, like looking at the code sometimes if I can try to figure it out or looking at nonprofit websites to figure out why we're having a hard time reading them, contacting it's a labor of love. It's just because it puts me in contact with a lot of really good energy, good people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then do you have a way yet of starting to aggregate the connections made? I don't know if that's like SEO or like analytics, Google analytics like how are you starting to or trying to measure like all of the connections or people that have actually signed up for volunteer opportunities? That's a really good question. And we're at the beginning of that. So where we are now is we of course have what every website has, which is ten thousand unique visitors a week. And we're coming from. We see locations, devices, mostly mobile. a lot from states where we're already listed as a resource on a school website, the Utah website, the Virginia. So there's places where we're more densely located. We have accounts. People have created accounts because then we have AI recommendations. Yes. Tell them, hey, this might be good for you. And it's also a way for them to favorite, save their ones to know to come back to their search results if they like. So we need to track them all the way to the nonprofit. And that's our next step. Actually, I know that's your standard questions, what's in the future? And one is we have we didn't used to crawl for contact information for these nonprofits. Because we're just trying to connect people. We're not trying to bother anyone with emails. But now we want to collect how do we contact all of the twenty five thousand organizations we currently have and create a relationship so that they let us maybe track people to them and see what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That would be great. I'm excited to see more of that as it evolves. Wow. Wow. I'm still I'm also still thinking about that e i equine therapy that you'd mentioned. Was that a recent thing that you signed up for or was that a while ago? I discovered it maybe in the past year and I've done it in a few months. So yes, it's just I didn't you don't know these things even exist, right? And and it's really fun because you're going to a stable, you're brushing a horse. So it's not difficult. Have you speaking of not difficult, I feel like in our evolution as an as a nonprofit organization, like one of the things that I was always trying to do is eliminate any barriers of people taking the next step and whether it's donating or whether it's watching a video or signing up for a volunteer opportunity. Are there currently maybe when you started, like were there parts, especially from project manager's perspective, parts in a potential volunteers journey that you're like, we really need to simplify this or make it an easy button. And are there current components of that volunteer sign up journey that you're also trying to simplify? Yeah. So you're hitting on all of our high priority next steps. The initial goal was to be like the LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever of volunteering where people create an account and they can seamlessly get their information to any of the nonprofits they want. The nonprofit gets that information and can contact them. Every organization has their own system. They sometimes even say things like print out this PDF and email it, which is a huge blocker. Who's doing that? Right? Several online forms, but then you have to wait to hear back. So we spoke with several organizations, the Salvation Army in New Jersey, for example. They were saying, What if you just had those tools for us where you collect the information, where you connect to that third party background check? And so that's called volunteer management software. we Have applied for several grants because it it is a bit of a build, but have it defined and it would be wonderful because then people have just one place with their information is click of a button and it goes. It is a blocker. You're right, it is slow. We want to remove the friction for everybody. We've removed the friction for nonprofits because they don't need to apply to us or submit or write anything. We've removed the ref the friction for people finding and discovering. But that whole application process, that has to be part of it too. Yeah. Yeah. And is that that's probably very unique and different for all organizations, like the volunteer application process? Like what information is important that needs to be collected, what doesn't. Like you said, background checks, are those needed for the the volunteer opportunities? Is that true? Is everything pretty unique based on the organization? Yes, and it's also not in that It could be a menu of options. We could build all of the main options and it's a bit of a the person has to maybe do all of the things and then an organization picks and chooses what they need. Depending on the sometimes you need to show a driver's license. So there's sort of it's it I it would be great though to just get that information. And since our co founder is a head of cybersecurity working now in top secret places, we feel make sure everybody's data is secure. Probably more secure than wherever they're sending it now. So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like me as a volunteer, say say like I have a profile. I feel like my goal would be just like fill out your profile once and then for any future opportunities, the data's already there and the application process could be automated. Yeah. Yeah. We found 'cause we were looking for grants for this and it wouldn't cost that much for compared to technology costs. But a lot of grants they have a cause in mind. They say we really care about children. We really care about the environment. Yeah. When we care about all of them. So it's a little bit difficult because we could say, yes, we do we also care about children. So therefore we should be getting your grant money. But it I don't think there's ⁓ there's might be a disconnect in funders' understanding that there could be a rising tide that lifts all boats. And how have y'all talked about crafting that grant response then knowing that your impact is inclusive of all organizations? So they have all very different missions. Are you trying to focus on maybe one, like for example, the the Salvation Army and using that as like a driver since there's interest there? Or are you trying to think about a different way to tell that story to also include all types of causes? I could probably use some advice on this. We have people thinking about it and trying different tactics. We're not sure. But when you apply for a grant, there's also grant software which you might be aware of. They often require you to check off a box of which causes you align to. So we see that we align to ten causes that we've listed, but we can only choose three. So it becomes a we click off the three and then we explain in the body of the grant how our impact could be for more. And how many organizations are you guys crawling right now? You said twenty five thousand or so? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I wonder what the the heat map would be of like the type of causes they are. Maybe the top three could just be the top three. Sorry, I'm just noodling ideas because the these are challenges as well that I have experienced in the same thing that we do in the grant writing process. Yeah. Right. ⁓ that's amazing. We could create a heat map. Now I think we should do that. We have a heat map that shows where we are locally. So you could see ⁓ any state, any city. But that's not the same as a cause. But we have everything aligned to a cause. This is a really good idea. I'm just more I mean it is is you you as well I feel like you're also a technologist because of just your previous and current role, but the using Claude and and chat GPT in in even the grant renting process is wildly different now. And as long as you I feel like the whole saying of the responses of or the output of these AI tools is are as good as the source data that you have or the knowledge base that you have. I think that's so true. And it sounds like you guys have put in a lot of the work to gather those twenty-five thousand organizations. That's a huge lift and a huge knowledge base that could really simplify a lot of the grant writing process. So so I'm excited. I'm excited to see how you guys evolve. And speaking of evolution, fast forward five years from now, looking back, what do you hope to see? So we do hope to have the volunteer management tools for free. So any organization can very quickly get people onboarded and up and running. And We would love to add a layer to the website that is about two different things we don't have. One is events, because there are one time events that are important. And we hear from people saying, I am going to be on vacation during this date and this date and this location. We're kinda it's very specific. And vacation volunteering or just this weekend. So we'd love to have another layer that's very specific. And in addition to the volunteer management tools, but we'd really love to see people communicating about this. sharing their volunteer opportunities, inspiring others. Maybe we could really get to that social online part of people sharing a picture or advice and connecting with people that then they can meet in person volunteering. So it could be like a meetup aspect too. That's dream. That it becomes like brushing your teeth. You volunteer, you brush your teeth, right? It's just what you do. And sometimes you do it and meet new people and sometimes you go with friends. It's just a habit. That would be Yeah, yeah, habit stacking. Can you stack the volunteering habit onto brushing teeth? It'll yeah, increase the likelihood. So what are those habits that people do day to day? Probably and social media is an example where you could stack them posting their experience. I'll add another one to the list. What I work at Amazon and whenever we have on sites with our team, we're always looking for like local volunteer opportunities. But again, like on sites are scheduled kind of last minute and sometimes it's hard to find a nonprofit. Like I can reach and I have reached out to organizations I know in the cities that we're gonna be in. And see if there's like volunteer opportunities. But also like organizations, as you probably know, will would gladly schedule a volunteer event for people knowing that they're gonna be on site in an area. Because a lot of organizations are always looking for volunteers, even if it's one off, whether it's putting together back to school kits or putting together clothing kits. Yeah, there there's just so many organizations that are able to be flexible with those. There are a lot of organizations locally based that are offering that to companies. For a fee and we'd love to partner with them. We'd love them to be able to make use of our database. We'd love to support them and get the word. We don't need to be everything. We're not we don't we're not gonna be Google. We're not gonna be Amazon. But we we think through partnerships we can actually have a really big impact. Yeah. Yeah. And I think being s smaller and nimble allows you to be able to still have a huge impact and respond quickly to whatever the needs are and demands are. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. People that are listening and want to get engaged, what type of engagement do you typically look for? So there's this simple one, which is please just come to Samaritan Scout and find something, connect with an organization. And second, help spread the word because we're willing to be a back-end integration and surface our search results anywhere. We don't need people coming to our site. We're happy to If people are already on a news publication site, if they're already on a local, regional, popular platform, why not put the search button there and surface the results there to people? So we're looking for people that might want to help make those connections for us so that we could do that. But the goal is really just getting the word out. I think. Yeah. Wow. Awesome. ⁓ go ahead, sorry. So I realize that's a big ass saying please make connections for us. I just know of places where. we think people are that want to volunteer so we can be there too. Yeah. And what about the organizations that that want to be a part of that twenty five thousand plus on your on your search engine? What's their process like? So we we pull lists from the IRS, which is how we get fully certified 501 C threes. Those lists are incomplete. They don't always have the websites. So we do have a form on our website. All you need to do is give us the name of your organization and the URL. Two pieces of information. That's it. And we get people emailing through that form, contacting us, so we're always putting more up. Yeah. Pretty straightforward. Amazing. Yeah, that is pretty straightforward. All right. There's gotta be more than twenty-five thousand plus on that IRS list. How often is that published and updated? And how do you do that cross reference like magic on the back end? It was the last time we pulled a list, it was only about twelve percent of them were actually organizations that wanted volunteers. We know that there's a lot of five one C3s that just don't want organ. They don't want you in elementary school, you don't want strangers coming to be with the kids. You're a Boy Scout troop, you're there's other organizations that are 501c3s. So when you hear there's a lot of nonprofits, that doesn't mean there's a lot that want you to come in and help them. That's just the layer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a lot don't have their websites. Or what's interesting, when they formed, they had a website and then they've changed it and they didn't update their URL. So we need to find another way. And ⁓ an and ask out there. We're reaching out to state level organizations that have all the five ⁓ one C threes. Those are directories, but if they're willing to share the data, we can bring all of them in as well. Yeah. This is amazing, Divora. I'm really inspired and excited about what y'all are doing and the future plans that you all have. Is there anything that we missed or anything you want to leave us with before we wrap up? Sure. We really appreciate what you guys are doing. And if so there's one thing perhaps is that you don't need a fully formed plan to start. Just reach out with what we want to say. Just reach out to anyone and everyone. You'll find possible partners. You'll build the village together. And so right it's not about it's about greater than zero percent. Doesn't that just mean you have to add something? That's the first step. Just move forward with one step. That's what drove us, that's what continues to drive everybody. And so that's my shameless plug, I think. Yes. D'orah, thank you so much for your time. Really excited. And and for people listening, we'll also add all the links in the show notes here. ⁓ and feel free to reach out to Davora if you have any other follow up questions. But thank you, Dora, for your time. And we're gonna be sharing it for you guys on the sidelines here and and definitely making some connections because I think we have a lot of overlap and excited about what y'all are doing. Thank you, thank you. And we'd really actually welcome, I think, your ideas, everybody's ideas, but I've already taken note of some of yours, so thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate your time. Bye.