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Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award

2006 WINNER -- Ami Dar

CASE Managing Director Beth Anderson presents the 2006 Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award to Ami Dar, Founder and Executive Director of Action Without Borders and Idealist.org.

Ami Dar, founder and CEO of Action Without Borders and Idealist.org, spoke to students and community members at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business on April 5, 2006. Dar, who was there to receive the Fourth Annual Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award from the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, shared the seeds of his passionate belief in the power of the internet to unite people around the world in the service of the common good. He explained how the extreme poverty he witnessed while growing up in Peru and Mexico led him to question at an early age why things were the way they were. The young Dar resolved one day to “start a revolution” to change the world.

At age 18, Dar was drafted into the Israeli army, where he served as a paratrooper in the Lebanese war of 1982. While his unit was posted at the Syrian border, he spent hours peering through his binoculars observing Arab soldiers across the border. Dar soon realized that these supposed “enemies” were, in fact, a lot like him, and that they likely shared similar dreams of peace and prosperity. He thought to himself, “there must be a way of reaching across borders… of getting people together on both sides.” Dar began to envision ways to aid global communication and bridge the gap between people who share similar passions and ideals of positive change in the world.

After military service, and subsequent work as a waiter, translator, and marketing manager for a software company, Dar came to the U.S. in 1992 to launch a subsidiary of Aladdin Knowledge. During these years, his desire to make a difference in the way that people are connected grew even stronger. Finally, in 1995, Dar founded Action Without Borders with the initial aim of building a network of neighborhood contact centers that would provide a one-stop shop for volunteer opportunities and nonprofit services in communities around the world.

With the rise of the internet, Dar quickly recognized the potential of the new technology to bring together people with shared goals. “Someone has created something just for me,” Dar recalls saying to himself. “I had been waiting for this sort of thing for ten years!”
Dar noticed that there was no single directory that made all the nonprofit resources available on the internet easily accessible to the millions of people who were already online. Responding to this need, Dar and his team set out to find every nonprofit website and to arrange all of these resources by both topic and geographic location. To help close the gap between technology-rich and technology-poor organizations, Action Without Borders launched the website Idealist.org in 1996 to allow any nonprofit or community organization—whether it has a website or not—to have a presence on the web through which to promote its mission and activities. Since then, Idealist.org has become one of the most popular communities of nonprofit and volunteering resources on the internet, with information provided by over 53,000 organizations in 165 countries, and thousands of users every day.

Not content to rest on his organization’s achievements, Dar noted some lingering dissatisfaction with the level of collaboration in the social sector. “Everyday we have millions of opportunities and possible partnerships of collaboration that people just don’t know about.”

Nevertheless, Dar sees Idealist.org as part of the solution. Citing the complexity of societal problems that do not respect international borders (such as pollution, climate change, health epidemics, natural disasters, terrorism, etc.), Dar pointed optimistically to the potential social benefits of the communications revolution and the global trend toward increased political freedom. According to Dar, the tools of technology will provide a powerful mechanism for action and change in the world as like-minded people come together in search of concrete solutions. “We will see more creativity, more excitement, and more collaborations, as well as greater risks…but above all else many more opportunities for people to do something good!”

Watch the streaming video of Ami Dar at Fuqua. (Quicktime 7 required).

In 2000 the Stern Family Fund awarded Mr. Dar its annual $100,000 Public Interest Pioneer grant (renewed in 2001) to help support his work with AWB. In the last four years, the NonProfit Times included Ami in its annual list of the 50 most influential people in the nonprofit sector. In 2004, Ashoka invited him to join its global fellowship of social entrepreneurs. Ami chairs the board of N-TEN, and also serves on the board of Aspiration and on the editorial board of the Nonprofit Quarterly.