Journalist Rebekah Brandes, on Samaritan Scout‘s volunteer-focused search engine for Nice News wrote:
Volunteering is a sort of superfood for the soul. On top of it making a meaningful difference in the world, the personal benefits can’t be beat: You can meet people, learn new skills, increase your confidence, cultivate a sense of purpose, and even boost your health. Will Rosenthal, a second year computer science major at Cornell, knows all that — it’s why he co-founded Samaritan Scout, a nonprofit search engine for discovering volunteer opportunities.
“I really have been volunteering as long as I can remember,” the 19-year-old told Nice News, adding: “It’s a source of joy like no other.” His current position as the search engine’s chief technology officer is also unpaid. He got involved through Dvora Inwood, whose daughter inadvertently conceived of the concept after struggling to find volunteer opportunities as a high school freshman a few years back.
“She said, ‘There should be a search engine for volunteering.’ And that just stayed in my brain. But, you know, we’re all busy. I’m working, I’m a mom. I don’t have time to create a search engine because my daughter wants one,” Inwood, who has a background in technology product management, recalled with a laugh.
But that changed after Inwood was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer. She quit her job to focus on her health (she’s now cancer-free), and eventually found herself ready for a new start. Wanting to “do something meaningful,” Inwood remembered the search engine idea and pitched it to Rosenthal, who had gone to school with her daughter in New Jersey.
“I knew I wanted to help build the architecture of the search engine, and I was fully confident that I could,” he shared. And that architecture — which he began developing in April 2023, the spring before he started college — is what makes Samaritan Scout unique.
While searchable directories like VolunteerMatch have been around for years, the downside is that they require often overworked organizations to write and list their entries themselves (and sometimes pay to do so). A simple Google search isn’t always the most effective method either, as many nonprofits don’t invest in the elements that would help them rank high in the results, Inwood explained.
Samaritan Scout is designed to be the best of both worlds, thanks to the AI-assisted back end that Rosenthal and a small team of fellow Cornell students built in their free time. It operates similarly to Google, but only crawls and returns information from nonprofit websites.
Inwood enlisted Kavita Mahabaleshwarkar, a volunteer who spent countless hours designing the UX and guiding student interns in creating the front end of the site (the adorable Samaritan Scout logo is actually based on a photo she took of Inwood’s dog), and it officially went live in July 2024.
