Stage 4 Cancer Led Her to Build a Search Engine for Good with Dvora Inwood

Samaritan Scout harnesses cutting-edge technology to inspire a culture of service, connecting individuals everywhere to meaningful, local volunteer opportunities.

Samaritan Scout is the world’s first AI-powered search engine built specifically for volunteering, designed to replace the outdated, labor-intensive "directory" systems that have bottlenecked community service for two decades. Unlike traditional platforms that require under-resourced nonprofits to manually create accounts and write "listings"—a barrier that leaves countless organizations invisible and has resulted in a fractured marketplace of directory websites that surface a fraction of the organizations working in our community—Samaritan Scout uses advanced search technology to automatically crawl and index the web’s nonprofit organization’s sites. The platform’s magic lies in its zero-burden pipeline: it requires nothing more than an organization’s name and website URL. From there, Samaritan Scout’s proprietary search engine crawls the site and uses AI to automatically write a clear summary, assign cause tags, and extract critical logistical details like age limits, specific locations, and required volunteer skills. By instantly transforming unstructured web prose into clean, structured opportunities, it maps a community's entire volunteer landscape with absolutely zero data entry required from busy nonprofits. The organization was founded by edtech veteran Dvora Inwood alongside young genius software developer expert Will Rosenthal—a Cornell student currently on leave to work in cybersecurity for NATO in the Netherlands—supported by a dedicated team of student developers and volunteers. Today, the platform makes the service landscape of over 21,000 organizations nationwide completely searchable without putting a single minute of administrative burden on the nonprofits themselves. While today it serves as a powerful, comprehensive search tool, the ultimate vision for Samaritan Scout is to evolve into a dynamic social infrastructure—a "LinkedIn meets Facebook and Meetup" dedicated entirely to community building for social good. Funding permitting, the platform is on the verge of introducing features that bring friends and strangers together to join, share, and collaborate on service activities. Rather than networking for a job or meeting up just to ride a bike, Samaritan Scout's dream is to let people gather to improve each other's lives and develop the deep relationships that make our communities truly vibrant and caring.