Seven years ago, Dvora Inwood’s daughter needed to complete volunteer-work requirements for her New Jersey high school, but finding service work was difficult with nonprofits buried in Google’s search results. The 13-year-old pitched her techie mom an idea: a search engine for volunteer work.

“I wasn’t going to build a website, platform, search engine for her when she was 13,” Inwood told eJewishPhilanthropy. At the time, Inwood was busy working as product manager at education company McGraw Hill. Then a Stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis in 2022 opened her schedule. 

Yearning for something positive during her treatment, Inwood corralled her daughter’s friends to create Samaritan Scout, a nonprofit search engine connecting people with volunteer opportunities. Feeling a similar sense of despair after the Oct. 7 attacks, she partnered with Mosaic United, an initiative of Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, to create a platform modeled after Samaritan Scout to link Diaspora Jews to volunteer opportunities in Israel: Volunteer Hub. 

Inwood first felt the throb of cancer on a plane ride to Israel, with 13 hours left to go. The pain lasted her entire two-week business trip, so the moment she landed back in America, she rushed to urgent care. She had recently turned 50. “Not young, but not old,” she said; she never expected cancer.

The rest of that summer, she was in and out of the hospital: receiving chemotherapy, hoping to live long enough to extract the cancer through surgery. The beginning months were “a code red,” she said. She quit her job. Unable to eat, her diet came through a straw. But about five months in, she entered the “marathon” stage.

“At that point, I needed something to look forward to,” she said. “I needed something to do. I couldn’t go to a job every day. I couldn’t know how I was going to feel from day to day. Chemo sometimes means three days of sleeping.”

This desire to do something caused her to return to her daughter’s idea: a search engine focused on helping. In May 2023, while receiving treatment, Inwood launched Samaritan Scout as a nonprofit, pulling in volunteers from her daughter’s friend circle.

Co-founder William Rosenthal was a senior in high school at the time. He also saw friends struggle with fulfilling volunteer hours needed to graduate. He had volunteered since he was 4 years old and coded since he was 14, so when he heard about Samaritan Scout, he immediately wanted in.

“I was wondering if it would be possible to aggregate as many local volunteer opportunities as I could, put it into this sort of platform and have people submit their interests and hobbies and passions and whatever they like to do, and use AI to show them the best opportunities available to them nearby,” Rosenthal told eJP.

That summer, Rosenthal worked 40-hour weeks programming the Samaritan Scout platform, and in August, as he prepared to enter his first semester of college, Inwood received her final cancer treatment, but with her in recovery, Samaritan Scout began losing steam. Then came the Oct. 7 massacres in Israel, and like many American Jews, Inwood felt powerless to help Israelis. Her mind started brewing.

“When people are struggling, when they’re hurting for something, they want a place to put that,” Inwood said. “They want another direction to go to feel better.” 

She told a friend about an idea to create a search engine for volunteerism in Israel, and that friend began pitching the idea around the nonprofit world, eventually connecting Inwood with Mosaic United, which was interested in partnering. Once she realized she could help Israelis, Inwood’s passion to help in America was reignited: Samaritan Scout launched in the summer of 2024, with Volunteer Hub following in the spring of 2025.

The partnership is a “shidduch,” Natasha Malka, a program director for Mosaic United told eJP. “Volunteering gives purpose to those looking to serve and strengthens the bond between Israeli and Diaspora Jewry.” In the future, Mosaic United hopes to expand the platform to include Jewish volunteer opportunities around the world.

The college-aged volunteers who created both platforms come from all religious and ethnic backgrounds; but even as campuses raged with protests, not a single volunteer dropped out when they found out they would be helping in Israel. One non-Jewish student expressed their shock upon finding how small Israel was. Having non-Jews work on the platform allowed them to learn more about a commonly misunderstood region, Inwood said.

Both Samaritan Scout and Volunteer Hub have the same boundaries for what is filtered out and what is allowed: missions have to be constructive rather than negative, and focused on producing tangible results. That means no protests.

“As an American, there’s always room for protest and free speech and all that stuff,” Inwood said. “It’s just not what this organization is about.”

There are organizations that are on a “bad list,” she said, which are filtered out of results. For example, the platform doesn’t allow groups supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, but there are no boundaries around if an Israeli organization leans liberal or if an organization works in Jewish or Arab communities. It doesn’t necessarily mean an organization is “evil” if it is filtered out, she said, just not right for the platform.

Israel offered a unique obstacle to the platform. Many Israeli websites are protected by security programs that weed out bots, and Volunteer Hub is a bot. To work around this, Volunteer Hub interns programmed the bot to explore sites as if it were a human, tricking the website. Still, sometimes the bot can’t get around security, so opportunities are often added to the database manually. Because many Jewish volunteer opportunities are rooted in WhatsApp groups, many opportunities are added manually by individuals.

Rosenthal had difficult conversations with non-Jewish volunteer friends when Samaritan Scout extended its services to Israel. “It boiled down to how we can create the most benefit for society as a whole, because we as individuals, we are very much against war, against violence, against suffering,” he said. “We decided, all mutually, that all of that can be mitigated by people who want to do good and who intend to do well for their communities.”

“At the end of the day, the meaning of this project — of both Volunteer Hub, Samaritan Scout, all of it — is to help people get involved, to help people give back to their communities, to help people do good,” Rosenthal said.

Although Samaritan Scout is national, many states aren’t fully covered; New Jersey, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Utah are among the first. Inwood is raising funds to widen the nonprofit’s reach.

Recently, Inwood was reading the feed of a New Jersey Moms Facebook group when another mom bragged that her daughter had found volunteer work in Israel using Volunteer Hub. In the past, it was common for Americans to go to Ecuador to help turtles, Inwood said, but now they are looking to help Israel rebuild. 

“There’s a lot of healing that we can be a part of,” Inwood said. “Don’t let up on the gas.”