{"id":18958,"date":"2023-10-27T10:54:38","date_gmt":"2023-10-27T10:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/startups\/these-tech-tools-are-helping-israeli-workers-coordinate-volunteers\/"},"modified":"2023-10-27T10:54:40","modified_gmt":"2023-10-27T10:54:40","slug":"these-tech-tools-are-helping-israeli-workers-coordinate-volunteers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/?p=18958","title":{"rendered":"These Tech Tools Are Helping Israeli Workers Coordinate Volunteers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Founders, web designers and larger organizations like monday.com, Guesty and Hatzalah are using tech tools to coordinate and rally volunteers and relief efforts as the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues.<\/h2>\n

By <\/sub>Alex Konrad<\/sub>, Forbes Staff<\/sub><\/h4>\n

F<\/abbr>ive years ago, around the time he sold his email startup Rebel to Salesforce, entrepreneur Joe Teplow first volunteered with United Hatzalah, a non-profit organization that manages about 7,000 volunteer medics in Israel. In the years since, Teplow, a senior vice president at Salesforce Labs, has continued that work in New York, volunteering with its U.S. group. Each time he visited Israel, he\u2019d squeeze in a shift or two.<\/p>\n

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Nearby, volunteer dispatchers connected doctors, nurses and EMTs to emergency callers via software that uses algorithms to match emergency callers with available volunteers, factoring in their proximity, skill level and equipment and vehicles on-hand to ping them in widening concentric circles until the request is accepted. Hatzalah then directed the medics to the emergency via a custom-made Android device loaded with apps for communicating with the caller and finding them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have the most advanced location-based dispatching that I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d Teplow said later, en route back to New York. \u201cIt\u2019s just been remarkable to watch from the inside.\u201d (There was professional synergy, too, it turns out: Hatzalah\u2019s matching software runs partly on Salesforce, his employer, on the back-end; CEO Marc Benioff has been a vocal<\/a> supporter of the organization.)<\/p>\n

The latest version of Hatzalah\u2019s app had only just undergone an 18-month proof-of-concept, said Dov Maisel, the organization\u2019s cofounder and director of operations. On the day of the attacks, the app helped dispatchers direct civilians fleeing by car across open fields to safety, and to show by video chat how to apply dozens of potentially life-saving tourniquets. Hatzalah\u2019s medics used the system to field about 10,000 emergency calls in each of those first days, up 400% from a typical day.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about leveraging technology to create the Uber of life-saving,\u201d Maisel said by phone on Thursday, just after leaving an air raid shelter following more attempted missile strikes. \u201cI\u2019ve been in emergency medical services for 30-plus years, and looking at the power these tech tools provide us, it\u2019s doing that dramatically.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the wake of the attacks, Israel\u2019s tech scene has struggled to maintain business operations amid the loss of loved ones, the displacement of families and key employees being called to serve in Israel\u2019s armed forces reserves. (Palestinian founders, a source of economic hope for their communities, have faced major recent challenges of their own as the death toll in Gaza has reportedly topped 5,000.)<\/p>\n

At the same time, Israeli tech workers have scrambled to translate their energy and skills into volunteer and relief efforts. Some projects, like one to protect the online identities of evacuees who lost electronic devices to Hamas, or another using facial recognition to identify missing persons, are technically complex. But others, like Hatzalah\u2019s software and solutions from local tech companies such as monday.com and Guesty, are more straightforward \u2014 and no less valuable.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe tech ecosystem is stepping up, overcompensating and continuing to kick ass,\u201d said Israeli tech blogger and adviser Hillel Fuld. \u201cIt\u2019s been a really beautiful thing to see, especially given the lack of unity that we had just before in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

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I<\/abbr>n the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, Israeli tech CEOs and staff exchanged many thousands of messages sharing best practices, volunteer pages and other resource links via WhatsApp group chats. Others set up volunteer databases and intake sites. Web designer Ariel Levi, who goes by the business name Arielos, is a member of Dreamliner, a group of 17 digital professionals who share the same mentor. The day after the attacks, Dreamliner met over Zoom and resolved to build a master site for tracking volunteering opportunities and connecting volunteers automatically to openings. They published the site, called Ironclad Home Front (a pun in Hebrew), within 25 hours of that chat, Levi said over WhatsApp.<\/p>\n

More than 20 major relief organizations registered on the site, alongside over 1,300 volunteers in the first week, according to Levi; that number has since crossed 2,300. Dreamliner\u2019s own volunteers, meanwhile, have been busy in the weeks since updating the site with more links to similar systems developed by other peers. \u201cWe all joined together and made it happen,\u201d Levi said, \u201cfor the people of Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

So much activity has also inevitably meant overlapping efforts. \u201cI like to call it organized chaos on a macro basis,\u201d venture capitalist Avi Eyal of Entr\u00e9e Capital said of the flurry of activity earlier this month. Several CEOs pointed to software from monday.com, the productivity software maker that went public in 2021, as a key tool for coordinating the mess. \u201cMonday was amazing managing all those operations, doing it for free,\u201d said Dan Adika, CEO of fellow publicly-traded Israeli tech company WalkMe.<\/p>\n

Monday.com\u2019s dedicated emergency response team has developed a playbook for such chaotic scenarios \u2014 deployed in recent years for everything from a Covid-19 vaccination push in Africa to managing European refugee centers for Ukrainians fleeing Russia\u2019s invasion last year. But in an interview last week interrupted by air raid sirens, the company\u2019s chief people and legal officer Shiran Nawi said she hadn\u2019t expected to need the software so close to home.<\/p>\n

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Around 200 local employees volunteered from monday.com\u2019s Israel office in the first week after the attacks, Nawi said. They helped organize the purchase of floral wreaths for funerals, coordinated donations of supplies and supported other groups running their projects using monday.com\u2019s software in conjunction with monday.com\u2019s non-profit arm, Digital Lift. More than 8,000 new active users have worked in dozens of projects in the past several weeks, the company said, spanning over 300 live projects and engaging with 16,000 \u201cactions\u201d (the company\u2019s term for the completion of one task) around medical equipment or food donations. As one example, the Red Cross of Israel used the software to match blood donors to centers that are actively collecting.<\/p>\n

Since that first week, monday.com has shifted to a \u201chandover\u201d approach to train individuals at other organizations to use the tools themselves; about 40 employees are still volunteering full-time alongside 150 external volunteers from other organizations. Monday.com is working to ship new templates based on current demands, Nawi added, such as a form it created to allow employees to sign up to volunteer part-time. \u201cWe\u2019ll do much, much more,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are learning from these days of crisis and improving ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first form set up on monday.com during the current crisis, by noon local time on the first day of the attacks, was one to match displaced people with places to stay: more than 14,000 families worldwide registered on monday.com forms to host displaced families as of Thursday. That remains a challenge as a reported 200,000 Israelis have been displaced in recent weeks, filling hotels. (A similar and much larger-scale crisis has developed in Gaza, where Israel\u2019s armed forces ordered the evacuation of at least 1.1 million people from the territory\u2019s northern part.)<\/p>\n

One company uniquely positioned to help in Israel was Guesty, a Tel Aviv-founded startup now co-headquartered in Nashville in the U.S., and which raised $170 million in 2022. Guesty provides property managers with software to manage their listings across sites like Airbnb, Expedia and Vrbo, spanning hundreds of thousands of properties across 80 countries. In the aftermath of the attacks, president and COO Vered Raviv-Schwarz was one of several employees to take a displaced family into her own home, she said. Early in that first week, Abi Rod, a senior global events manager on Guesty\u2019s marketing team, pinged Raviv-Schwarz to suggest Guesty invite its customers to open up their own vacant properties for use.<\/p>\n

In the past two weeks, Guesty customers have hosted hundreds of displaced people, Raviv-Schwarz said. One Tel Aviv-based manager of furnished rentals, HolyGuest, has hosted more than 600 people since the attack, with capacity to take on hundreds more. Two other vacation rental managers, Herzliya-based Carmelo and Tel Aviv- and Jerusalem-based Trust Inn, have each hosted dozens, and continue to do so. Guesty has assisted by matching supply and demand, and by listing available properties centrally on its platform. \u201cThe resources are more from our customers, and that is really something to commend them for,\u201d Raviv-Schwarz said. \u201cThe great thing about the Israeli tech community as a whole is that everybody jumped to help. A lot of our employees just got up in the morning and said, \u2018okay, I have to do something.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

With some schools in Israel only just reopening for in-person classes and others on hold or partially disrupted, companies like monday.com and others have also managed temporary daycare centers and made arrangements to help employees with at-home children. At stealth startup Oasis Security, CEO Danny Brickman has also turned to technology to try to help. While serving in the Israeli Defense Forces for 11 years, Brickman led a training program for teaching teenagers cyber skills; at the encouragement of an employee who spent 15 hours in a bunker during the weekend of the attacks, Brickman more recently turned his attention to establishing volunteer virtual instruction for students currently unable to attend school.<\/p>\n

At the time of publication on Friday, Brickman and his collaborators were hosting a cybersecurity workshop for high school students; more than 100 students have participated in such workshops so far, he said. Next week, they expect to launch a two-month program and network for students from affected southern Israel school districts. In collaboration with Israel\u2019s education ministry, he hopes to prep students for final exams in computer science, despite a shortage of in-person teachers and studies.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome students are indeed gradually returning to school, but ongoing alarms and teachers being called to reserve duty create uncertainty,\u201d Brickman wrote in an emailed update on Thursday. \u201cNonetheless, our initiatives are progressing and are being enthusiastically received by the students.\u201d<\/p>\n

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