A Voluntary Call to Arms

Like any siblings trying to survive their teenage years, Ravi and Kavita Sarin bicker about who gets to finish off the junk food and who gets to use the family’s new Pentium computer.

But this Los Angeles brother and sister put aside their differences to team up on a technology project they hope might do some good for Los Angeles: creating a clearinghouse on the World Wide Web where major nonprofit groups in the county can list their volunteer needs. The site, titled ReachOut, is at https://reachout.org

The siblings, who organized impromptu neighborhood carwashes and played duets on the piano while growing up in UCLA faculty housing, decided to create the site late last summer.

“I was surfing the Web looking for useful sites and there just wasn’t anything out there,” said Ravi, a 15-year-old junior at Harvard-Westlake High School. “I mentioned it to Kavita, and we decided we had to do something.”

Kavita, an 18-year-old Stanford University sophomore who’s leaning toward a chemistry major, started recruiting county nonprofits, while Ravi, an avid computer user, built the site with help from several volunteers.

The Sarins’ site, completed earlier this month, lists 37 nonprofits under categories such as Animals, Children, Disabled, Environment and Homeless. It includes an online application that nonprofits can fill out to list their volunteer needs. The siblings’ goal is for the site to list volunteer opportunities at every major nonprofit in the county.

The Sarins, the children of a business professor at UCLA’s Anderson School and a revenue agent at the Treasury Department, hope the site will make volunteerism a less daunting commitment for Angelenos by listing one-time activities--from beach cleanups to charity walkathons--in addition to more regular volunteer opportunities.

“This is like a phone book. You can log in and see if there’s something you want to do Saturday morning, and you don’t have to feel like you’re committed,” said Kavita.

The Sarins are riding a wave of interest in volunteerism as well as the desire of many technophiles to show that the Internet can be used for more than electronic commerce and gambling.

“The nonprofit community is a few years behind the for-profit community in using the Internet because we couldn’t afford the technology,” said Barbara Lohman, spokeswoman for Points of Light, a national nonprofit dedicated to recruiting volunteers. “It’s picking up now because it’s becoming more affordable.”

The siblings, who share a passion for music and jujitsu, hope a link on the site that allows volunteers to post their experience will motivate Netizens to volunteer for nonprofits they might not have been interested in otherwise.

There’s also a chat room link, and the Sarins plan to schedule regular sessions with nonprofit administrators and volunteers. Nonprofit officials said this is the most effective way to recruit volunteers.

“Most of our volunteers come to us through word of mouth after they talked to people who had a good experience with us,” said John Shallot, program manager of volunteer resources at AIDS Project Los Angeles, which is listed on the Sarins’ site.

The Volunteer Center of Los Angeles, which matches volunteers with nonprofits, has agreed to help the Sarins increase the number of groups posted on their Web page.

“In nonprofits, awareness is 99% of the battle. Traditional methods of communication . . . are so limiting,” said Nikki Johnson-Maxwell, volunteer coordinator for Habitat for Humanity’s San Fernando/Santa Clarita valleys affiliate. “This is the wave of the future for us.”