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Personal Investment
San Franciscan Dave McMurtry uses the Web to reach the world

Dave McMurtry is used to going the extra mile--or a few thousand. The 40-year-old Silicon Valley mergers-and-acquisitions professional serves as a volunteer pilot for Doctors Without Borders and as a United Nations human-rights observer. He traveled to Afghanistan in 2004 to monitor elections and wound up building a house with one of the locals, the cook at the U.N. guesthouse. "I helped him haul a bunch of rocks up a mountain, and we built a house," McMurtry says. "It made me realize that for only $300 and a little bit of time, I could actually change someone's life. I realized that, for a relatively small amount of money internationally, you could take a lot of people off the streets."

McMurtry was familiar with Habitat, having volunteered with San Francisco's Peninsula Habitat for Humanity for years and having worked on a Habitat-related business-systems project when he was a student at Stanford University's business school. When he returned from Afghanistan, he began searching the Stanford alumni database for Habitat connections and found CEO Jonathan Reckford. "I basically called him up and said, 'Here's what I want to do,''' McMurtry says.

His plan was simple, but ambitious: set up a Web site to collect donations to add to his own seed money, take a six-month sabbatical from his job at software company Intuit and then go build some houses. But not just anywhere. "I really wanted to go somewhere where maybe others wouldn't go," say McMurtry, who settled on the city of Sincelejo in civil-war-wracked Colombia for his Habitat building project.

McMurtry had studied and worked in Colombia previously. "I knew the country well," he says. "And I knew that it was a mixture of wonderful people with a political situation that simply didn't allow them to proceed."

Sincelejo sits in the mountains about four hours outside Cartagena; approximately 70 percent of the city's residents live below the poverty line, with a huge portion of the population composed of those displaced by the country's continuing civil war. In Sincelejo, families squat on federal property--often in minefields--and live in makeshift structures without access to water, electricity or gas. Often, these areas also lie in flood plains; when big rains come, what shelters have been built get washed away completely and families are forced to rebuild from scratch.

McMurtry's Web site--www.helpdavechangelives.com--ultimately raised $175,515 from nearly 400 donors, enough to sponsor the construction of nearly 40 Habitat houses for Colombian families. Donors came from 16 countries and fell into one of four categories. "The first quarter was people I know very well," he explains. "The second hundred were people I knew, acquaintances. The third quarter were friends of friends who received forwarded emails and read the Web site's blog. And the fourth hundred? I have no idea."

McMurtry estimates that setting up and hosting the Web site cost him less than $200. "That's really the piece of this that needs to get out to people, I think," he says. "To do this kind of stuff is no longer prohibitively expensive."

Following through, McMurtry traveled to Sincelejo to help interview and select families and to participate in construction. "I remember going into houses," says McMurtry, "shacks really, made of Glad bags and tin cans and cardboard and, with my intermediate Spanish, saying to these people, 'Would you like for me to help build you a house?'"

In the future, McMurtry would like to help others learn how to spearhead similar fundraising efforts, and he's already playing around with a new, extra-Habitat life-changing idea: the construction and administration of "fun, thriving orphanage communities."

"One of the things that I like about Habitat is that it's so helpful to young children," he says. "And I have that same passion when I'm thinking about what my next project might be. I chose families in Sincelejo who had at least three or four kids, so that for each adult I helped, I also took three or four kids off the street. It's amazing to help someone at age 40. But how much better if we can help someone at age 4?"

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