Tsur Taub

Tsur Taub has developed a new and highly effective mechanism, the centerpiece of which is a web-based platform that encourages and enables people to give household equipment and other possessions that they no longer want to others who need such items. In doing so, he is also reducing barriers and promoting mutually beneficial contacts among sharply divided social and ethnic groups in Israel.

Tsur is the founder of Agora (the Hebrew term for the Israeli cent), which uses a web-based infrastructure to enable individuals with usable possessions that they want to dispose of to give them to others who are in need of them. The Agora platform has a simple user interface, the first of its kind, that generates listings of items for users based on their needs, and is not limited by geography or target population. Agora incentivizes giving: it provides citizens with the mechanism to give equipment, goods or products that they no longer need, while also enabling others to find and receive items they are looking for but cannot otherwise buy or obtain. Agora is free of charge to all users, and since its beginning has been reshaping the face of donations and community building across the country, making giving simpler, direct, and more personal.

The Agora initiative is systems-changing both in the way that it facilitates the giving of unwanted items to people who will use them and in the scale of such giving that it facilitates. It also eliminates the need for a third party, or middleman, between the givers and the receivers, and it significantly reduces the burdens and costs of collecting trash and disposing of it in landfills. Agora has enabled more than 200,000 users—including ordinary citizens from a diverse array of social groupings, welfare workers assisting particularly disadvantaged individuals and families, and students seeking to equip their lodgings—to exchange some 216,000 items. And perhaps even more importantly, through the exchanges it facilitates, Agora is helping to address an array of divisive issues in the Israeli setting, including wide disparities among social classes and limited contacts and interchange among ethnic and social groups.

The Agora model is attracting growing interest in other geographical settings, and Tsur has recently begun work on a global platform for Agora, in association with potential partners in several overseas locations.

Each day enormous quantities of personal possessions that are still in usable condition but no longer wanted by their owners are discarded and end up in garbage dumps and landfills around the world. To be sure, some such items—including household appliances, clothing, books, and car parts, to name but a few—are sometimes sold in second-hand markets or disposed of through various “ad hoc” mechanisms, including bulletin board, newspaper, and Internet postings. In most geographical settings, however, in the absence of a well-functioning platform to facilitate such exchanges, most people find it easier to dispose of unwanted but still usable items as trash.

In Israel, prior to the launching of the Agora platform, the usual processes for giving away an item for reuse was to ask neighbors and friends within one’s social network if they were interested in acquiring the item, or leaving the item near a trash bin in the hope that that someone might find a good use for it, or contacting a local welfare organization and bringing the item to that organization’s distribution center. With regard to the latter option, however, most such centers are very limited both in their hours of operation and in the range of items that they will accept. Reuse of clothing for example has been effectively facilitated through the work of Wizo, a large organization of women volunteers, but finding organizations that will facilitate the reuse of donated toys, household appliances and kitchenware, or old books is much more difficult and time consuming.

In addition, as computers and Internet technology have played an increasingly central role in communication and people rely less on face-to-face interaction, some observers are persuaded that there have been corresponding losses in social solidarity and in citizens’ commitment to their communities, and that there are thus growing needs for initiatives that combine the efficiencies of electronic communication with direct personal engagement in social transactions of mutual benefit.

By using several of the technological advancements of our time—the Internet, social networks, and smartphone applications—Agora is rebuilding personal connections in communities based on the natural and human impulse to give, empathize, and respond to need. Tsur is creating new links and opportunities for collaboration in society and also creating a solution to unnecessary landfill waste and the untapped “third market” for the exchange of goods.

Tsur has founded and developed the world’s first successful web-based platform dedicated solely to helping people with usable household equipment and other items that they no longer want and is giving them to others who need them. Agora, the citizen sector, not-for-profit organization he has created for this purpose, has based its operational strategies on a number of key principles: (i) it is open to everyone who wants to use it to dispose of useful no longer wanted items or is seeking such items (ii) the exchanges that it facilitates must be free-of-charge and (iii) the recipients of the items that are thus transferred are responsible for picking them up from the givers. By developing an easily navigated web platform and eliminating the logistics associated with advertising, Agora has transformed the ownership transfer and reuse process into a hassle-free option for everyone involved.

The Agora platform offers a number of simple search options that organize available items by categories and geographic location to make it easy to use and has facilitated rapid growth in the number of users (givers and receivers) and the volume of exchanges it facilitates. After only two years of operations, the platform achieved its five-year goal, garnering more than 20,000 distinct visitors each day, and in the four years since its launch, it has enabled more than 200,000 items to be transferred to new users.

In spite of this rapid growth, Agora has been able to retain a very lean organizational structure. In addition to Tsur, its staff consists of two full-time employees and a substantial network of volunteers who assist in programming and in implementing an outreach strategy that has been remarkably successful in engaging social workers, welfare agents, and other citizen organizations in finding “new homes” for usable items no longer wanted by their owners. In a growing number of locations in Israel, social workers and staff of welfare agencies inform their clients about Agora and its offerings and, in some instances, help their clients navigate the Agora site to acquire much-needed items.

Agora has also succeeded in maintaining a correspondingly modest budget for staff and program expenses by using Google advertisements on the pages of its website. In doing so, it does not accept advertisements that promote the sale of unnecessary or unethical products, and it publishes the website’s ethical code on the site.

Tsur is firmly committed to extending the use of the Agora model to other parts of the world, and is increasingly engaged in exploring that possibility in India and in a few European countries. Tsur and his colleagues have already begun work on a global platform for Agora, and they are consulting with prospective partners on various approaches for contextualizing the idea and the platform before introducing Agora in other locations.

Born in Merhavia, a farming community in the north of Israel, Tsur became actively engaged at a young age in local youth groups. When he was in the tenth grade, however, his family moved to another part of the country, and Tsur, as an anonymous new student in his new school, felt both a need to earn recognition among his classmates and a heightened sense of gratitude for the generosity and empathy with which he was welcomed. After a short period of time, Tsur founded the school’s first student council and led that initiative during its first year of operations.

Upon completing high school, Tsur postponed his military service in order to serve as a volunteer guide and instructor for his youth movement in central Israel, and later, after completing his military service, he settled in Lachish, where he worked with particularly needy communities in efforts focused on helping young people excel in school. In due course, however, he became increasingly frustrated with the limited scope of the change that he was inspiring in Lachish, and he felt compelled to help improve the lives of larger numbers of people. With the latter aim in view, therefore, he left Lachish and spent some time examining various options and reflecting on what his next steps should be.

Soon after, working with a friend, Tsur launched his first web-platform—a free service promoting concerts and other events. Even though this undertaking lacked the social focus and impact he was looking for, it exposed Tsur to the power of the Internet as a tool to attract and inform large groups of people, and he was soon convinced that he would use this technology in his subsequent attempts to produce positive social change.

While still searching for his next socially focused endeavor, Tsur took a job as manager of a small clothing warehouse. As part of the job, he regularly received large quantities of clothes on plastic hangers, which he had to replace with wooden hangers before delivering the clothes to the retail establishments, and at the end of each day, huge numbers of plastic hangers were left behind, and they were almost always thrown into the trash. Tsur was shocked by the waste, because he was sure that there were people who could put the hangers to good use. Accordingly, he tried to sell the hangers online but, failing to find anyone interested in acquiring them, he realized that what was missing was a web-base infrastructure that would match providers, or givers, with potential users—or reusers—not only of hangers but of a wide-range of equipment and other widely used household items.

Tsur has subsequently devoted his full energies to the design, development, and consolidation of the Agora initiative in Israel, and, more recently, to replicating his idea in other countries with similar social and cultural contexts. In recognition of the high-quality and promise of Tsur’s work, Agora was awarded first prize in Ashoka’s “Doing More with Less” Challenge: Social Environmental Entrepreneurship, the first Changemakers competition in Israel. Agora also received first place for the best Internet social project in the Best Israeli Websites Awards (2008), sponsored by Walla.co.il and Bezeq Ben Leumi (a leading Israeli portal and a major communications company). In affirming the quality and innovativeness of the Agora project, this prize also strengthened Tsur’s resolve to move forward as briskly as possible in replicating the Agora model in other parts of the world.