Steve Glikbarg was co-founder of Impact Online (IOL), a nonprofit whose mission was to use technology to connect people interested in volunteering with local, national, and virtual volunteer opportunities. In its early years Impact Online rented office space at 715 Colorado Avenue in Palo Alto, where Bay Area Action (BAA) was the landlord.

BAA was one of the first nonprofits IOL put online, constructing for BAA a mostly text-based set of pages, but also including a few small photos and even a couple WAV sound files. This was pretty sophisticated in a time before most of the world’s population had even started using the web, internet speeds were extremely slow, and web browsers were in their infancy.

The first iteration of the site was built and maintained by Steve, with help from BAA volunteers Sandeep Vaidya and David Coale.

Mark Bult was another renter at 715 Colorado, and Steve hired Mark to design the graphics for Impact Online. Steve also taught Mark basic HTML, enabling Mark to take over maintaining and updating BAA’s website.

Steve and Impact Online were instrumental in BAA’s entry to the web in a time when most companies and nonprofits didn’t yet have an internet presence.

In 2009 Steve recalled: “The really amazing thing is that in 1995 BAA was even interested in going online. So many nonprofits were terrified of putting information on the web. Seems crazy now but that is how a lot of organizations felt. BAA was very cutting edge and trusting.”

The BAA Archives* show Steve’s donations to BAA as:

• 1999 — $200–499 level
• 1999 — $100 level
• 1998 — $200–499 level (Youth Environmental Programs matching grant challenge)

* Records may be incomplete. The BAA Archives are still being collated and researched.

Post BAA

Impact Online rebranded as VolunteerMatch in 1998 and over the next 2+ decades grew to be the largest volunteer engagement network on the web, connecting millions of volunteers with thousands of nonprofits across the United States. In 2025 VolunteerMatch merged with Idealist.

In 1998 Steve co-founded the tech startup Katmango, an early entry in the online password management space. Since 2000 he has led Glikbarg and Associates in Santa Barbara, CA, which manages investments in real estate. He serves as the VP and Treasurer of the William and Charlene Glikbarg Foundation.

He and his children have been involved with Santa Barbara’s Wilderness Youth Project, whose small-group outings encourage independence; his son later completed a five-day backpacking trip. “He is comfortable in and around nature in a way that so many teens (and adults) no longer are,” Steve told the Santa Barbara Indepedent in 2019.

Steve has been a donor to the Bay Area Action History Project, Stanford Spokes, Interplast, Universal Giving, the Mosaic Project, Lotusland, Quail Springs, Congregation B’nai B’rith in Santa Barbara, local schools, and many other worthy causes.