For the past five years, Airbnb has stepped in during emergencies— the earthquake in Japan, or wildfires in Canada — to pair volunteer hosts with people in need. The whole thing has been rather rudimentary by the standards of a sophisticated tech company. Airbnb staffers draw up spreadsheets of hosts in affected areas, send email blasts out to them, and make introductions. Now, the company has launched a new platform to formalize and grow its efforts. Dubbed the “open homes platform,” it’s a homesharing site for hosts motivated by goodwill instead of profits — and for guests motivated by need rather than wanderlust.

“Our community can respond faster than governments can show up,” says founder Joe Gebbia, who stopped by Backchannel’s New York headquarters to give me a demo. “Anywhere in the world, where people need short-term housing after a natural disaster, we could have our community ready within hours.”

To start, the platform will connect refugees with volunteer hosts in Canada, France, Greece, and the United States. People can register on the site — even if they aren’t already hosts on Airbnb — and list their homes. Social service agency partners will vet them, and then place families for stays from a few days to a few weeks. “This is the buffer housing before a family finds permanent or longer term housing,” says Gebbia. Ultimately, the site isn’t meant only for refugees. Site visitors can also nominate other groups of people for temporary placements, and Gebbia says the platform will expand to include them eventually. Airbnb has said it wants to house 100,000 displaced people within the next five years.

The project got its start formally in 2015, as news of the growing humanitarian crisis unfolded, when an engineer approached Gebbia with the idea for building software to match refugees and volunteers. Gebbia encouraged him to write up a proposal, and the project began to gain momentum inside the company. Meanwhile, Gebbia and several other Airbnb employees began talking with the State Department and relief agencies to see how they could help. “It took us almost all of 2016 to figure out how to integrate with the State Department and with the nine resettlement agencies just in the United States,” says Gebbia. “They hadn’t really worked with private companies before.”

Last October, Airbnb placed its first refugee in Oakland, California. It was part of a pilot program that the company ran in conjunction with the International Rescue Committee’s local Reception and Placement Center. In October, an Oakland host opened her home to a family. “From that one proof point, they all got it,” Gebbia says of the government and nonprofit partners. “They were like, ‘Oh, this is cool. How do we do more of this?’”

In January, Airbnb aired a Superbowl ad promoting tolerance that flashed through different faces and ended with the hashtag #weaccept. As a result of that 30-second spot, 16,000 people pulled up the website airbnb.com/weaccept, read the rather lengthy letter about tolerance from Airbnb’s founders, and clicked the link buried in the last paragraph inviting them to share their home with refugees or people affected by natural disasters. These people will form the foundation for Airbnb.com/welcome’s volunteers.

The new site may turn out to be an excellent recruitment vehicle for Airbnb’s primary service. Half of the people who signed up after watching the Superbowl ad were new to Airbnb, according to Gebbia. But, he stresses, that is really, truly not the point. Rather, he sees this new platform as Airbnb’s first effort at do-gooding — a stab at philanthropy, minus the nonprofit part. It was incubated in the research and design lab Gebbia runs, and it has recently been spun out into its own product team, dubbed “Human.” “We’re experts at engendering trust between strangers, and we’ve become experts at nurturing community in all corners of the globe,” says Gebbia. He explains that it therefore makes sense for them to try to apply this to large social problems. “That’s how I want our company to be thinking about philanthropy.”

To the homesharing platform’s clinically optimistic trio of founders, Airbnb is a social endeavor. Even as it has ballooned into a $31 billion company, the founders have held fast to the belief that its mission is synchronous with its business. Yes, there are regulatory issues, but so far, Airbnb’s collaborative strategy for dealing with government has mostly kept them in check. Unintended consequences such as discrimination on the site also surface, but they believe that surely these issues can be addressed with smart minds, software, humility, and transparency. Chesky takes every opportunity to espouse his conviction that people are good, and earlier this spring, he added “chief community officer” to his title.

As I’ve written before, Airbnb is in a golden moment. As a platform and a company, it’s big enough to have built a strong brand and it has the capital to invest in projects of its choosing. But it hasn’t gone public, and has yet to face the scrutiny of outside shareholders.

Airbnb will likely launch a formal nonprofit in the future. This initiative may live within it, eventually. But for now, Gebbia hopes it will codify the ethics and values of the company. “It’s important that these activities get formalized now, regardless of when we go public,” he says. “We preach about a world of inclusion and acceptance. This is just a natural extension of what we set out to do.”