Founder Joe Gebbia is leading a charge to help ensure every refugee has a warm welcome — via an Airbnb host.

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.