Donor Dedicates Wealth and Time to Immigrants From Her Homeland

At 16, Bita Daryabari was sent by her parents—a dentist and a homemaker in Tehran—to live with relatives in St. Joseph, Mo. The year was 1985, and she was part of a wave of immigrants who fled Iran in the years following the Islamic fundamentalist revolution in 1979.

In her new homeland, she thrived: moving to the Bay Area for college, becoming a software engineer, and catching the tech wave early.

Today, the 44-year-old has a fortune worth roughly a half-billion dollars and has given nonprofits more than $21-million, both personally and through her Unique Zan Foundation. (Zan is Persian for “woman.”) She intends to give much more during her lifetime.

She is doing more with that money than simply writing checks. Ms. Daryabari is building a charity that has helped at least 400 Iranian immigrants here escape poverty, and she is supporting projects that women in the Middle East are using to gain independence and strengthen the chances that they and their families will be financially stable.

Whatever the causes she supports, all of her charitable efforts have one thing in common: a directness that surprises her beneficiaries, often leaving them speechless.

Sakena Yacoobi, founder of the Afghan Institute of Learning, which helps women and children in Afghanistan gain greater access to education, was the recipient of Ms. Daryabari’s first major philanthropy project: providing the charity with money to build a private girls school in Kabul, Afghanistan.

“She asked me, ‘What do you want to do that you couldn’t do?’ And I just told her, ‘This is a dream that I have: I want to start a private school, but I can’t because it costs so much,’” says Ms. Yacoobi.

“On the spot, she said ‘I’m going to fund you.’ I was really shocked. That built my confidence that in my lifetime, I am going to build that school.”

Ms. Daryabari gave $500,000 to the girls school in 2005 and another $500,000 in 2008 to support a private high school Ms. Yacoobi started in Kariz Mir, Afghanistan.

‘They Have Nothing’

The bulk of her fortune comes from a 2009 divorce from her first husband, Omid Kordestani, who was the 11th employee to join Google and became a billionaire after the company went public in 2004.

The causes Ms. Daryabari supports are not the kind that usually attract Silicon Valley philanthropy. Her gifts are rooted in her experience as an Iranian immigrant and her concerns about the future of women in the Middle East. For instance, she gives to Stanford University, as many donors who have made their fortunes in technology do. But she supports efforts to bolster knowledge of Persian arts and culture rather than, say, engineering. (See more in Ms. Daryabari’s giving profile.)

At the center of her philanthropy is Pars Equality Center, a social-service charity she established in San Francisco in 2010 to help newly arrived Iranian immigrants and refugees start a new life in the United States. (The Persian word Pars refers to ancient Persia.)

She runs the organization herself and is its main supporter, having poured $3.5-million into it so far. It opened a Los Angeles chapter in September.

Though she originally conceived the charity as an advocacy group to help its clients fight discrimination, she quickly realized that new Iranian immigrants more urgently needed help getting settled in their new country.

“They have no foundation, no community helping them move forward,” says Ms. Daryabari. “When we came here after 1979, a lot of us, we had financial and family support, but these new people that are coming in, they don’t have any of this. They have nothing.”

Help From Community

In addition to filling what she sees as a need for services, Pars Equality Center exemplifies Ms. Daryabari’s approach to philanthropy: listening to beneficiaries’ needs and figuring out how to help them build a stable life in the United States.

And once they are back on their feet, the organization encourages them to give back by becoming a Pars Center volunteer or donor or to recruit other newly arrived Iranian immigrants.

Her early forays into philanthropy helped solidify that strategy, she says.

She had long wanted to help women and children in the Middle East, she says, but wasn’t sure exactly where to devote her time and money. She started her foundation in 2004 and began making small grants. (Her foundation now holds more than $2.6-million in assets, but most of her giving is from her own money.)

She sought counsel from other Silicon Valley philanthropists, one of whom introduced her to Ms. Yacoobi, and through others she met Zohre Elahian, a Bay Area philanthropist who was directing Relief International’s programs in the Middle East. Ms. Elahian wanted to develop a program to make small loans to help Palestinian women start businesses. Intrigued, Ms. Daryabari asked Ms. Elahian to develop a proposal and offered to provide the money.

In 2009, with Ms. Daryabari’s support—a three-year grant of nearly $500,000—Ms. Elahian opened the Unique Zan Women’s Center, in Dura, Hebron, which provides business and vocational classes as well as health care and child care.

The emphasis on helping the women help themselves is key, Ms. Daryabari says.

“Now they are coming and doing volunteer work, and now they are independent. I’m not paying anymore,” she says. “So they’re making their own money, which is amazing. The more we do that, the more we involve the community, the more they show unity. It’s a better way of building this.”

Aiding Immigrants

Ms. Daryabari has significant experience in helping build new enterprises.

After graduating from California State University at East Bay in 1991, she took a job as a software engineer at a Silicon Valley start-up called GammaLink, an early inventor of PC-to-fax technology.

“They paid me $33,000 a year, and I was bragging about it to my friends, but they warned me I’d be working 80-hour weeks,” she says.

She didn’t mind the long hours. Her enthusiasm for software engineering, however, waned. Yet she was learning about the burgeoning telecommunications field, and that interested her. She went on to join MCI but left the company in 1996 when she had her first child. (Now remarried, she has three children still at home.)

Pars Equality Center demands much of her attention these days. Six months after establishing the organization, she took on the executive-director position to better oversee its work.

“I wanted to see results, and I decided that I needed to really be on top of it. Otherwise, it wasn’t going to happen,” she says. “It’s become a full-time job, and I’m telling you, I opened a can of worms. I had no idea.”

After that first year, Ms. Daryabari says, she realized the needs of those she was trying to help were much greater than she had expected.

The immigrants the charity serves, she says, “come here and they get shocked by the whole culture, by the whole system. Then they don’t know the language or anything, so they have to take ESL classes and study and learn the culture and then find some job somewhere. So we needed to help them in that process.”

Job Fairs and Classes

She also saw that she lacked adequate expertise to fulfill the mission of Pars, so she set about searching for an experienced director of social services.

She hired Reza Odabaee, 74, a former Iranian military pilot who, like her, had come to the United States after the revolution. On the verge of retirement, he had worked for two decades at Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, where he was head of the organization’s refugee resettlement and employment program.

Mr. Odabaee was intrigued when he met Ms. Daryabari. “We had so many nonprofit organizations established by American Iranians, but they were all in the arts or music and literature, but nothing in social services.”

Today the organization’s No. 1 priority is to help new immigrants find jobs. It holds job fairs every three months.

It also offers English classes, citizenship classes, legal guidance, and financial-literacy courses.

Weekend workshops tackle tenants’ rights and how to navigate the U.S. sanctions on Iran so that immigrants here can access their bank accounts back home.

Pars attaches strings to its charity designed to help clients succeed in America: It requires clients complete a six-month class in English for speakers of other languages before they can get any other help from the charity. It also seeks to foster a giving culture by asking clients to pay the charity back for emergency rent assistance and other aid once they are employed and settled.

In addition to the people served by the charity so far, the organization has built a network of support by getting people who left Iran decades ago involved in helping less-prosperous recent arrivals.

“The newer immigrants don’t know the established community, and the established community doesn’t know them,” Mr. Odabaee says. “So Pars has to let people know that if they’ve been established here and have a good life, they can help by being a volunteer or mentor.”

Ms. Daryabari makes a point of using her social connections among Iranian-Americans to attract volunteers and donations. To date, she has raised about $750,000 from other donors and is looking for ways to expand the charity’s work to other cities.

Bigger Plans

Looking ahead, Ms. Daryabari says she expects to support Pars as long as its services are needed. But she hopes one day to move into a board position and pass the leadership on to those it is now helping.

“Hopefully in five or 10 years I can hire another executive director to do the job, to be as passionate as I am in serving this community,” she says. “Pars needs to belong to the community. They need to run it.”

And after that, she has bigger plans for her giving. If the United States government lifts its sanctions on Iran, she says, she would like to support programs that would make it easier for women in Iran to get a divorce. She would like to build new universities there. And eventually, she wants to do something to help elderly Iranians in America plan for retirement.

“This older generation of Iranians, they are all aging, and since the culture is different here, our kids are not used to taking care of their grandparents, so that’s another project I’m thinking about,” she says. “It takes so much time and education. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but that’s the dream.”

Bita Daryabari’s Giving Profile

Age: 44

Net worth: About $500-million

Giving to date: More than $21-million

Foundation: Unique Zan Foundation, with just over $2.6-million in assets, though most of her gifts are made outside that fund

Background: Moved to America from Iran in 1985; worked as an executive director in sales at MCI and as a software engineer at GammaLink

Where her money comes from: Google stock held by her former husband, Omid Kordestani, an early employee of the technology giant

Causes: Help for Iranian immigrants settling in the United States; education and social services for women in Afghanistan and the Middle East; Persian arts and culture

Key projects: Pars Equality Center, a social-services charity in Los Angeles, Menlo Park, and San Jose, Calif., for Iranian immigrants that Ms. Daryabari started in 2010 and now runs; Stanford University’s Iranian-studies program, to which she has given $6.5-million since 2007