Kevin Bacon spoke recently with CONTRIBUTE about sixdegrees.org, his new social networking site to rally celebrities and mainstream Americans, alike, around philanthropy. The site launched at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in partnership with Network for Good, AOL, and Entertainment Weekly. It's based on the concept that no more than six people connect everyone to each other. So far, the site has leveraged individuals' personal connections to raise close to $2 million for dozens of different causes.

How did this get started?

In the early 90s, some college kids came up with this goofy notion that I was connected to everybody in the acting universe. The Internet was just starting to explode at that time, and these kids invented a game with me as a subject, called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The more generic concept now, of course, is that everyone is connected to everyone else, by at least six people—but it started out with the theory that I, especially, was connected to a very diverse group of people, and chiefly to all these other actors. They thought I was some sort of phenomenon in that regard.

Were you?

Well, at first I thought it was a joke at my expense—you know, that a loser like me could be connected to so many other people [laughter]. Then I actually met these guys and saw it was for real. I thought it would all just go away, but now, of course, this concept of six degrees of separation comes up all the time. It's in the zeitgeist: the movie Babel is all about connectivity.

Why now?

I got to a point a few years ago where I was feeling like I hadn't really done enough in my life—I hadn't given enough, shown up enough, given back enough. I've given a lot of money away, I do charitable work when I can, and I do show up. But I was feeling like maybe it just was not enough. I mean, there was Paul Newman and Bono out there doing a lot with their celebrity. So just for the hell of it, I went onto sixdegrees.com, and it was some kind of a real estate site. I thought, well, I'm not selling anything here—this isn't a George Foreman grill or a Pet Rock. So about a year ago, I saw that sixdegrees.org was available, and I purchased it and started to formulate what I would do with it. I wanted it to be charitable. I knew that much. And I wanted it to have something to do with the idea that what we do in one place on the planet effects everybody else. So I was talking to a guy, who told me about a guy who told me about a guythe six degrees thing. And I ended up talking to Network for Good, to [CEO] Bill Strathmann. I got to thinking, What would it be like if you could give $10 or $20 a month and you could change your charity like you do your Netflix movies, according to whatever you saw going on in the world in any given week or month? We then reached out to celebrities, and thats how it started.

How does it work?

You have a few options. You can click on a list of celebrities and see what charities they support and why, and you can donate right there. Or, you can see regular people from all over the country who have posted their own badge—a little interactive ad for themselves and for their favorite charities that can attach to other Web pages, emails, or blogs. These badges make it possible for anyone to donate to a favorite cause. For example, there's a woman who has multiple sclerosis and who is raising money for MS research, and there's someone else who feels strongly about supporting a charity overseas. And that was the dream, to be able to see one person reach out to two people and have those two people reach out to two more, and so on, and see the power of change grow exponentially around somebody's hope of having an impact.

What are your hopes for this going forward?

Ongoing donations—to keep people engaged in the perpetual act of giving.

Was giving a family value?

My mother was raised as a Park Avenue socialite, and she grew up with incredible luxury. And when she left home, she kind of turned her back, in a way, on all of that and lived very simply. I mean, we had very little money growing up. I don't know where all the money went, but it didn't go to us. She lived this very spartan lifestyle and started a day care center in a housing project in Philadelphia, and spent her whole life giving back. For me, it took a long time to come around to the notion of giving back. I'd been very focused on my career. But I pick up the paper and I'm so overwhelmed with the state of the world, that it makes me feel sometimes like everything is spinning out of control and that I can't really do anything about it. Six Degrees is a place you can go to do something.