Dan Pallotta

Founder and President, Charity Defense Council

Boston

Dan Pallotta is an entrepreneur, author, and builder of movements. He is the founder and President of the Charity Defense Council, a national leadership movement dedicated to transforming the way the public thinks about charity and social change.

In the 1990's, he invented the multi-day charitable event industry by creating the Breast Cancer 3-Day walks and the multi-day AIDS Rides. These events raised in excess of half a billion dollars in nine years and were the subject of a Harvard Business School case study. The model and methods he created are now employed by dozens of charities and raise in excess of $100 million annually for important causes from pediatric leukemia to AIDS to suicide prevention and many others.

Dan is the author of Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential, the best-selling title in the history of Tufts University Press. The Stanford Social Innovation Review said that the book "deserves to become the nonprofit sector's new manifesto." His latest book is Charity Case: How the Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up for Itself and Really Change the World. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has described it as "an Apollo program for American philanthropy and the nonprofit sector."

He is a featured weekly contributor to the Harvard Business Review online, and the founder and Chief Humanity Officer of Advertising for Humanity — an agency dedicated to the expansion and transformation of high-impact humanitarian organizations. He is a recipient of the Liberty Hill Foundation Creative Vision award, the Triangle Humanitarian of the Year award, the Albany State University International Citizen of the Year award, and the Seven Fund Morality of Profit Essay Prize.