Dan Pallotta

Dan Pallotta
Pallotta speaking at the Change Course. Boston MA, October 2012
Born	Daniel M. Pallotta (1961-01-21) January 21, 1961 (age 56) Malden, Massachusetts, U.S.
Alma mater	Harvard University (1983)
Occupation	Entrepreneur, author, and humanitarian activist
Website	DanPallotta.com

Daniel M. "Dan" Pallotta (born January 21, 1961) is an American entrepreneur, author, and humanitarian activist. He is best known for his involvement in multi-day charitable events with the long-distance Breast Cancer 3-Day walks, AIDS Rides bicycle journeys, and Out of the Darkness suicide prevention night walks. Over nine years, 182,000 people participated in these events and raised $582 million. They were the subject of a Harvard Business School case study. He is the author of Uncharitable – How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential, the best-selling title in the history of Tufts University Press. He is also the author of Charity Case: How the Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up for Itself and Really Change the World, and When Your Moment Comes – a Guide to Fulfilling Your Dreams. He is the president of Advertising for Humanity and president and founder of the Charity Defense Council. He is a featured contributor to Harvard Business Review online.

Pallotta was born in Malden, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, the oldest of four children. He attended Harvard University and graduated cum laude in 1983.

At the age of 19 Pallotta placed second in a field of twelve candidates and became the second youngest member ever elected to the school board in his hometown of Melrose, Massachusetts. He took office in January, 1981, the same day Proposition 2½ became effective, which limited property tax increases by Massachusetts municipalities to no more than 2.5% annually.

Also at the age of 19 Pallotta became chair of the Harvard Hunger Action Committee, an undergraduate student organization that raised money for Oxfam America by hosting symbolic fasts that raised approximately $2,000 each twice annually. He was studying development economics at the time and became frustrated at the gap between the massive scale of the problem of world hunger and his committee’s minuscule fundraising totals up against it.

During Pallotta’s first weekend at Harvard he participated in the human consciousness course called the Erhard Seminars Training, created by Werner Erhard. The training's emphasis on making a difference, goal-setting, and human understanding would play a major role later in the design of the multi-day event experiences Pallotta and his company created. In 1980, as chair of the Harvard Hunger Action Committee, Pallotta organized a speaking engagement for singer-songwriter John Denver (who had served on President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on World Hunger). At Denver’s invitation, Pallotta attended the singer’s Windstar Foundation Program for college students in Snowmass, Colorado the next summer. The program focused on issues of global sustainability. Pallotta and his 20 classmates slept in teepees in the Rockies, and were treated to a macrobiotic diet and lectures by the mathematician and philosopher Buckminster Fuller.