Dan Pallotta

He and his co-chair, Mark Takano (now a Congressman representing the 41st district in California) recruited 39 students to make the journey.

Daniel M. 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.

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.

During the summer before Pallotta's senior year at Harvard he heard about two cyclists crossing America to raise money for cancer research.

It inspired him to create a cross-country bike ride for world hunger.

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.

Also that year, 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.

During the summer of 1983 they traveled 4,256 miles along a primarily northern route over the course of 9 1/2 weeks from Seattle to Boston.

They crossed the continental divide at 9,658 feet at Togwotee Pass in the Absaroka Mountains of the United States, between the towns of Dubois and Moran Junction, Wyoming.

The event raised approximately $80,000 for Oxfam-America.

Pallotta appeared on television and radio during the course of the ride, including an in-studio appearance with Bryant Gumbel on the Today show.

In 1985 Pallotta moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a singer and songwriter.

He was auditioned by Clive Davis and had a single recorded by Edgar Winter and sang the national anthem at Anaheim Stadium for the Los Angeles Rams.

During his time in Los Angeles he also met David Mixner, a leading civil rights activists, and went to work on Mixner's Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, envisioned as a 5,000-person march across America to promote nuclear disarmament.

He also met and worked with Irving Warner, author of Bantam Books' The Art of Fundraising, who mentored him in the field of major gift fundraising.

In 1991, building on the 'power of the journey' as a metaphor, he conceived of a 600-mile bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which combined his marketing, fundraising, mobilizing and motivating skills.

Three years later, the movie Alive motivated him to realize his idea.

He brought his plan for the event to the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center, which was looking for a new signature event.

The Center put up an initial investment of $50,000 in risk capital, which was enough for the effort to survive until a sponsorship was secured from Tanqueray for an additional $110,000.

478 people participated in the first California AIDS Ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, netting $1,013,000 – much more than expected.

In 1992, after a serious bout of Hepatitis A which he believed was HIV at the time, Pallotta decided to seek counseling and entered a 12-step program known as SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) to deal with addictive behavioral patterns that he felt were undermining his potential.

His first book, When Your Moment Comes, details these years in Pallotta's life.

Pallotta was aware that there was “nothing big” for the average person to do about AIDS.

It was the same feeling of frustration he had at Harvard looking at the gap between world hunger and the small fundraising events designed to address it.

From 1995 to 1996 Pallotta expanded the AIDS Rides to include San Francisco, Boston, New York, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and Raleigh, North Carolina.