About me
Dan Pallotta is a pioneer in the global effort to
transform the way our culture evaluates the
character and impact of nonprofit organizations.
His iconic TED Talk on philanthropy has been viewed
more than 5.7 million times. The TED community voted
it the most persuasive TED talk of all time. It is the 16th
most-commented TED talk of all time. It has been
translated into 27 languages and continues to be
viewed nearly 1,000 times a day by people all over the
world. His 2016 TED talk on being has been viewed
more than 2.1 million times. He is one of the 100 mostviewed TED speakers of all time.
Dan is the central character in the movie, “Uncharitable,”
based on his book by the same title, directed by
Stephen Gyllenhaal and featuring Edward Norton, the
heads of the Ford Foundation, the Nature Conservancy,
TED, Wounded Warrior Project, Charity Water and
others.
Dan is a former Hauser Center Leader at the Center for
Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
He is a founding thought partner of TED’s Audacious
Project, which has raised over $1 billion for disruptive
entrepreneurial social initiatives across a variety of
issues.
He invented the multi- day charitable event industry. He
created the Breast Cancer 3-Day walks and the multiday AIDS Rides long-distance cycling journeys, which
raised over 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 have raised in excess of $1.5
billion more for important causes from pediatric
leukemia to AIDS to suicide prevention and many
others.
He 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
newest book is, “The Everyday Philanthropist: A Better
Way to Make a Better World,” published by Wiley, a field
guide for the average person who wants their life to
matter. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has described his
approach as “An Apollo program for American
philanthropy and the nonprofit sector.”
Dan has written over one hundred articles for the
Harvard Business Review online.
Dan has given over four hundred talks on philanthropy
and innovation in thirty-eight states and ten countries.
He is a William J. Clinton Distinguished Lecturer, and
has spoken at Stanford, Wharton, Harvard Business
School, Harvard’s Hauser Center for Nonprofits,
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Brown, the
United Nations, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the
Council on Foundations, and the Gates Foundation,
among others.
He has been an elected member of the School
Committees in both Topsfield and Melrose,
Massachusetts. He is a recipient of the Liberty Hill
Foundation Creative Vision award, the Triangle
Humanitarian of the Year award, and the Albany State
University International Citizen of the Year award.
Dan been written about in feature and cover stories in
the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Los
Angeles Times, Washington Post, Stanford Social
Innovation Review, and has appeared on The Today
Show, the BBC, CNN, CNBC, American Public Media’s
Marketplace, and numerous NPR stations, among
others.
He lives in Massachusetts with his husband and their
three children.
