Change Course: Source

The course is led by Dan Pallotta and his team. He was one of the original social entrepreneurs. Dan’s career making a difference started at age 21, when he organized 38 of his Harvard classmates to bicycle 4,200 miles across America with him to fight world hunger. He launched a for-profit social enterprise that created the AIDSRides and the Breast Cancer 3-Days. These events gave 182,000 people access to their personal heroism, raised $582 million in eight years and were the subject of a Harvard Business School case study. Dan is the author of Uncharitable:How restraints on Nonprofit Undermine Their Potential from Tufts University Press, which the Stanford Social Innovation Review said, “deserves to become the nonprofit sector’s new manifesto. It has changed the national conversation about change. He’s the author of When Your Moment Comes: a Guide to Fulfilling Your Dreams, and Charity Case: How the Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up for Itself and Really Change the World, from Jossey Bass. He’s a featured contributor to Harvard Business Review online. He’s spoken at Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, Brown, UCLA, among many others, and is a William J. Clinton Distinguished Lecturer. He’s the father of triplets. And he’s gay. He considers being gay and fathering triplets to be the most socially entreprenurial, socially innovative thing he’s ever done.

We’re writing to let you know how important your talk to our Philanthropy students was to their learning... Many of the students specifically referenced your talk and your book as providing pivotal lessons that made them question prior assumptions about philanthropy: ‘It was not until Dan Pallotta’s lecture that we really started thinking ‘outside the box... he forced us to think about re-framing how we think…[it was] a wakeup call as to how narrowed our thinking was up to this point.

- Ann Dill and Roger Nozaki,
Brown University
Thought you’d like to hear how much of a hit you were at the Social Enterprise Summit. On a scale of one to five (with one being “poor” and five being “excellent”), you scored a 4.57. Of 168 respondents, 119 gave you a five.

- Jerr Boschee,
President and CEO,
Social Enterprise Alliance
Your talk at the Social Capital Conference was one of the best social sector talks I’ve seen.

- Sean Stannard Stockton,
Founder and CEO,
Tactical Philanthropy
Many, many people have told me you are the most inspiring and best speaker they have heard in a long, long time.

- Elizabeth Banwell,
Dir. Program Strategy,
Maine Assoc. of Nonprofits
Your comments were the most provocative and inspiring remarks I’ve heard in a long time. I also appreciated your sheer intellect and the brilliance of the materials you prepared. Thank you for having the courage to do what you do.

- Margaret Meiers,
  Senior Director,
  Community Relations,
  Freddie Mac
Your presentation at the Direct Marketing event was the best one I’ve seen in the four years I’ve been attending…

- Shannon Albert,
President,
National Relief Charities
…truly a life changing experience.

- Abraham L. Taleb,
Managing Partner,
TerraShift