Latest / We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits / 115. Real Talk: Why Nonprofits Must Dream Bigger - Dan Pallotta

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115. Real Talk: Why Nonprofits Must Dream Bigger - Dan Pallotta · We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

• 0:01
  Jonathan McCoy: Hey, I'm john.
• 0:02
  Unknown: And I'm Becky.
• 0:03
  Jonathan McCoy: And this is the we are for good podcast.
• 0:06
  Becky Endicott: nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
• 0:15
  Jonathan McCoy: We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create
• 0:22
  Dan Pallotta: an impact uprising.
• 0:23
  Becky Endicott: So welcome to the good community, where nonprofit professionals, philanthropist, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
• 0:34
  Jonathan McCoy: So let's get started.
• 0:36
  Unknown: Welcome, welcome.
• 0:37
  Jonathan McCoy: Do you what a big day,
• 0:39
  Becky Endicott: the day is here,
• 0:40
  Jonathan McCoy: we've been counting down the days
• 0:42
  Becky Endicott: when we start I mean, this would almost be the impetus of why you would start a podcast is to just simply have a platform to talk to our guests today. And I have been thinking about how I would even begin to intro our friend Dan pelada. I plan nothing, because I wanted it to come from the heart. But I kind of want to take everybody back about seven, eight years ago, I am on a we've talked about this several times, I'm on a TED talk binge, and where I would just watch everything that was on. And I was just so intrigued by the concept of Ted and just the way that it could curate these innovators in the world in such a short span of time. And I watched this TED Talk. And I'm sure Dan hears this every time he goes to talk to anybody, but it was so revolutionary in my life. And Dan gives this TED talk that went viral. And I mean, viral still continues to get millions and millions of hits around the world. And he is basically talking about the way we think about charity is dead wrong. And I felt my the axe the world tilt on its axis a little bit after I watched it, I've sent it to probably 50 people in my lifetime, including every boss that I've ever had. And today, we are talking to the disrupter of all disruptors, the man who I felt like for the first time in my nonprofit career, I saw somebody that represented my thoughts, and my ideas. And I'm just geeked out. So Dan, welcome to the we're for good podcast, we're a little bit excited that you're here.
• 2:19
  Dan Pallotta: Thank you for having me, Becky and john, and thanks for that big, big build up. I hope I can live up to it.
• 2:24
  Dan Pallotta: But I'm happy to be here with you. I'm looking forward to the conversation. And, you know, thanks for creating a place for ideas like this. These are
• 2:33
  Becky Endicott: the conversations that we need to be lifting up. And I really just want to kick it to Dan and just say, tell us your story and how you even got into the nonprofit sector and why you started speaking up for things that truly matter.
• 2:47
  Dan Pallotta: Well, I guess it probably started for me. You know, I'm probably started when I was a kid I was born. I was born the first day of john Kennedy's presidency. And so I, you know, my formative years where I was surrounded by images of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and john kennedy.
• 3:05
  Dan Pallotta: And you know, these were young people talking about love and justice in the same sentence was also the era of the Vietnam War.
• 3:14
  Dan Pallotta: So you know, when I was six or seven or eight years old, my parents were watching Walter Cronkite every night talk about the you know, the body counts, and it was it was unending, and it gave me a sense of that the human condition was futility, that we were unable to transcend our circumstances. It was also the era of Apollo, right? So I was eight years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon like so many other eight years old, my eyes were just glued to the television set during that whole mission, watching the docking sequences, the undocking sequences, the landing everything else. And so that was a that was a powerful stew of things that made me want to make a difference in the world rebel against futility, but also wanted to do something as big as going to the moon. And then I guess it was in college when I was studying world hunger for the first time and learning about the massive mortality, I chaired our hunger Action Committee. We were doing these little fundraisers that seemed very not big to me. And I wanted to do something big and organized a bike ride across America got 38 of my classmates to bicycle 4200 miles across the continental United States with me during that very hot summer of 1983. And that's where the metaphor of the journey became powerful for me, you know, the very difficult journey the arduous journey that took us nine and a half weeks, pedaling our bikes, 4200 miles, 69 days.
• 4:39
  Dan Pallotta: The intersection of that and coming to the aid of the of the disenfranchised, and then and the abandoned in the world
• 4:56
  Becky Endicott: is such a good dude. And I love the humble brag of just we just biked 42 100 miles just got all of these people to do it. And it really it underscores our belief that community is everything. And if you can get people to believe very much in the mission of something, they will work, and they will hustle to see it through to the end. And then you have a rabid fan there who you can pour into your mission even further. I love that you saw this so early.
• 5:21
  Dan Pallotta: Yeah, it's got to be you know, you got to give them a dream. That's the thing.
• 5:23
  Dan Pallotta: And I think too many nonprofit organizations, and he, and even, you know, political leaders want to make it as easy as possible for people. And that's not what their spirits want, you know, they want to live into a dream.
• 5:38
  Dan Pallotta: And so when when you tell someone that who's lost their friends to AIDS, you can stick a red ribbon on your jacket, or you can work your ass off for a year and ride your bike 600 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and raise $2,000 and scare the hell out of yourself in the process of asking other people for that money. They'll pick the ladder.
• 6:00
  Jonathan McCoy: Yeah, I mean, I love that you bring up dreaming.
• 6:03
  Jonathan McCoy: It's real serendipitous, we were, you know, interviewing another guest this morning. And she talked about just the limitations that nonprofits feel with so much restricted funding coming into the play. And she was the recipient of this huge gift from Mackenzie Scott that was unrestricted. And she said, it allowed us to run it allowed us to dream, it allowed us to activate and I feel like that's what you have been really championing for a long time saying nonprofits can have these answers and have these big dreams, but they can't get held back by these by looking at the wrong metrics of if we're successful or not. And it's keeping things so small. You know, I love that you've been kind of preaching that or similar to that, if I haven't watched it for decades, you know?
• 6:47
  Dan Pallotta: Yeah, in the TED talk, I use the the metaphor of a rule book that the, you know, the two rule books, the for profit sector gets to play by one that has a lot of freedoms and the nonprofit sector has to play by one that has a lot of restrictions. And since then, I've been using the metaphor of prison that the nonprofit sector is in prison and the for profit sector rooms free and and even.
• 7:09
  Dan Pallotta: And even when we dream we dream in miniature. You know, we don't dream on the scale that Ilan Musk is dreaming. And Mark Zuckerberg is dreaming that Jeff Bezos is Jamie. And these are people who are lack any ounce of self consciousness about the scale of their dreams, right?
• 7:37
  Dan Pallotta: come right out and say it colonize Mars, you know, bring humanity to another planet. But you try and get a person in nonprofit, to say it's their dream, to end hunger in the city of Boston in the next 10 years.
• 7:51
  Dan Pallotta: You try. I've tried. They, you know, they just can't bring themselves to do it. They just can't bring themselves to think that big. It's his hubris to think that big, you know, it's ego to think that big I, you know, my dream, My dream is, if we could hire another major gifts fundraiser, like really, really like you. You don't have to do it, just say it, just say it what's in your heart, just say like, if you couldn't fail, what is it? Can't do it? Do you
• 8:25
  Jonathan McCoy: think it's because people are just so pre conditioned? Because the next answer is going to be I mean, here's all the limitations. I mean, you don't have the budget to do that. It's going to cost too much to do that. It's too
• 8:36
  Dan Pallotta: powerful work in the in the know sector, right?
• 8:39
  Dan Pallotta: It's the it's the no profit sector, profit sector. sector.
• 8:44
  Dan Pallotta: And so the word profit actually comes from the Latin for progress. So it's literally like the no progress sector. And there's I think there's, you know, I think there's a I'm gay, I'm very familiar with what oppression sicknesses and I think there's a serious oppression sickness in the non profit sector that we're so used to. You know, what Mackenzie's doing is great, but still recognize that we're grateful for what a dreamer is doing for us, right? We subjugate ourselves to the dreamer, even in that, even in that scenario with Joan Kroc did for the Salvation Army. Oh, isn't she's a saint. Well, you know, what about us? Why can't Why can't we create entities as big as Apple for solving the world's problems? They're only individuals at Apple. That's all they are. But they managed to put a smartphone in the hands of pretty much every human being on the earth and a Mac on, you know, 10% of everybody's desk.
• 9:45
  Dan Pallotta: They're just human beings with capital. Government is just human beings with capital. We're human beings to why aren't we capable of achieving things on that on that kind of a scale and you know, people are aghast when you say that No government has to do it while government can do it great, but they haven't demonstrated the ability so far, I'd like to see people of ingenuity stimulating public concern on a mass level selling the idea of a better world on mass level, the way we sell caffeine, and, and, you know, watches and everything else. And get ourselves out of this prison because we didn't do anything wrong. You know, we don't deserve to be in prison. No human being, it's a horrible thing. And it's ironic, like, well, like the poor person that you're trying to help. You know, the entrepreneur that you're trying to help the poor entrepreneurs starting a business, you want to see that business grow, right? You want to see them maybe get wealthy, but Oh, not yourself, not your organization, there's just is this internal inconsistency to it?
• 10:53
  Becky Endicott: I mean, I'm gonna call this a lot of pulpit because I just am sitting here listening to you preach, and I just am cheering in my head. I'm like, Yes, you're saying, This is exactly what we need. We need a revolution, we call it an impact uprising, and in our organization, and it's about shifting the lens and everything in the way that we talk and the way that we engage in the way that we infuse and the way that we empower. And I love just this unapologetic approach to this is how we can really solve human suffering, because you're right.
• 11:31
  Becky Endicott: Anybody that's sitting in Apple is a human being just like we are. But I would even submit to you that people that are in the nonprofit sector have the level of compassion and the level of sacrifice that could even elevate creativity, ingenuity to another level, because we don't want to see failure. We know what failure looks like. We've seen it in the eyes of the people that we're trying to serve and the people that we're trying to help solve these crises around them. And I love that you brought up Elon Musk, because we have a very dear friend who says that if Ilan musk says that he can colonize Mars in a decade. Why can we not in the water crisis in the world in the exact same time? Why do we have to move outside our own planet, when we still have major issues of basic human rights and basic human? Like response?
• 12:18
  Becky Endicott: Yeah, to end suffering. So I love all of this. I also want to give a shout out to just what you do with marketing, and advertising. Because I think that the way that you leverage the power of words, and platform is a beautiful thing. dance group has a great ad campaign that's going on called I Am overhead, which I am just geeking out on. And the thing that you say is, we've got to humanize overhead because overhead is people. When we talk about overhead, and we talk about not investing in overhead, we're saying that we're not going to invest in people. And it's the people who are passionate about these issues.
• 13:01
  Becky Endicott: And it's the people who are going to solve the problem. So I would love to get your just take on the overhead crisis and how our listeners and all of us can lean into combating it.
• 13:11
  Dan Pallotta: Yeah, I want to just go back to something you said earlier that like maybe in the in the nonprofit sector, we can even do more than apple.
• 13:15
  Dan Pallotta: Because of sacrificing because we're unwilling to see failure.
• 13:20
  Dan Pallotta: I actually think we have a high tolerance for seeing failure. I think we've seen failure for a long time, and we've gotten quite accustomed to it. And I think we actually need to break out of that willingness to live with the failure to end poverty and the failure to end hunger and failure to cure cancer. And I think also that we have to rewire what kind of sacrifice we value, right? We value financial sacrifice, like the person who's willing to sacrifice themselves financially. I remember a mentor of mine once saying i don't i don't i don't have respect for someone who's old. I have, I have respect for people. And I don't have respect for people who sacrifice money necessarily doesn't necessarily make a difference. I have respect for people who are willing to sacrifice their reputation.
• 14:23
  Dan Pallotta: People who are willing to sacrifice their reputation, put their ass on the line for some audacious dream that they don't know whether or not they can achieve and they're not sure how they're going to achieve it. But they're fully committed to it.
• 14:37
  Dan Pallotta: And they're willing to have the world laugh at them while they're there. They attempt it to me, the willingness to sacrifice your reputation eats the willingness to sacrifice money for lunch in the domain of making a difference. And I think we also have to recognize In the nonprofit sector, there's a certain arrogance to thinking that Oh, we're the, we're the people who really make a difference in the world. Oh, really. So you don't think the people at Apple who develop the ability to do an electrocardiogram in 30 seconds on your wrist, you don't think that makes any difference? You don't think the iPhone makes a difference in the lives of the blind, you don't think the iPad is making a difference in education, you don't think zoom makes a difference, which is allowing us to spread this message about making a difference around the world wherever we want to spread it right? So get over this notion that you're the only one that that makes a difference. Get over your sackcloth and ashes.
• 15:37
  Dan Pallotta: Get over your sacrificial mentality and get in the business of producing results.
• 15:44
  Dan Pallotta: And ask yourself, what is the result? You actually want to produce? Like, say it? And not?
• 15:48
  Dan Pallotta: Well, if we could, if we can meet our budget this year?
• 15:54
  Dan Pallotta: That's not your dream? That's not your dream go deeper? Well, I'd like to have you know, I'd like to have money to do the new marketing campaign. Really, that's what you want on your grave? Did the new marketing campaign. You want to solve problems? Name them? I want to cure cancer in the next 10 years? Say it? Say it, you know, what is it that you want to achieve, because if you don't say what you want to achieve, like at the deepest level of your heart, you are lost, you're lost. And you will be at the mercy of some kind of a fog of confusion and a sense of lack of purpose about your work, no matter what kind of 501 c three status it has attached
• 16:37
  Jonathan McCoy: to it. Just some self reflection of just man, we're just selling ourselves short. We're selling our missions. Short, we're selling these problems that could be eradicated. And you know, Becky, I do have a dear friend that his mission is to eradicate to go out of business because we solve the crisis. But that's a very rare organization to see, you know, we have to look far to find that. What do you think is holding people back, Dan? And I also want to hear what are some of the naysayers saying to you because it's not lost on me that you were one to stand up and put your reputation on the line to stand up and be the counter argument to you know, all this tradition and expectation of cost to raise $1 and all these things. Sorry, to throw two questions at you.
• 17:24
  Dan Pallotta: Well, the first thing you know, it's it's it's part of the human condition. So to lower your horizons, I think because you people are afraid that they'll be laughed at and and I've always said, if you're if you're not being laughed at, you are not dreaming big enough.
• 17:39
  Dan Pallotta: Like seriously, if people aren't ridiculing you in a way that's painful for you. You're not thinking big enough. Mario Andretti the famous racecar driver used to say, if you don't feel out of control, you're not going fast enough. And I think that's true. And if you look at the ridicule that's been laid on Ilan Musk, I mean by the legacy auto manufacturers and by the space experts, by his heroes, by heroes of his in the space program laughing at him, you know, it's just like, painful, painful stuff you imagine.
• 18:18
  Dan Pallotta: Imagine Walt Disney at the age of 15, walking around with his drawing of a mouse and telling people, I think it's got a lot of potential, right? I mean, seriously, like, try to erase hindsight from your brain. And you're looking at a 15 year old kid with a drawing of a mouse.
• 18:31
  Dan Pallotta: I'm laughing, right. Yeah, I mean, I remember this Bruce Springsteen is to tell the story of his concerts about how he and his dad never got along. And he has long hair, and they always fight and his father didn't know why he was playing the guitar.
• 18:46
  Dan Pallotta: And his father was waiting up for him one night, when he came home sitting in the kitchen. And his father said to Springsteen, what do you think you're doing with yourself? And Springsteen said the worst part about it was I could never explain it to him.
• 18:57
  Dan Pallotta: It's in that moment where who you are is really tested. How do you tell your father, I'm going to be Bruce Springsteen. Right, when that means nothing, prior to Bruce Springsteen being invented, and so, so I think it's, I think it's part of the human condition. I also think we have, some of our values are mixed up in it, like we don't want to make a promise, and then not deliver on the promise.
• 19:31
  Dan Pallotta: Because we feel that we're dishonouring our word, but I don't think it's dishonouring your word. If you make a promise, and you don't keep it.
• 19:37
  Dan Pallotta: I think it's dishonouring your word if you make a promise, and don't keep it, and then act as if you never made the promise in the first place. That's dishonouring your word, but to actually make the effort and fail and explain to people why you failed and then perhaps make a new promise. I thought we were going to end hunger by 2025. We didn't do it. But here's what we learned. And here's the progress we made as a result of that audacity, we're making a new promise we're gonna end it by 2030. I applaud you, as opposed to the person who's laying on his couch making, drawing no lines in the sand and just laughing at you.
• 20:51
  Jonathan McCoy: Taking a quick pause from today's episode to thank our sponsor, who happens to be one of our favorite companies virtuous, you know, we believe everyone matters. And we've witnessed the greatest philanthropic movements happen when you see an activate donors at every level. And virtuous is the platform to help you do just that. It's so much more than a nonprofit CRM. virtuous helps charities reimagine generosity through responsive fundraising.
• 21:11
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• 21:25
  Becky Endicott: You are so right and it is it is about a global mind shift. You know, as my mindset shift, and I and I we have a lot of people that are that are new young professionals in the in the nonprofit space.
• 21:38
  Becky Endicott: And I just believe Gen Xers and Gen Z years and millennials, you are the ones that we think can turn the tide on the way nonprofit is viewed in the way that we operate in the way that we engage. And I I'm here to tell you that your disrupter is right here, your your creative rebel is sitting here on this podcast right now. And I want to give you an example of why it's important to stand up and be the one that everybody thinks is crazy, the one who's being laughed at Dan stood up and had this 18 minute TED Talk. And then three minutes or three minutes from May, it could have been three minutes after at lunch three months after the TED Talk went live GuideStar Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau wise giving Alliance did a complete about face. It was like the coup of the season, in my opinion, you know, as the three leading resources for nonprofit data, and announcing that they were denouncing the overhead ratio as a valid indicator of nonprofit performance. When you speak up when you are brave enough to save the thing that is on the hearts of so many when you have capacity to dream. Incredible movements begin to ripple ripple ripple. And I have to tell you, I love this notion of picturing little Dan, like watching the shuttle launch. And you literally if you get on the YouTube, you can see the in the background and literally has a shuttle in the background office which is amazing. Right set.
• 23:14
  Becky Endicott: Okay, there you go. So, I just think that if you have someone like Dan, who has this heart for justice, you have a penchant for creativity, and you can speak up and and be okay with being the one that's being laughed at.
• 23:30
  Becky Endicott: They will not be laughing in 10 years because a movement can come behind you. You have little people in Oklahoma who say, Dan, you saw us You were the creative rebel who was brave enough to step out there and say this. And now we're looking at a different arc that's kind of hitting our sector. And so my question to you, Dan, is there are people listening in here who are going to say yes, I 100% believe in this ideology. I believe that I want to be a part of change and about shifting this narrative.
• 24:02
  Becky Endicott: How could someone lean into what you're doing? We're going to talk about the charity defense counsel in just a second. But how could they lean into that?
• 24:12
  Becky Endicott: How could they lean into this notion of we've got to start disrupting, because I do think it starts within community and wherever they are in the world?
• 24:20
  Dan Pallotta: Well, first of all, you've got to analyze your own assumptions. And be careful of thinking that because you're 22 years old, and you're having a new thought, you excuse me, you're 22 years old, you're having a thought for the first time, that it's a new thought.
• 24:39
  Dan Pallotta: It could be that it's a very old thought. I speak to a lot of college students who are very traditional, they have very, very traditional thinking about charity, because they grew up on it, and they've been infected by the same media as the rest of us. So their idea of being young and innovative and progressive is charity shouldn't pay people very much money. Well, that's a very old idea. That's a very counterproductive idea. That's not a very young new idea. They have the idea that charity should be very frugal and not spend very much money on anything other than giving it to the people who need it. That's a very old idea. That's a very counterproductive idea. So you got to check your own ideas. And I would encourage you to know watch my TED talk or read one of my books or somebody else's book and then You've got to come out about your dreams. You know, if you're working for a nonprofit organization, you got to come out to donors, you got to say, I'm not here to have them carve, I kept the overhead low on my grave. I'm here to solve this specific problem. And in order to solve this specific problem, I need these resources. And one of the things I learned over the course of the last 15 years and speaking about this is that people want to educate their donors, but they don't know how they don't know what to say. And they haven't said it as often as I've said it so they're, you know, understandably not as articulate about about it. So, in the last couple years, I've created tools specifically for changing donors minds, like a new little book I have called the everyday philanthropist that literally takes an hour to read, it reads in an hour, like you could spend an hour scrolling around on Facebook, or you could like change your whole perspective on charity in an hour efficient, big type and big graphs, and it's really easy to understand it's then I created these online trainings called the bowl training for nonprofit staff and boards and donors. So So I've created lots of tools that people can find on my website for actually evangelizing and you know, you don't have to do it yourself.
• 26:52
  Dan Pallotta: You can let these tools do it.
• 26:52
  Dan Pallotta: So, but coming out about your real dreams, that's the bravest thing you can you can do, you know, probably like coming out, coming out about my sexual orientation is probably the, probably the bravest thing that I did. Or do. You know, people think that you come out once when you're gay? Like when you're 19? You come out? No, I mean, you know, I'm much older now. And I can be in a cab, and the cab driver can start up a conversation about family and I say, have triplets. And he says, Oh, my God, how's your wife feel about that? Okay, well, now I get to decide whether I want to have a transformative conversation with a cab driver in a city that I don't know, and what's going to happen to me, and I don't know what his prejudices are beliefs. So you know, you got to like, come out every day, we've been way too timid in the nonprofit sector, you know, well, let's tell donors what they need to hear donor trust, donor trust. I'm all for donor trust, yes, we want donors to trust us. But on the basis of what, on the basis that we just told them, we have low overhead, and we know that low overhead means we aren't going to be able to make much of a difference. Well, that's not a very nice thing to have your donors trust in, or trust in your dreams, trust in the resources that you need for those dreams. That's the thing you want your donor to
• 28:16
  Jonathan McCoy: have trust in.
• 28:16
  Jonathan McCoy: And I have a strong sense that that is why our boards aren't leaned in, why our teams are not engaged, or your staff is not performing because they're not hooked into that big dream that they feel connected to this big idea that they could perpetuate or be a part of, it just changes the way you act and take action.
• 28:34
  Jonathan McCoy: And just the urgency of it. If you're plugged into something that's much more impactful, meaningful,
• 28:42
  Dan Pallotta: will say to me, how do I get my daughter's more engaged? How do I get my board more engaged? Stop boring them to death. You know, I mean, Jesus come up with a dream that's so exciting that they cannot say no to it, you know, you watch I have that set and model of the Saturn five rocket behind me, you know, the the ship the goddess to the moon that brought Apollo 11 and 12, and 14 and 15 and 16 and 17, to the moon. And you watch documentaries on the Apollo program. And you look at those people who you know, the flight directors and the people who did the math and the people who built fabricated the spaces, they look back on that time. And in the interviews, they're just tears in their eyes. They're just like grown people weeping, because of the beauty of exploring the full potential of your humanity. And you don't do that. You're trying to figure out how the scheme donor to give you more money for overhead and it's without purpose, you know, you're not up to something big in the world. Good luck.
• 29:50
  Becky Endicott: Here's what I'm when I'm hearing is, when we're positioning and we have we have this conversation so many times about the new way to partner with a donor in the old ways. I hope they go to bed, and I hope they never come back and COVID in the ways that we would traditionally engage with them.
• 30:07
  Becky Endicott: But if you asked a donor, would you come alongside me to explore the full potential of your humanity? versus would you consider buying a table at my gala? I know which one's going to inspire somebody.
• 30:21
  Dan Pallotta: Exactly. Exactly.
• 30:21
  Dan Pallotta: Yep. And they want to look people got money. I'll tell you I you know, I mean, I know a lot of people who have they have a lot of money. They don't know where to put it. They don't know where to put it that it's actually going to make a difference there. They're by and large dissatisfied where, where they have to put it. So a lot of them end up just sticking it on the name of a big, you know, $50 million law school building, because at least they can see, well, there's a building there.
• 30:47
  Dan Pallotta: And it's got my name on it, you know, because we're not very good at packaging, dreams in Health and Human Services. And we got to get much better at packaging dreams and Health and Human Services, the way Harvard is good at packaging a new science center, because higher education is eating the lunch of Health and Human Services, because they're dreaming much bigger than we are. Yeah,
• 31:12
  Becky Endicott: and to think that this could all start with just doing exactly with what you did, if we could just step out on that stage just a little bit.
• 31:18
  Becky Endicott: And maybe the stage is just across the seat from your donor in their office or on zoom, and just literally launched the scale of our dreams. In those words, if that could inspire someone to not only give, but to lean in. I have to think and I'm an idealist. So I probably would think this, that so much good can come from that. Because when you're leaned into the dream, you understand that it's going to take everybody pouring into it. We've got to be inclusive in those spaces. Our number one core value of our company is everyone matters. We've got to make a seat at the table. We talk about the board's we don't want to bore them. No, we don't.
• 31:58
  Becky Endicott: But we also want our boards to be representative of the populations we're serving. If somebody is not at that table, and we're sitting there, we need to scooch over and give them a space. I'd also think that other things would come from it greater potential for risk capital, if they see that you have these creative ideas that are actually building traction in a very untraditional way, then they're going to give you more more leg room more of a runway to keep trying more things. We talk about throwing spaghetti at the wall, we've got to just try stuff in the sector.
• 32:28
  Becky Endicott: And I am just geeking out over everything that you're saying.
• 32:33
  Becky Endicott: And I know we have a million questions that we're not getting to because we're just talking to Dan, which is amazing. So sorry, john, go ahead. Well, I
• 32:41
  Jonathan McCoy: mean, Dan has had a lot of dreams. But one of them I would love to dive into is this. You started the charity Defense Council. And I know your endgame was not to create a council your endgame was to change the way the media and the public views things like overhead in the nonprofit space sets a huge, audacious dream.
• 32:58
  Jonathan McCoy: And maybe it's even bigger than that. But could you give us the background of that organization?
• 33:03
  Jonathan McCoy: and How are y'all activating on that now?
• 33:06
  Dan Pallotta: Yeah, well, it was basically after I wrote on charitable, which was a book about the problem. I wanted to write a book about, what's the solution? Well, if the problem is the general public, has all the wrong ideas about charity, then you got to change the way the general public thinks about charity. Now, leaders and thought leaders in the sector, they've started to come around to the idea that inside the sector, we think about it all wrong. And so it's very insular.
• 33:35
  Dan Pallotta: So we issue press releases to one another, hey, we're thinking about this all wrong. But we never go outside the walls of the castle to the general public. And that's where it's all happening. So I've always felt like, you know, the hell with the internal stuff. Let's go out to the people, you know, the people that are driving down the street, right now. And when you look at that, like the answer is change the way the public thinks. And you look at the sector, you see, it is devoid of any of the tools that you use for movement building, it doesn't have an ad agency, it doesn't have a legal defense fund. It doesn't have a legislative agenda. It doesn't have an anti defamation force.
• 34:17
  Dan Pallotta: It doesn't have a database of all of the people who work in the sector. There's no database of the 10 million people employed in the nonprofit sector. We've never taken out a full page ad in the New York Times, taking out an ad on the Superbowl Superbowl to tell the general public what we do. We have you know, every community has a legal defense fund. We don't have anything like that.
• 34:40
  Dan Pallotta: So we're so so the charity Defense Council is about, well, let's put some of those. Let's put some of those things in place. And you know, I, I kind of go where the love is and you know that the charity Defense Council is alive. And you know, it's been really hard to get structural funding for it because people people want to fund poor children. Well, you're always gonna have poor children if you don't solve these structural issues here. So right now, in fact, I was just on a on a zoom before I hopped on this with Steven Gyllenhaal, who is directing the new documentary that I have coming out on my book on charitable it'll be out in June and it's going to be a very powerful tool is going to be more powerful than TED talk and Darren Walker's in in who's the head of the Ford Foundation, Billy shore, who created No Kid Hungry Chris Anderson, who runs Ted and Edward Norton, the actor who started crowdrise, Katie hood was the former CEO of the Michael J. Fox foundation. It's a really powerful documentary film with real world examples of how this dysfunctional thinking screws things up.
• 35:50
  Becky Endicott: Can't wait. So I want to ask you about a moment of philanthropy. You've had so many incredible opportunities to work with nonprofits in your lifetime. What is a moment in philanthropy a story that deeply moved you that you might share with our community today?
• 36:10
  Dan Pallotta: Well, you know, we had 182,000 people ride or walk in one of the AIDS rides or breast cancer three days or out of the darkness, suicide prevention walks, and so I mean, more stories than I could ever tell you of heroic people who were terrified of, you know, riding their bikes across Alaska or across Texas or across Montana. You know, my dad rode across the Continental Divide with me when he was 65 years old in the Montana aids vaccine, right? My mom's a breast cancer survivor, walk three days and 60 miles with me and my sisters in the breast cancer three day.
• 36:45
  Dan Pallotta: It's just it's those kinds of stories of average, people in ragtag outfits have all kinds of breathing dimensions and rear ends of all with Sue, you know, didn't look like Lance Armstrong and, and committed themselves to these brave endeavors. Each of those is an act of philanthropy.
• 37:05
  Dan Pallotta: Philanthropy comes from the, the Latin and Philo's anther post for love of humanity. And so you don't need to be a billionaire.
• 37:14
  Dan Pallotta: To be a philanthropist. You do something sacrificial in the name of others. You know, you sacrifice your body, your reputation. That's philanthropy.
• 37:22
  Dan Pallotta: I wrote a blog once for Harvard Business Review. I used to write regularly for them and Steve Jobs was being attacked while he was alive, is he going to give enough money away to charity and I wrote a piece called Steve Jobs world's greatest world's greatest philanthropist, because of what he contributed to humanity, you know, because of his love of humanity, his desire to democratize desktop publishing, and movies and photographs and music. So yeah, my stories I've seen people give away 10s of millions of dollars in a moment. I've seen I've seen billionaires do it but but my, my stories are the ones of the average people, you know, carpenters and nurses and a average people who took it upon themselves on top of everything else that was going on in their lives to do something philanthropically heroic for AIDS or breast cancer, suicide prevention.
• 38:24
  Becky Endicott: I mean, I just sit here and think about this conversation of dreams and what you've been able to ignite through that walk, I love that you that your mom is a breast cancer survivor, that must just have been so rewarding for you to be able to pour more than$300 million into research for that it feels like a very nice love letter to your mother. But I'm really curious about your kids. And I would just think having a dad, that everybody deserves to have a dad who loves them. But having a dad who literally says, I want to give you incredible space to dream, your biggest dream, what is that like? And I'm wondering how you're infusing these ideals into the way that you are parenting and raising these three extraordinary humans?
• 39:11
  Dan Pallotta: Well, you'd have to ask them, you know, they're human beings today of human DNA.
• 39:15
  Dan Pallotta: So so for one thing, like, you know, yeah, I'm this champion of charity and making a difference in the world and my son Ryder is really into Minecraft. My daughter is in Minecraft and he's really into fortnight, and he's really into Call of Duty and my daughter Sage is a wonderful, wonderful drummer and is learning to play the guitar and is learning to play the piano. And Annalise is a wonderful writer and goes goes to CrossFit every day in is doing the CrossFit challenge with all of these adults and I encourage them to dream their biggest dreams and they're they're haunted by the human condition by the by the narrative that says I'm not good enough I'm not strong enough I couldn't do that. So we all battle that no matter who your father is, maybe even you know, if your father is someone who's achieved a big dream maybe maybe those demons are even louder. I I tried to make them aware of the voice in their heads and and that that's not them. That that's something other than that. They do they are is is the listener right who they are is the context for their lives, whether it's getting through Well, we'll just have to say I have enough trouble trying to get it through to my own head.
• 40:38
  Becky Endicott: We hear that I mean, Dan has triplets john has suit two sets of twins. I just feel like I'm feeling like I'm not contributing much to this conversation with my singles.
• 40:48
  Becky Endicott: Yes. So.
• 40:49
  Jonathan McCoy: So dad, we ask all of our guests and man, I'm prepping for this one. What's your one good thing? summing up all the advice you could impart on our listeners, what's something that you could say you could do this today? What's one good thing?
• 41:03
  Dan Pallotta: There's a line in a James Taylor song, which I I love and I sing it in May. It's called jolly springtime. And there's the line where he says, everybody say got to live in today. Don't nobody know how.
• 41:15
  Dan Pallotta: And I think it's realize that life is happening right now. It isn't happening when this podcast is over. And you get to apply the ideas. It isn't happening. When you go get your dream impact job. It isn't happening when we convinced the world not to think about over it. It's happening right now.
• 41:35
  Dan Pallotta: That's all you got. That's all you got is right now it's all you ever had. It's all you're ever gonna have is right now. So if you're not here, right now, if you're not living right now, if you're not happy right now, if it's always off in the distance, that's the that's the greatest mistake you can make.
• 41:53
  Dan Pallotta: And I think as a culture, we're really bad at being. And it's almost that we're getting worse, that we're getting better and better at doing. And you I mean, for all of the importance of it in the value of it. You look at whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, you look at the obsession with political discussion right now. It's all off in the future. It's all doing, it's all doing. It's all hating on other people. It's all it's all this projection, this cinematic projection in our mind. And who was it Seneca that said all all of all of humankind's problems come from people's inability to sit quietly alone in a room. And I believe that, you know, like, you get you start jonesing out if you just have to be, right, it's just not natural to us to just be just sit here and do nothing. And feel the wood on your hands. And the temperature on your face and the pressure of the chair on your legs. Just sit here and be shut up. You got nothing to contribute. Just be I think that'd be that'd be my one good thing.
• 43:13
  Becky Endicott: I think that was such a beautiful Manifesto. We didn't talk about the fact that Dan inspired john and i to write our first organizational Manifesto. 10 years ago, the I think it was 10 years ago in our in our healthcare organization.
• 43:27
  Becky Endicott: And we wrote one and we've even written one for here it was the flag. Yeah, if you just think the manifesto concept is so great. But I love what you're saying. Because I think it's an incredible way to just tie up this amazing conversation. We've had a conversation about equalizing, and about and not even coming down. I don't mean to come down as equalized. I mean for us to rise up. And I think that this notion of do something, and not even just rewrite this narrative for nonprofit, I would say, look inside yourself, what is the narrative? What is your brand?
• 44:02
  Becky Endicott: What do people say about you as a human being? How are you living your truth, and step up and be the person that you want to be? And step out be a champion for the cause that you are so passionate about? Maybe your mother is a breast cancer survivor, you know, maybe you have somebody who's fighting through something right now, be their champion, you can do that in the space that you are, you can do it with your voice, you can do it with your resources, you can do it with your volunteerism. And I'm telling you we all know in our living proof that charities need us that nonprofits need us that social good needs us that entrepreneurs need us. And so thank you, Dan, for being the great equalizer for seeing every single human and being the scrappy, same little boy that was watching the coverage of NASA with on wonder and the fact that you have followed your wanderlust to innovate. The sector is one of the greatest legacies, I think that anybody could give.
• 45:02
  Dan Pallotta: Thank you. Thank you both very much for for having me. It's been a pleasure to have the conversation and I I salute what it is that you're up to in the world.
• 45:12
  Becky Endicott: Thank you in our, in our thanks to our dear friend Matthew Zachary, my New York brother from another mother for making this connection and encouraging us to be rebels. We felt like we found a fellow disrupter there so it's good to be around my like minded friends.
• 45:27
  Jonathan McCoy: Dan, what's the best way people can connect with you online and follow all your good work?
• 45:32
  Dan Pallotta: Yeah, go to danpallotta.com and you can get in touch with me there. You can buy a kit you can buy a book you can buy both training you can buy human can be both t shirt.
• 45:42
  Dan Pallotta: You can you know, danpallotta.com is the best way to be in touch.
• 45:46
  Jonathan McCoy: So this has been amazing.
• 45:47
  Becky Endicott: Yeah. Thank you for coming. Dan. We're so glad to know you and amplify your great work.
• 45:52
  Dan Pallotta: You're welcome.
• 45:52
  Dan Pallotta: Happy spring
• 45:53
  Unknown: right back at you.
• 45:55
  Jonathan McCoy: Thanks so much for listening to today's conversation with Dan. We hope it inspired you to explore the full potential of your humanity and consider how to dream even bigger. I hope you hear it in our voices. But we love connecting you with the most innovative people to help you achieve more for your mission than ever before. We'd love for you to come join the good community. It's free and you can think of it as the after party to every podcast episode. It's our own social network and you can sign up for free at we're for good calm slash Hello. One more thing. If you love what you heard today, would you mind leaving us a podcast rating and review? It means the world to us and Your support helps more people find this community.
• 46:24
  Jonathan McCoy: Thanks friends. Our production hero is a creative rebel in our own right Julie Confer Hello and our theme song is sunray by Renee boys boom, Iraq this week do gooders