[2] 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.
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 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.
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.
At Denver's invitation, Pallotta attended the singer's Windstar Foundation Program for college students in Snowmass, Colorado the next summer.
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.
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.
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.
[citation needed] 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.
[8] 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.
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.
[9][10] 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.
The model was new in that it was the first time a “thon” event came with a four-figure mandatory fundraising minimum, and was marketed on a large scale in major metropolitan media.
[citation needed] In nine years the AIDS Rides netted, after all expenses, $108 million – more money, raised more quickly for these causes than any events in history.
She brought it to Jim Preston, Avon's CEO, who signed off on the launch of the first event, which would take place in 1998 and travel from Santa Barbara to Malibu.
730 cyclists rode for six weeks from Seattle to Washington, D.C.[2] In 1999, Pallotta made a personal guarantee in order to borrow $1.1 million to launch the AIDS Vaccine Rides which would provide unrestricted dollars for maverick research at the UCLA AIDS Institute, the Aaron Diamond center and the Emory Vaccine Center.
In three years, the AIDS Vaccine Rides, conducted in Alaska, Montana, and across the Canada–US border from Montreal to Vermont, netted $8 million.
During that period, Avon announced a nationwide series of multi-day breast cancer fundraising walks, each with a four-figure pledge minimum, in many of the same cities in which the 3-Days had been conducted and, in many cases, on very similar dates.
Ultimately, the Susan G. Komen Foundation hired an event company, which was founded by former Pallotta staff, and resuscitated the 3-Day Walks, continuing to produce them through 2017.
[18] The book calls for the creation of a “Charity Defense Council” to act as a national leadership organization for the humanitarian sector in the United States.