Dan Pallotta

Entrepreneur, author, & humanitarian activist

Dan Pallotta invented the multi-day charitable event industry with the AIDS Rides and Breast Cancer 3-Days. These events altered the landscape of options for ordinary individuals seeking to make an extraordinary difference.

Dan is the author of Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential. The Stanford Social Innovation Review said that it "deserves to become the nonprofit sector's new manifesto," and which contributed to a new conversation about economic freedom for the humanitarian sector. His newest book is Charity Case: How the Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up for Itself and Really Change the World. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. described it as, "An Apollo program for American philanthropy and the nonprofit sector."

Dan is the founder and Chief Humanity Officer of Advertising for Humanity, a full-service brand and inspiration agency for the humanitarian sector. He is also founder and President of the Charity Defense Council, a new national leadership movement dedicated to transforming the way the donating public thinks about charity and change.

His iconic TED Talk has been viewed nearly 3.5 million times and is one of the top 50 most-viewed TED Talks of all time.

Emily Pilloton

Educator, architect, & humanitarian design activist

Emily Pilloton founded Project H in 2008, believing deeply in the power of design and building to excite learning and citizenship. Her first crush, MacGyver, sparked her love of constrained problem-solving and tinkering. She went on to study architecture and building because it was the one thing that allowed her to geek out about everything, from math and structural engineering to ethnography and the fascinating behavior of people.

In 2010, Emily moved to rural Bertie County, in North Carolina, to engage in a bold experiment of design-led community transformation. She's teaching a design-build class called Studio H that engages high schoolers' minds and bodies while bringing smart design and new opportunities to the poorest county in the state.

Emily believes that by giving youth, particularly girls and students of color, the skills to design and build their wildest ideas, we can support the next generation of creative, confident changemakers.

Her ideas and work have made their way to the TED Stage, The Colbert Report, the New York Times, the cover of MAKE magazine, and more. She is the author of two books, Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, and Tell Them I Built This: Transforming Schools, Communities, and Lives with Design-Based Education.

Adam Braun

Entrepreneur, author, & philanthropist

Adam Braun is a New York Times bestselling author and the Founder of Pencils of Promise, an award-winning organization that has broken ground on more than 250 schools around the world. He has been named to Business Insider’s “40 Under 40,” Wired Magazine’s “50 People Who Are Changing the World,” and was selected as one of the World Economic Forum’s first ten Global Shapers. He has also been a featured speaker at The White House, United Nations, and Clinton Global Initiative.

Braun began working summers at hedge funds when he was just sixteen years old, sprinting down the path to a successful Wall Street career. He started his college career as a Division 1 basketball player, but while traveling abroad he met a young boy begging on the streets of India. When Braun asked him what he wanted most in the world, he simply answered, “a pencil.”

This small request became the inspiration for Pencils of Promise, the organization Braun would leave Bain & Company several years later to start with just $25. Using his unique “for-purpose” approach, he meshed for-profit business acumen with non-profit idealism and in doing so created a leading organization in the global education space, proving that anyone can start a movement that matters.

Adam's book The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change debuted at #2 on the New York Times Bestseller list and went on to become a #1 national bestseller.