Q-MoB @ Revolutionary Film "Uncharitable" @ Mahaiwe (Great Barrington, MA)

FILM IS FREE, BUT MUST TO RESERVE YOUR SPACE:

And please register here on Eventbrite so Q-MoB can save you a space with our group.

FILMMAKER: Dan Pallotta, a gay father of 3 young children, founder of the AIDS Ride, creator of the famous on how we can revolutionize the impact of non-profit organizations, and the filmmaker behind the film "," which fleshes out his ground-breaking ideas through telling the stories of various philanthropic entrepreneurs and organizations that are chaning the world.

In a live conversation following the screening of Uncharitable, DanPallotta told the audience to “stop boring people with little ideas. ... You do not belong in Pr*son; you do not deserve to have your beautiful human intelligence and potential wasted for a lifetime in the confines of these restraints. You have every bit a right to dream as ridiculously as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are dreaming and you need to claim it.”

His Oscar-nominated documentary highlights through personal and poignant stories notable philanthropists like Steve Nardizzi, Dorri McWhorter, Scott Harrison, Edward Norton and Darren Walker. It attempts to weave a new narrative that urges a reevaluation of our giving strategies.

The film, which is being recognized as a potential manifesto for the nonprofit world, wasted no time getting deeply personal about Pallotta’s path to his innovative charity work.

“Looking at it from my age now,” Pallotta said in the film, “I just wanted to get away from something that was suffocating me.”

He came out as gay to his parents before heading west from his hometown of Boston, to which he has since returned and now lives with his husband and three children.

He landed in Los Angeles at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when young men of his age were going to an inordinate number of funerals. “You were meeting a lot of parents for the first time without their 26-year-old sons there to introduce you,” he remembered.

“There was just so much grief,” he said. The grief of his friends, the grief that lived in thousands of people in the gay community in West Hollywood that he didn’t even know, of people in other major American cities, let alone in the rest of the world.

“And I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t anything the average person could do about AIDS. You know, you could stick a red ribbon on your jacket.” But that just wasn’t pushing the needle.

“And I said to my friends, ‘That’s it. We’re going to organize the AIDS ride,’” he said.

That deeply personal mission, a ride for a cure, was the start of the multi-day, charitable-event industry that Pallotta invented. He also created the Breast Cancer 3-Day walks that, combined with the multi-day AIDS Rides long-distance cycling journeys, raised more than half a billion dollars in nine years and were the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.

Pallotta’s work was groundbreaking. It showed people that you could convert an activity that is not traditionally associated with fundraising into fundraising to support a nonprofit. You could turn a race into a fundraiser. You could turn almost anything into a fundraiser.

Pallotta said he and his team at Pallotta TeamWorks Company were riding a wave of positivity through their work and looking to expand and do even more, “until a reporter began to stir up some trouble.”

A narrative began to spread that Pallotta and his team were only giving 30% of the money donated to riders and walkers, which Pallotta described as “recklessly not factual.” The truth, he said, was that 100% of the money they raised went directly to the charities into bank lockboxes that the charities controlled and out of which they paid a small TeamWorks fee, which was 4% of revenues, not 70% as falsely stated by the media.

Pallotta went on to say that all the actual numbers were posted transparently on the TeamWorks website and still are. Despite all that, their sponsors cut them off and wanted to distance themselves from the nonprofit because “we were being crucified in the media for investing in recruitment and customer service … and in this demonic label of ‘overhead.’”

And so began, said Pallotta, the unfair narrative that has existed for too long in the nonprofit sector, a burden that charities worldwide have had to bear.

While he believes that we can change things quickly in the charity sector, it must be in service of a dream.

“What’s your north star, what do you want to achieve and by when?” he asked the audience. “That’s why we are doing this work. We want to solve problems. Let that north star guide you and you can figure out how these tools can be employed to help you.”

CARPOOLING/RIDE-SHARE: Carpooling is a great way to get to know other men, save money on gas, and help to reduce your carbon footprint and save the planet. If you need a ride or are open to carpooling, please indicate that when you are registering, & our ride coordinator will try to match you with people nearby who are interested in carpooling or offering rides.

OR : Please donate $10-$20 to help assure Q-MoB can continue to offer more than 20 activities & multiple resources & services to rural queer men all over the region. If you attend 2 or more Q-MoB events/month, please consider becoming a monthly sustaining donor member. By donating $25, $50, $75, or $100/month you can help to sustain the incredible variety of activities, services, and resources Q-MoB provides and assure all of these activities are accessible to men regardless of their age, income, or ability, and best of all you can avoid having to donate at each and every event you attend. Monthly Sustaining Members pay only once a month and then can attend all our activities with no further donation.

REACHING US DAY OF EVENT: If you will be late, can't attend, or have trouble finding our group, please call/text Bart at 503-734-6508

Host or Publisher Q-MoB (Queer Men of the Berkshires)