-
Case Study - Pallotta TeamWorks
- University Press of New England
- Chapter
- Additional Information
one line long CASE STUDY— PALLOTTA TEAMWORKS Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing at all. —helen keller Centuries after the Puritans arrived in New England, I found myself trapped by their beliefs, caught between my desire to do good and my desire to build an economic future for myself. I grew up in Malden, Massachusetts , settled by Puritans in 1640 on land purchased, in 1629, from the Pawtucket Indians.1 I was one of those few lucky human beings whose first years on the planet coincided with the primes of Martin Luther King, John and Robert Kennedy, Neil Armstrong, and with the landing of the Eagle on the Sea of Tranquility, all at pretty much the same time. The spirits of these individuals animated my imagination and left me hungry to do something to make a difference. Their words gave rise to new possibilities for the kind of world we could all create together. They stood in sharp contrast to the dreary images of bloodied Vietnam soldiers I saw on Walter Cronkite’s news—images that I didn’t understand, but that depressed me and spoke of an indifferent world where things dragged on, nothing ever changed, and all life was resignation. Years later, while I was still in college, I had an opportunity. From 1979 to 1982, I was the chair of the undergraduate Harvard Hunger Action Committee, and I was frustrated by the puny fundraisers we did to bring in a thousand dollars here and there through largely symbolic onemeal fasts on campus. The summer before my senior year, an idea came to me on the radio; I heard about two guys bicycling across America for cancer research. I knew instantly that was the kind of scale I had been seeking. The next summer, thirty-nine of us spent nine and a half weeks 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Pallotta:Uncharitable page 189 190 Case Study—PallottaTeamWorks bicycling 4,256 miles from Seattle to Boston to raise money to combat and heighten awareness of world hunger. We raised about $80,000, and when we rode back into Boston at the end of our long journey, I think we all felt we had exhausted the full measure of our potential. Pallotta TeamWorks began in the early 1990s with a single event that was a response to the AIDS epidemic and the loss of many of my friends.2 At the time, the epidemic was nearing its height in the United States. Close to fifty thousand Americans were dying every year. I was meeting the parents of my young friends for the first time at their sons’ memorial services in the Hollywood hills homes of their surviving friends. It was the age before protease inhibitors. A friend would tell you he’d just found out he was HIV positive. Three weeks later he’d have symptoms of AIDS, and five months later he’d be dead. And there was nothing the average person could do that could match the scale of their grief. By 1993, I had been mulling over the idea of a bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles for a few years, and I finally decided to refine it. We called it California AIDSRide. We brought the idea to the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center, which provided seed funding, among other things, and served as beneficiary.3 We didn’t market the event to cyclists. We marketed it to average people from all walks of life who had it in them to do something epic and extraordinary. Each registrant had to agree to ride for seven days, rain or shine, sleep in a tent, and raise a minimum of $2,000 for the privilege. Our later ads said, “I’m not an athlete, I’m not a cyclist, but I’d climb Mount Everest to make a difference in the fight against AIDS.” Most of the riders hadn’t been on a bike in years. Most didn’t even own one. In the years that followed, we...