Pallotta TeamWorks is an idea. It is an experiment. It is an experiment that is working. We stand for the principles of social justice and imagination that were espoused by Robert and John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Helen Keller, and Walt Disney. We believe in kindness, compassion, and magic. We are in a constant state of evolution, and our enterprise will never be complete. Our commitment is to be of service first, and to offer our intelligence and our talent in service of that which we perceive as being wanted and needed in the world.

We are built on three fundamental theses. First, that our problems are made by humans, therefore they can be solved by humans, and that no problem is too great to be beyond the scope our capacity of our dreams and abilities as a species. Our events are an experiment in which small groups of dedicated citizens can witness first-hand the awesome power of a united group of compassionate people. From this platform, eventually, people can see that war is not an inevitability. Hunger is not an inevitability. Crime is not an inevitability. We are larger than these things. Much larger. To the degree that we do not see that, these problems minimize us. To the degree that we do see it, we have the capacity to minimize them into nonexistence.

Second, we believe that human beings are basically dreaming creatures -- that what distinguishes us from all of God's other creatures is our ability to achieve the impossible. Gravity says that things fall, but human beings go buzzing around in airplanes in abject defiance of that "fact." Elephants run a mile. But they do not after that seek to run faster than the previous elephant. Only human beings try to break their own records. But we have forgotten our dreaming essence. We provide experiences that allow individuals to remember -- to move beyond their own perceived limits and boundaries -- to move out of their safe harbors into the great unknown sea of their potential, all in the name of service to others.

Third, we believe in the simple power of kindness. Our events are laboratories where people get to experiment rigorously with kindness. They are places where people help one another pitch their tents and fix their flats -- where people give up their spot in the dinner line to let someone who's getting in late get to a meal a little faster. On one of our events, a rider came up to us and said, "I fixed 11 flats on this Ride, and none of them were my own." We believe that when people in the world start fixing flats that are not their own, that is when we will have the experience that the world has changed. When people start saying "hello" to strangers in the grocery store, that is when we will feel as if the world has changed. Government cannot do that. Policy cannot do that. The simple power of kindness can, and we seek to spread it, inside of our events, and, as we grow, well beyond those walls out into the world.

In addition, we are doing all of this as a highly professional business, utilizing the best business marketing, management, and strategic practices. Industrial altruism and compassion. Commercial kindness and possibility. We are bringing powerful business dynamics to a world that was previously limited to traditional not-for-profit parameters. This is a paradigm shift. It is a huge change. We believe that the great causes of the world need and deserve the most talented minds in America, and that they need to be outfitted with the most powerful tools available. We don't believe that the brightest most enthusiastic spirits coming out of our colleges and universities should be faced with a mutually exclusive choice between their altruism and their security needs. We believe they ought to be able to work on the world's greatest problems and do as well as their friends in business, medicine, and law. Further, we don't believe that the AIDSRides compete with the AIDS Walks. Rather, we believe that the AIDSRides and AIDS Walks together are competing with everything else that vies for the consumers attention -- we're competing, in the final analysis, with BMW, Apple, Coca-Cola, and Universal Studios, and we must enter the arena at least as well prepared as they.

We use imagination, innovation, and a lot of internal brainstorming, in much the same way a motion picture studio would, or a theme park design team would, to conceive event concepts that will be extremely challenging, and that will allow several thousand individuals to bond together in a common effort that will leave them transformed with respect to what they can achieve, and with respect to what a group can achieve when the people are working with one another, instead of against one another, in a spirit of cooperation, support, and kindness. We then create the events through an intense budget-design, marketing design, and logistics design process. When the events are done, we unveil them to the public, usually in one city, and then expand them to other cities around the nation as appropriate.