| David Dawley has worked in business, government and social services as a company president, consultant to Fortune 500 companies, lobbyist, community organizer, special assistant to a Governor and Peace Corps Volunteera tour.
His work has built bridges between different racial, class and professional groups and has been recognized by two U.S. Presidents with appointments to the National Advisory Council of the Peace Corps and the White House Conference on Small Business. In 1968, Esquire Magazine selected him as one of "Twenty Seven People Worth Saving," and in 1974, the Governor of Massachusetts nominated him as one of Greater Boston's "Ten Outstanding Young Leaders."
After graduating from Dartmouth College, Dawley became a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Honduras where he worked in community development. To stimulate self-help problem solving, he organized townspeople to build a health clinic and traveled by mule to support literacy programs and develop credit unions. In special projects, he organized the first interscholastic track and field competition in Honduras and wrote, "The Barefoot Runners," a manual of organization. With other volunteers, he initiated a regional movement of campesinos that involved road building and other cooperative projects that became a platform for advocating social change.
In graduate school at the University of Michigan, he was an activist for civil rights, founding chairman of Action for Human Rights and the first registered lobbyist for the Michigan Council of Social Work. He was featured in “Eyes On The Prize” as a witness to the birth of “black power,” a new force in the struggle for civil rights.
During the late Sixties, in a period of national trauma, a time of two worlds: one black, one white, he was an organizer with the Vice Lords, a black street gang of several thousand members on the West Side of Chicago. His work defied skeptics by demonstrating that the thrown out, left out, dropped out, most violent and "irredeemable" could accomplish what few thought was possible
. The Vice Lords chose to build, not burn, and what they built became a national model of community, economic and political development that lowered the crime rate in Chicago's most violent neighborhoods. Mr. Dawley became known as "the only white Vice Lord" and later wrote the autobiography of the gang, A Nation Of Lords. This work was featured on The History Channel’s “Street Gangs: A Secret History.”
While in Chicago, Dawley was a founding organizer of Youth Organizations United, a national coalition of street youth groups, and founding Vice Chairman of The Independent Foundation, a national coalition of former Peace Corps and Vista volunteers.
In the early Seventies, he wrote "Double Standard," a report on the Chicago Police Department from transcripts of hearings conducted by the Black Legislators of Illinois, and after riots in Attica, he wrote a report on prison reform in Massachusetts for the Governor's Committee on Corrections and then served as Special Assistant to the Governor for policy and administration.
He then joined and later became president of a closely held manufacturing company. After selling the company, he worked as Associate Director and later Acting Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations for Dartmouth College where he developed a congressional appropriation that, at the time, was the largest grant in the history of the college.
At Dartmouth, he served as trustee and adviser to Casque & Gauntlet, a senior honorary society, adviser to the Ivy League champion Tae Kwon Do club, Treasurer and Steward of the Friends of Dartmouth Rowing and member of the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility. In addition, he conceived and developed a Peace Corps Internship, the first Peace Corps short term service opportunity for college undergraduates - a model that received the Peace Corps "Leader for Peace" award and became a national project sponsored by Campus Compact. Currently, he is a member of the Board of Visitors of The Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences.
Later, he founded The National Center for Gang Policy and served as an advisor to the Youth Gang Drug Prevention Program in the United States Department of Health and Human Resources and to the U.S. Department of Justice. Dawley has developed cause-related marketing programs for Special Olympics International, assisted NIKE in developing a strategy for inner city philanthropy and advised RJR Nabisco in the design and implementation of NEXT CENTURY SCHOOLS, a corporate grants program intended to stimulate radical change in K-12 public education.
As President of Dawley Hutchins,a consulting practice, he has assisted technology companies and government relations firms with strategic alliances and business development. This activity has resulted in business-to-business partnerships and millions of dollars of federal appropriations for universities, hospitals and nonprofit organizations as well as successful lobbying programs for corporate and municipal clients. He is currently Senior Consultant to Patton Boggs, a public policy law firm that has the largest lobbying practice in Washington, D.C., and Advisor to Lighting Science Group, a company that manufactures and markets energy efficient LED lighting. Previously, he was Senior Advisor to SynapticMash, an educational software company that was sold in 2010.
Internationally, having lived and worked in Honduras and traveled extensively in Central and South America, Mr. Dawley understands and appreciates Latin cultures. In business, he has counseled the principals of a Korean manufacturing company, facilitated contracts in Africa to the benefit of both private companies and sovereign nations and as President of Cassidy Middle East represented Cassidy and Associates as co-founder and Managing Director of TransGulf, a joint venture that assisted clients in the Arab Middle East.
Mr. Dawley received his A.B. at Dartmouth College, M.S.W. at the University of Michigan and is an alumnus of OPM at the Harvard Business School. He has coached rowing, run the Boston Marathon and earned an instrument-rated private pilot license. He is a certified professional ski instructor and black belt national champion in Tae Kwon Do.
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