Dan Pallotta, the US fundraiser and charity sector activist, is organising a three-day march in the States next June to raise awareness of the non-profit sector and funds to promote and defend its work.

The Charity Defense (sic) Council, an organisation set up by Pallotta to champion the work that charities do and inform the public about the realities of running a modern charity, is urging charity workers and supporters everywhere to join “the largest demonstration of the sector, by the sector, and for the sector in the history of the sector”.

The Charity Defense March will last three days from 26 to 28 June 2015 and cover 60 miles from Maine to Salem, Massachusetts.  It aims to raise $1m to launch the Charity Defense Council and fund its first year of operation.

The website for the march states: “There have been a thousand walks for a hundred causes, but never a march for the causes of causes itself. Never a demonstration by the sector to raise money and raise consciousness in order to change the way people think about changing the world.

“This is a march – cooperative not competitive, activist not athletic – three days and 60 miles long – for anyone and everyone who works in the charitable sector, from executive directors to social workers, and for anyone who supports them.

“It’s for the people who get labelled ‘overhead’ and the people who rely on them. This is your tribe. This is your root cause. Because these are the issues that stand in the way of our potential to impact the causes we work on everyday. If we don’t take a stand for ourselves, a stand will never be taken.”

Pallotta established the Charity Defense Council after making the case for its existence in his second book, Charity Case.  He argued that the sector ought collectively to spend millions of pounds on advertising and PR to educate the public to judge charities by their achievements, not by their admin costs.

His contention, outlined in his first book, Uncharitable, is that charities are constrained from being able to solve the world’s most intractable problems because of outdated attitudes about the concept of charity and how it should operate.

His controversial solutions provide that charities should be able to operate under exactly the same rules as private companies: paying staff whatever it takes to attract the best talent; advertising as freely as they wish in order to generate wider awareness and raise more money, and raising capital on the stock market.

His second book took these ideas on and mooted the creation of a body that would champion the cause of the non-profit sector; protecting charities against unfair media criticism, running national ad campaigns on its behalf, acting as a legal defence force for the sector, and organising the sector so its voice is properly heard.

Pallotta’s 2013 TED talk on the subject, entitled ‘The way we think about charity is dead wrong’, has been viewed over 3.1 million times.

The Charity Defense Council has already gained traction in the US, attracting signatory support from more than 1,000 people including many charity leaders, and raising over $150,000 to date which has enabled it to hire three staff and run some ad campaigns.  But the march aims to enable the organisation to scale up significantly, both in terms of money and awareness.

• The September edition of Charity Finance contains several articles about public perceptions of the UK voluntary sector and what could be done to educate people about how it really works.  Click here to order your copy.