David Gershon
DAVID GERSHON is co-founder and CEO of Empowerment Institute and its initiation of the PEACE ON EARTH by 2030 (POE 2030) movement and its POE 2030 Game (https://peace2030.earth/poe-game/). David is one of the world’s foremost authorities on behavior-change and large-system transformation, and applies this expertise to issues requiring community, organizational, and societal change. His clients include cities, government agencies, large corporations, and social entrepreneurs. He has addressed a wide diversity of issues, ranging from low carbon lifestyles, livable neighborhoods, and sustainable communities to organizational talent development, corporate social engagement and cultural transformation. Over the past thirty years the empowerment programs he has designed have won many awards, and a major academic research study described them as “unsurpassed in changing behavior.” David used this empowerment proficiency to organize at the height of the cold war, in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund and ABC Television, one of the planet’s first major global consciousness-raising initiatives—the First Earth Run. Building on his background as the Director of the Lake Placid Olympic Torch Relay, he used the mythic power of relaying a torch of peace around the world to engage the participation of twenty-five million people in sixty-two countries, the world’s political leadership and, through the media, an estimated 20 percent of the planet’s population.
