Dan Bennett is a nonresident senior fellow with the Millennium Leadership Program (MLP) the Atlantic Council’s center for global leadership. He co-founded MLP in 2015 and served as its Director from 2017 to 2020, building the center’s flagship program for future leaders – the Millennium Fellowship. Currently, he serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the Amani Institute, an award-winning leadership development, training, and education nonprofit that offers both global programs for leaders of all ages and sectors, as well as local and immersive travel programs through its offices in Kenya, Brazil, and India.

Dan’s leadership development background includes executive coaching, Design Thinking/Human-Centered Design, psychometrics and assessments, Adaptive Leadership, and building peer-mentor communities. As a coach, program leader, and facilitator, Dan has worked with leaders in over 80 countries across business, government, and civil society. In the public and nonprofit sectors, this includes senior government and elected officials ranging from White House staff to mayors and ministers as well as award-winning artists, authors, activists, scientists, and academics. In the private sector, Dan has served as a partner in leadership development for CEOs and start-up founders as well as senior leadership at fortune 500 firms including Google, Facebook, PayPal, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Airbus, and many others. He has supported or led immersion programs in over twenty countries since 2011, including in the Syrian border region of Turkey at the height of the refugee crisis; Kyiv, Ukraine after the 2016 Revolution of Dignity; rural Colombia, Bogota, and Medellin after the FARC peace deal; Sarajevo, Bosnia on the 25th Anniversary of the Dayton Accords; across India and Pakistan to explore cross-border entrepreneurship; and throughout Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Beyond the Amani Institute and the Atlantic Council, in 2019 Dan founded Stepping Stone LLC, a boutique coaching and Design Thinking practice offering affordable leadership development and innovation services to a younger generation of leaders. He is also an advisor to the Jeffrey A. McLean Foundation, a nonprofit that provides scholarship funding to offset the costs of unpaid internships for students and recent graduates without the financial support to accept an unpaid career opportunity.

Prior to the Atlantic Council, Dan worked in Cairo, Egypt coordinating advocacy programs during the Arab Spring. He earned his bachelor’s degree in international relations with a minor in Arabic at Tufts University, studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo, and is a graduate of Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership. He holds certificates in Design Thinking, executive coaching, and is certified in the Leadership Circle assessment instrument. Dan spent 13 years living in six different African Countries and currently resides outside Washington, DC. with his wife, Kristin, and two children, JJ and Olivia.