National Compassionate Leadership Week runs September 6 through 12 this year. The TramutoPorter Foundation, which Donato Tramuto co-founded with Jeff Porter, established the week in 2022. The premise holds up. Leaders get better results when they lead with empathy, and compassion belongs at the center of how we work.
Donato has spent a career making that case, in boardrooms and in villages, and Flawless got to see it up close this summer. We want to mark the week by introducing the person behind it.
Donato lays out his argument in his 2022 book, The Double Bottom Line: How Compassionate Leaders Captivate Hearts and Deliver Results, written with Tami Booth Corwin. He treats compassion as strategy. Caring for people, he shows, produces stronger teams and better outcomes, so the choice between profit and humanity is a false one. He calls it a double bottom line: results and compassion together. To ground the claim, he interviewed nearly 40 leaders and surveyed 1,500 people about compassion at work (including our Flawless Founder, Janine Francolini).
His definition is short. “Compassionate leadership is empathy in action,” he says. It is no longer enough to tell someone you feel their pain. You have to do something about it. He offers a model he calls the Three T’s: start with tenderness, add tenacity, and be ready to make tough decisions. Lead with tenderness first, he argues, and you keep the trust you need when the hard calls come.
We saw that philosophy in practice on July 30, when more than 200 people gathered at Camp Sunshine in Casco, Maine, to celebrate Donato and his twin brother Daniel’s 70th birthdays, and 25 years of the TramutoPorter Foundation. Donato could have marked the milestone anywhere. He chose a summer camp for children living with serious illness, a place that reflects how he thinks about care.
The foundation grew out of loss. In September 2001, Donato was set to fly to Los Angeles with his friends Ron Gamboa and Dan Brandhorst and their three-year-old son, David. A toothache moved him to an earlier flight. His friends boarded United Flight 175 the next day and died when it struck the South Tower. Donato and Jeff turned that grief into the foundation and gave its first scholarship in David’s memory. In 25 years, the foundation has supported the education of more than 100 young adults and backed health and human rights programs across the United States and beyond.
Donato used the birthday to look ahead. He and the foundation committed multimillion-dollar endowments for education, hearing equity, health, and human rights. Beginning in 2027, the foundation will name a new four-year, $30,000 Compassionate Leadership Scholarship for Mary Kelleher, a board member who recently passed away. Camper Tyler Claussen, who lost part of his hearing during chemotherapy for neuroblastoma, helped present Donato and Daniel with flags flown over the U.S. Capitol, and told the crowd that Donato inspired him never to give up. Gov. Janet Mills accepted the 2026 Compassionate Leadership of the Year Award, and Donato and Jeff gave her a framed portrait of Robert F. Kennedy taken by photographer Harry Benson.
Donato closed on an idea he returns to often. Drawing on his own losses and the life of Eleanor Roosevelt, he described hope as active work, a refusal to let darkness have the last word.
The foundation puts that idea to work again on September 11, 2026, when it joins Lasell University for a gathering called Defiant Hope in the Age of Disconnection. Educators, university leaders, and community members will spend the day on the question behind much of Donato’s work: what each of us can do when people feel disconnected and the challenges seem overwhelming. The day includes conversations on how leaders keep humanity at the center as people fold artificial intelligence into daily work, plus a session on Fred Rogers and radical kindness led by Dr. James William Lincoln of Lasell University, whose course on “Mr. Rogers” filled as soon as it opened. For a family audience, Mr. Rogers is a familiar guide. He treated kindness as something you practice on purpose, and he built his days around helping people feel seen.
Donato’s message reaches past the workplace. He treats social isolation as a health problem and describes connection as a form of medicine. For families, that hits close to home. When you check on a lonely parent or sit with a child who feels alone, you are protecting their health.
Compassionate Leadership Week is an invitation to the rest of us. You can practice what Donato models without a foundation or a title. You notice who has gone quiet and you make the call. You stay with someone through the hard part. That is empathy in action, and it is available to anyone this week.
We were thrilled to celebrate the birth of Donato and Daniel in Maine. Thank you, Donato and Jeff, for 25 years of proving that compassion is something you do. Take a look at the birthday celebration and send these Flawless friends your warmest wishes.
Watch this Flawless birthday tribute video honoring Donato Tramuto and his contributions.
