David Fenton

President, Fenton Communications

David Fenton, named as “One of the 100 most influential P.R. people of the 20th Century” by PR Week magazine, founded Fenton Communications in 1982 to create public relations campaigns for the environment, public health and human rights. Over more than two decades, he has pioneered the use of professional P.R. and advertising techniques by non-profit public interest groups in the United States.

Fenton Communications, the nation’s largest public interest communications firm, has over 75 employees spread among three offices – in New York, Washington, and San  Francisco. Some of Fenton’s better-known campaigns include aiding the rise of MoveOn.org, the banning of the pesticide Alar in apples and the subsequent rise of the organic market, a decade of assistance to Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, successfully organizing the nation’s top chefs to save swordfish nursing areas (the “Give Swordfish a Break” campaign), working with Al Gore and the United Nations on climate change, and many others.

Fenton is also a co-founder of four non-profit organizations: Environmental Media Services, which coordinates communications for environmental groups; New Economy Communications, which works on human and labor rights in the global economy; the Death Penalty Information Center; and The American Freedom Campaign (www.americanfreedomcampaign.org ) which he founded with writer Naomi Wolf and MoveOn.org co-founder Wes Boyd to help protect the Constitution from the abuse of power.

Fenton started his career as a photojournalist in the late 1960s – his books “Shots: An American Photographer’s Journal” was published in 2005 (www.shots1960s.com ). He was formerly director of public relations at Rolling Stone magazine and co-producer of the “No-Nukes” concerts in 1979 with Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and other artists. He is a native of New York City where he lives with his two children.