Dan Bolsen did not begin his career with aspirations to become a bridge builder between the worlds of finance and philanthropy. But after a decade in higher education fundraising, a variety of high-stakes roles in healthcare benefits, and a career shaped by watching two powerful industries talk past each other, that is exactly what he has become.
Bolsen currently contracts as Chief Impact Officer at AffirmedRx, a Public Benefit Corporation working to transform pharmacy benefit management through transparency and patient-centered care. In addition to his role in Louisville, Bolsen works to address the disconnect between wealth management and philanthropy. A relationship with a concrete image: a grand canyon. Two sides of the same landscape, separated by a gap that most professionals on either side have little incentive to cross.
“One side is laser-focused on serving clients and families, mitigating taxation, and maximizing investment returns,” Bolsen says. “The other side is focused on connecting a donor to a cause. The person caught in the middle is the one who sees how much is being left on the table or is the person simply wanting help.”
That middle space is where Bolsen is building career-defining outcomes.
Who Is Dan Bolsen?
Dan Bolsen is an executive leader specializing in cross-sector partnerships at the intersection of philanthropy and finance. He has held senior roles in higher education advancement, healthcare benefits, and nonprofit strategy, working across institutions and industries to solve structural problems that neither side can fix alone.
His entry into philanthropy was personal, not strategic. As an undergraduate, Bolsen received the Reagan Leadership Program Fellowship to attend Eureka College in Illinois, the alma mater of President Ronald Reagan. He had been recruited for athletics at Division III and NAIA schools, but the academic scholarship made the decision easy. Benefiting from someone else’s generosity opened his eyes to what philanthropic investment actually does for a person, and that experience has shaped his thinking ever since.
Bolsen graduated cum laude from Eureka with bachelor’s degrees in Business Administration and Communication. He earned a master’s degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Recreation, Sport, and Tourism with a Sport Management focus, and is currently completing a Certificate Program in Financial Planning and Services at Boston University.
A Decade of Record-Breaking Fundraising at Purdue
Before his work in healthcare benefits, Bolsen spent ten years at the Purdue for Life Foundation, moving from frontline major gift fundraising to executive-level leadership. In his final role as Executive Director of Development for Health, Life, and Computational Sciences, he led teams across multiple academic units and partnered directly with senior university leaders and deans.
Over that decade, he helped secure nine dollar figures worth of philanthropic gifts supporting scholarships, faculty initiatives, capital priorities, research, and unrestricted funding. He is quick to put that number in context.
“The most gratifying work was finding interconnectivity between areas that had not worked closely together before,” he says. “Combining those forces opened the door to donor opportunities that simply had not existed.”
That instinct to connect systems rather than optimize any single one became the defining pattern of his advancement career. It also revealed a frustration he could not ignore: the nonprofit sector was falling behind the financial infrastructure available to it.
The Infrastructure Gap in Nonprofit Finance
Bolsen is direct about one of the most persistent failures in the sector: planned giving and estate planning capacity at smaller nonprofits. Most lack the internal infrastructure to run robust programs, which means they consistently leave some of the largest available funding opportunities untouched.
“Providing access to financial infrastructure is the work,” he says. “My goal is to connect any person, place, or group who needs it.”
The solution, in his view, is not simply hiring more staff or bringing in consultants. It is creating genuine connectivity between financial professionals who understand complex giving vehicles and nonprofit professionals who need them. Charitable remainder trusts, charitable lead trusts, donor-advised funds, blended gift structures: the professionals who best understand these instruments tend to migrate toward the for-profit sector, widening the gap further.
“The only way to overcome the growing knowledge gap is to get all the expert voices in the room together,” Bolsen says. “Each contributing within their niche. That is how viable paths forward get built.”
How Dan Bolsen Thinks About Performance and Impact
One of the more practical tensions Bolsen observes is how to balance investment performance with mission-driven outcomes. He uses the typical campus endowment model to make the point concrete. A $50,000 endowment, managed at a standard 4% distribution rate, generates a $2,000 annual spending account. The philanthropic impact happens at the spending level. The corpus stays invested, compounding future potential.
“There is real innovation possible within that model,” he says. “Modernized approaches on the investment side, realistic expectations on the nonprofit side. Balancing performance and impact is where the biggest opportunity lives.”
That framing, performance in service of impact, carries through to his current work in healthcare benefits. At AffirmedRx, Bolsen applies the same systems-level thinking to pharmacy benefit management, an industry he sees as structurally ready for the kind of reinvention he helped drive in higher education. He previously held a similar role at Bowtie Therapeutic Benefits, a startup designed to protect employers and payers from catastrophic claims while expanding patient access to high-cost cell and gene therapies.
Both roles reflect the same underlying pattern. Bolsen is drawn to industries at an inflection point. He identifies the structural gap, builds the connective tissue, and works to get the right parties aligned around shared outcomes.
Recognition and What Drives the Work
In 2023, Bolsen was named to the Almabase and Blackbaud “50 Under 50” list, a recognition within the advancement profession. Prior to those awards, he was inducted into the Lovington High School Athletic Hall of Fame for record-setting achievements in basketball. He credits that athletic background not for the recognition but for the habits it instilled: discipline, team-first thinking, and the understanding that individual performance means little without collective results.
He is candid about the scope of what he wants to build next. The goal is not to advise isolated institutions or close individual transactions. It is to construct financial infrastructure that addresses systemic disconnects at scale, particularly for organizations that have historically lacked access to sophisticated philanthropic guidance.
“Innovators identifying gaps and meaningfully filling them,” he says. “That is where the biggest opportunity is in both of these industries.”
For the worlds of wealth management and philanthropy, a bridge has been needed for a long time. Dan Bolsen is building it.
