President & Co-Founder: Dads & Daughters®

Author:
Dads and Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand and Support Your Daughter (Broadway, 2003)
The Dads & Daughters Togetherness Guide: 54 Fun Activities to Help Build a Great Relationship (Broadway, 2007)
The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Being an Expectant Father (Alpha, 2004)
The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Being a New Dad (Alpha, 2004)
The Body Myth: Adult Women and the Pressure to Be Perfect with Dr. Margo Maine (John Wiley & Sons, 2005)
Clean: A New Generation in Recovery Speaks Out with Chris Beckman (Hazelden, 2005)

Journalist, activist and father Joe Kelly co-founded Dads & Daughters® (DADs), the first national advocacy nonprofit that promotes the power and potential fathers and daughters. 

Kelly is a primary media source on fathering healthy daughters, appearing on NBC’s Today Show, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, CBS’s Early Show, MSNBC, Lifetime, Fox News Channel and Voice of America, as well as in Time, People, New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Parenting and dozens of other outlets. He has written for Parents and Mothering, and blogs for dadsanddaughters.org and Deepak Chopra's IntentBlog.com.

Dr. Mary Pipher calls Kelly’s best-selling book Dads and Daughters “an essential aid for the fathers of adolescent girls.” Of The Dads & Daughters Togetherness Guide, Pipher says: “If all the dads in the country read this book, family life would improve all over America. Girls would be stronger. Family would be healthier, and more fun.”

In 1993, Kelly and his wife Nancy Gruver founded the groundbreaking international publication, New Moonâ: The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams.  Edited by girls 8 to 14 years old,  New Moon is the only child-edited publication to win the prestigious Parent’s Choice Foundation Gold Award multiple times.  Gruver and Kelly won Parenting magazine’s 1995 Parenting Achievement Award.

Kelly has been named the Women’s Sports Foundations Title IX Father of the Year and won the national Eating Disorders Coalition’s Activist of the Year award.  He has won the Ann Bancroft Foundation Award and iParenting.com Dad of the Year.  He belongs to the Center for Family Policy and Practice, the Men’s Task Force of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, Save Title IX Task Force, and serves on the board of the national Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Minnesota Fathers & Families Network, and is a consultant for the Men's Resource Center for Change,  American Psychological Association Task Force on Sexualization of Girls, Take Our Daughters to the Polls Day, Take Our Daughters & Sons to Work Day, and other nonprofits.

Kelly’s leadership on family and cultural issues puts him in contact with parents and professionals worldwide.  He speaks and teaches frequently across North America on fathering; media and marketing’s impact on women, children and families; successful strategies for raising girls and boys; and how professionals can mobilize fathers as allies in their work.  Kelly has keynoted for the National Eating Disorders Association (US), National Eating Disorder Information Centre (Canada), the National Association of Independent Schools, National Association of Science and Technology Centers, AAUW, communities, universities and conferences across North America.  He has testified before the Congressional Children’s Caucus, the President’s blue ribbon Title IX commission, and the FDA.  He also wrote two Annie E. Casey Foundation fathering program guides.

Kelly and Gruver live in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  Their adult daughters live in California.  A New Jersey native, Kelly is the author of the play This Horse of a Body of Mine, co-editor of four nonfiction books for girls, and was an award-winning journalist for Minnesota Public Radio.  He has a BS in philosophy and journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

Joe and his family @ AT&T Park

Presenting @ Ethel Walker School, Connecticut