combine columns from Table and displaying filtered list from data

I have been searching and trying to find a solution to pulling filtered text data from cells from a pretty large table that tracks (among a bunch of other things) partners that participate in events throughout the year (there can be up to 10 partners per event, so ten possible columns to combine into one list with out duplicate items and ignoring blanks.

The data needs to end up in a dashboard. I think pivot tables is the way to go because of the filtering needs, and because new data is continually added to the table. For the life of me I can find no good way to return text in a pivot table that works. There is, however, Conditional formatting is one way I found to go (assign a value to a partner name and format to return text), but the problem is that there are always new partners coming and going and I'd have to update the conditional formatting all the time.

So, the problems I can not solve are:
1) returning text from a table using a PivotTable, which may not be possible as far as I can find
2) dynamically combining several columns with the partner names into a single column on the dashboard skiping blanks and not duplicating partner names
3) being able to filter that list on the dashboard by year and month, and getting a count of the number of unique partners

I've been working on this over several months and just can't make it happen. Has anyone done something like this before. I have a simplified workbook with a simplified mockup of the table and how it might look on the dashboard.