The destruction of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina prompted filmmaker Keresey Pearl and her partner Briana Pond to take action. “We knew we wanted to put good media out about what was happening in the community because we saw a lot of media coming out of this region that wasn’t accurate or authentic,” Pearl says. What began as a project documenting recovery efforts quickly drew in collaborators and evolved into something much larger: a woman-led nonprofit with a mission to support regional resilience through storytelling, strategy and systems-building.
Blueprint for Impact was co-founded by Pearl and Pond in partnership with Jennifer Germaine and Sarah Watkins. “We describe ourselves as a for-impact organization, because we believe it’s time to move beyond traditional non-profit models that often carry stigma or limitations,” says Pearl. “Our aim is to develop a finance model that blends sponsorship, donation and values-aligned investment—generating profit without being extractive to people or the planet.”
That model supports three pillars—collaborate, finance, amplify—and its results can be seen in four areas of return: inspirational, sociological, ecological and financial. “We know that we need to make money and create capital in order to move things in this world that we live in,” says Pearl. “We want people to understand that money can be a tool for good—when it’s used to build regenerative systems rather than just generate more money.”
The Blueprint for Impact team began facilitating conversations among organizations and individuals already doing vital recovery work. “The thing that we kept hearing over and over again from people is that there’s a lot of people doing a lot of great things, they’re just doing it in silos,” Pearl says. “So they said, if you guys can be the connectors to connect all the leadership groups … then that would be a major piece.”
They started having conversations, listening and connecting, which resulted in a number of flagship projects for the initiative. One such project is a partnership with Bounty & Soul, a food justice nonprofit that distributes fresh food to tens of thousands each month. Another emerging project involves using downed timber to make biochar, addressing both wildfire risk and soil degradation. “Bri [Pond] has a really extensive background in permaculture,” says Pearl. “She was saying from the very beginning we should be using these [downed] trees and creating biochar from them to be able to nurture the soils.”…