Today we’d like to introduce you to Jessica Merrell.
Hi Jessica, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Spoiler alert: When it comes to storytelling, I am anything but brief! 🙂
I currently live in Smyrna with my wife and three year old daughter. To understand how I got here, let me rewind a bit. We arrived in ATL in 2022 by way of West Palm Beach, FL by way of NYC/LA. In 2012, I was 28, living in LA, and on track to achieve my ambitious advertising career goals when my family experienced a horrible tragedy, losing my dad, very suddenly and unexpectedly, to suicide. My point of view on life shifted in an instant and, while on paper the next two years were the best of my career, I had not dealt with the loss and my physical and mental health were starting to show it. So just weeks before my 30th birthday, I made the decision to move back to my hometown of West Palm Beach, FL to focus on my health and start the next chapter of my career…entrepreneurship.
I joined my mom in helping to run our family’s 30k sq. ft fitness and wellness business and quickly learned that, while I had no passion for “running a gym” I did, in fact, have a love for the freedom and creativity of being an entrepreneur. After a year or so of consulting I met my (former) business partner. While I was initially brought on to help grow his wife’s freelance grant writing business, in 18 months I had become a partner in the business and we had grown to 50 clients which felt like a great success. The only issue was that it felt very misaligned with my vision for making a real impact on the world.
I had quickly learned that the nonprofit fundraising industry was burdened with so much complexity and inefficiency, it felt like more effort was being required to find resources than having the time to focus on solving the problems. Those working in the day-to-day of these amazing organizations were faced with more challenges and expectations than I had ever experienced in the years that I had spent supporting Fortune 500 brands.
In 2020, as the world had been flipped upside down, two my business partner and I decided to part ways to focus on building businesses that aligned with our separate visions. That meant I took over the grant writing business, rebranded it to One Degree Impact, and began the five year journey finding a solution that looks beyond individual organizations to tackle the deeper systems shaping the challenges we care about most. During that time I met my wife, we got married and moved to ATL just before having our daughter. Needless to say it has been an exciting and emotional journey the past five years!
At the end of this year, we are officially sunsetting our grant services and shifting to The Issues Intelligence Project, a new platform focused on uncovering the clearest pathways to lasting change. By combining stories, data, and research from across an issue’s entire ecosystem, we help funders and change-makers see where their investment can truly move the needle.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
NO WAYYYYY! I think the biggest challenges were getting my bearings as an entrepreneur and a new mom. It has forced me to learn a ton and figure out how to build and grow a company (and human) that is aligned with my values and vision.
Professionally, we have been able to grow the business successfully twice with models that ultimately didn’t contribute to solving the bigger problems of the industry so we started over both times. That has been an exhausting process and has caused me to question my abilities many times. The potential to make meaningful impact in the world is what keeps me going.
Becoming a mom has been the most challenging and rewarding thing I have ever done and while it presents some challenges in balancing time, my daughter helps keep things in perspective and get out of my own way a lot of the time.
My cousin gave me the best piece of advice that I think about all the time and it helps me through the struggles: nothing lasts forever, the good or the bad!
As you know, we’re big fans of One Degree Impact. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
At One Degree Impact, we’re rethinking how big social challenges get solved. For the past decade, our work has centered on helping nonprofits build sustainable funding models, but over time, we started to see a pattern. Even the most effective organizations were running up against the same systems-level barriers. It wasn’t a lack of effort or passion, it was that we were all solving pieces of a much bigger puzzle in isolation.
That realization led to The Issues Intelligence Project, our next chapter at One Degree Impact. We’re building a new kind of insight engine for social change, designed to help funders, nonprofits, and community leaders see the full landscape of an issue before acting. We connect dots across research, lived and learned experience, and local innovation to reveal what’s really working, where the gaps are, and how different players can collaborate more effectively.
What sets us apart is our mix of curiosity and clarity. We don’t show up with all the answers, we show up with better questions, and a process that helps leaders make smarter, more aligned decisions.
I’m most proud that our brand stands for warmth and innovative solutions in equal measure. We translate complexity into insight that feels human, because real change happens when people can see themselves in the story.
At its core, One Degree Impact is about connection and the impact that is created when the right people, data, and ideas come together.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
I anticipate major changes in the nonprofit industry over the next 5-10 years due to a few key challenges (nonprofits facing greater needs from those they serve, more gated access to funding and lack of clarity around gov’ts role, talent attrition specifically in leadership and development roles, lack of consistent metrics to measure efficacy) and opportunities (new generation of funders, technology advancements due to rise of AI, innovative solutions coming out of private sector). This will force everyone in the ecosystem of “solvable” issues to think and act differently.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://onedegreeimpact.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jess-merrell/
