The American Chestnut Foundation

The Client

The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) is a nonprofit conservation and science organization headquartered in Asheville, NC. Their mission: restore the American chestnut tree to its native range — a species that once numbered in the billions across the eastern U.S. before a devastating blight rendered it functionally extinct within two generations. TACF operates with 20+ staff, an 18-member board, 16 state chapters, over 5,000 members, more than 500 partnering organizations, and an annual budget of approximately $3 million.

Their work spans traditional breeding programs, biotechnology, and biodiversity research — deeply scientific, multi-generational work that operates on what their president calls “tree time.” The trees they’re restoring live 300–500 years. Their 40-year history as an organization barely qualifies as the tween years in the lifespan of a chestnut.

The Challenge

TACF had a problem that a lot of mission-driven organizations share: the people doing the work understood it deeply, but the story wasn’t reaching beyond their existing community. Their content was rigorous and scientifically accurate — and completely inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t already a member or a researcher.

The organization wanted to produce a documentary that could change that. Not a film for scientists about science, but a film for anyone who cared about forests, conservation, Appalachian heritage, or American natural history. Something that could introduce TACF’s mission to entirely new audiences, generate new supporters and members, create ongoing revenue for the mission, and earn external validation through film festival recognition.

The challenge wasn’t the science or the source material — TACF’s story is extraordinary. The challenge was translation. How do you take 40 years of complex genetic research, multi-state breeding programs, and restoration ecology and turn it into something that makes a general audience feel something?

What We Did

Mari Peterson led the strategic direction for the entire engagement — defining the communication framework, managing the production process, and ensuring every creative decision served the film’s goals and TACF’s mission.

Strategic Foundation. Before any production decisions were made, we defined what the film needed to accomplish, who it needed to reach, and what success looked like. This strategic framework guided every creative decision that followed — from narrative structure to interview selection to distribution planning.

Full Immersion. We didn’t produce this from a desk. We traveled to Lesesne State Forest in Virginia to embed with scientists during their annual field assessment, capturing real interviews in real environments with researchers from multiple countries. We toured TACF’s primary research facility in Meadowview, Virginia. We spent extensive time with researchers, volunteers, and staff at every level — learning the science deeply enough to translate it accurately and compellingly for a non-scientific audience.

Multi-Channel Execution. The documentary was the flagship, but during the same engagement Mari took over TACF’s social media, blog content, and email newsletters. One integrated operation: learn the science deeply, then communicate it across every channel simultaneously.

The Results

Why It Matters

Every business has a version of this challenge. The work you do is valuable and the story is worth telling, but somewhere between the expertise in your head and what the outside world sees, the message gets lost — too technical, too internal, too focused on what you do instead of why it matters to the people you’re trying to reach.

TACF didn’t need more content. They needed someone who could immerse in the complexity, find the human story inside the science, and build a strategic framework that carried that story across every channel. That’s what we do — whether the subject is restoration ecology or your business.