It's Official: Bonne Fire Is a 501(c)(3) Nonprofit
In 2022, Alexa Morse and I started hosting a monthly happy hour. No agenda, no name tags, just people across Atlanta's health world in the same room on purpose. In 2024, that habit became Bonne Fire. And this month, Bonne Fire became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
We started those happy hours because we wanted something simple: let's bring together Atlanta's healthtech community, at a bar or a restaurant, with no agenda beyond good conversation. So the two of us started inviting people together, on purpose. It kept growing because the need for it was real.
For the first few years, that mostly meant healthtech: engineers, product folks, founders building tools. About a year ago, we started calling it health innovation instead, on purpose, because the people solving problems in this city span research, public health, clinical care, and policy, not just product teams, and they're sitting in separate rooms from each other just as often as the tech side ever was.
The hard part was never getting people in a room. Atlanta has no shortage of smart, generous people working on health. The hard part was building something that could hold that energy steady, year over year, without depending entirely on any one person's time, memory, or goodwill. That's what this stretch of work toward 501(c)(3) status has been about. Not changing what Bonne Fire does, but making sure it can keep doing it.
So why now?
The mission had outgrown the model. Community building was competing for time with billable client work, and a four-year habit held together by one person's willpower isn't something you can keep betting an ecosystem on. Nonprofit status also unlocks the right kind of capital, foundation grants, corporate philanthropy, tax-deductible giving, none of which an LLC could access. And it lets us build something beyond just me: a board, advisors, and a host team who share real accountability for keeping this going, not just enthusiasm for showing up to it.
Practically, that means a few things.
Sponsors and funders can now give tax-deductible support, and we're eligible for grants and institutional funding that an LLC structure didn't qualify us for. Partners benefit too: we could always sign formal agreements as an LLC, but some institutions only partner with nonprofits, and we now clear that bar. And the community, the people who've been showing up to the gatherings, the Spark series, the mentorship conversations, gets an organization built to last beyond any one person's calendar, including mine.
It also means a board: Ben Huffman as chair, Mary Jacobson as secretary, JaMor Hairston as treasurer, and Kelsey Supple as a board member. Four people who agreed to help carry this forward, and I'm staying on as executive director to keep building alongside them.
None of that changes what Bonne Fire is. We're still not a conference, an accelerator, or a trade association. If you've spent time in health data, you know the term QHIN, Qualified Health Information Network. It doesn't run any single health system; it's the layer that lets otherwise siloed networks exchange information with each other. I like to think of Bonne Fire as the QHIN of health innovation communities, the connective layer between sectors that don't usually talk to each other, the reason this ecosystem talks to itself instead of staying stuck in separate silos.
If you've been part of any of this, a gathering, a Spark talk, a mentoring conversation, a sponsorship, you helped build the thing that just became official. If you're a funder or partner who's been waiting for the tax-deductible and nonprofit-only pieces to be in place before going further, we'd love to talk.
Four years in, and just getting started.
— Nadine Peever, Executive Director & Co-Founder, Bonne Fire
