THE GROW CO-LAB
MEET OUR TEAM
Get to Know Us
The Grow Co-Lab is a consulting firm that was born from many cups of coffee, refreshing conversations about community and economic development, friendship, and a genuine love of problem-solving. With over 25 years of combined expertise, The Grow Co-Lab is here to assist your community with planning, facilitation, and strategy,.
NORA ROUGHEN SCHMIDT
Co-Founder
Nora Roughen-Schmidt has over 15 years of experience educating in community and economic development. Nora is passionate about incorporating grassroots solutions and carefully curated resources to create and develop services that lead to successful outcomes. She began her professional career working in marketing for tech startups, public libraries, and rural healthcare organizations, before working on Main Street and developing simple, cost-effective approaches to empowering communities and businesses. Her style of problem-solving created opportunities on a state level-joining the Governor's Council on Workforce Investment in 2019. Her love for storytelling informed a successful podcast downloaded all over the country and a weekly newspaper column. In 2022, Always seeking better solutions to empower and eliminate barriers that exist in communities, Nora works with women in leadership throughout Wisconsin to strategize, mentor, and find solutions for their organizations. Nora is a member of several networking groups of Executives in Madison and Milwaukee and is an active participant in her local community in the Driftless Area--serving on several boards and coaching and supporting fundraising for youth sports. Nora became certified in the Orton Family Foundation's Community Heart & Soul, a resident-driven approach to community development that helps small cities identify what they love most about their communities and how they would like to achieve it. A passionate silent sports enthusiast-Nora enjoys hiking, snowshoeing, kayaking, and tending to her hobby farm filled with tomatoes and marigolds, honey bees, and chickens. She lives by the mantra that nothing is impossible. Home is in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin with her husband and two children.
DARRIN WASNIEWSKI
Co-Founder
Darrin Wasniewski’s journey into building communities can best be described as iterative. What began as a desire to save old buildings in the German Village Neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio evolved into a passion for fostering social connection, creating places for all ages and all abilities, and unleashing the power of locals as experts in their future through his later work as a local Main Street director and then Wisconsin State Main Street Coordinator. As a volunteer, Darrin is a Global Walkability Correspondent for Pedestrianspace.org, a collaborative focused on advancing walkable communities around the world, where he leads international workgroups focused on Architecture & Urbanism and the Walkable Economy. In the state, his passion finds an outlet as a steering committee member of 1000 Friends of Wisconsin’s Active Wisconsin Network. And locally, in his home of Madison, he serves on the steering and transportation committees for Madison is for People, is a member of Downtown Madison Inc. participating on the organization’s transportation and economic development committees, and as a transportation commissioner for the City of Madison. Additionally, he maintains membership in Wisconsin Downtown Action Council, Congress for New Urbanism, American Planning Association and YIMBY Action. He is a trained facilitator in Strategic Doing, Community Heart & Soul and Ice House Entrepreneurship Mindset. Darrin is a non-fiction book junkie, soaking up a few a month, and an avid podcast listener. Be careful, he’ll talk your ear off about a current read or a podcast he just listened to. When he’s not nerding out in the pages of a book, you will typically find him biking around his home town, paddling Wisconsin’s waterways in his canoe, or cruising the state’s roadways in his recently acquired 1987 Chevrolet El Camino.