Rachel Wardwell Featured in REAL PRODUCERS Magazine
Rachel Wardwell Knitting Community Together, One Home at a Time
BY GEORGE GROTHEER for New Haven & Middlesex Real Producers
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRIS DEVLIN
Rachel Wardwell spends her days selling homes with Calcagni Real Estate — but her impact on her local community goes far beyond the sale. Wardwell has been an agent since 2018 — starting with a small brokerage called Zone Realty. After a year, she connected with Calcagni and has been with the company ever since. But there’s more to Wardwell than her seven years in the industry. Before launching her real estate career, she owned a company that performed inspections for mortgage and insurance companies.
“I did that for almost ten years,” Wardwell says. “We were going to properties, verifying whether they were occupied. If they were not, we would have work orders to go back and clean them out.”
Her work involved providing other companies with photos and diagrams of the spaces they would be insuring and reporting on conditions or hazards that might affect decisions about insurance or investment.
“We were really busy in 2009 and 2010,” she recalls, referring to the financial crisis that led to foreclosure rates to spike.
But the industry shifted.
“We were working for a company — and I really believe that I was an ethical worker — but there were plenty of people out there trying to cheat the system,” she explains. “All of a sudden, people weren’t adhering to the requirements we set out for that side of the business.”
Disillusioned, Wardwell decided it was time for a change. Her friends encouraged her to explore real estate, so she took the required courses to get her license, and a new world opened up to her.
Around the same time, her youngest child was heading off to college, and she found herself with more time in what was suddenly a very different schedule. She became more involved with the Southington Chamber of Commerce, where she met the executive director of the nonprofit Early Childhood Collaborative of Southington. Wardwell was offered a board seat in the fall of 2019 — about a year after getting her real estate license — and was hooked.
After several months, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was invited to chair the board.
“I’ll step up and I’ll do this,” Wardwell recalls thinking. “I started trying to figure out what it is that the board should be doing — what a chairperson should be doing.”
Wardwell credits the Community Foundation of Greater New Britain with giving her the guidance needed to step into this new role and flourish.
“They did a whole series on how to be a board member, how to be effective, and what kinds of roles and responsibilities you have,” she says.
Wardwell has now served more than five years as the board chair — drawing early inspiration from her granddaughter, who was just two years old when she joined the board. Today, her grandchildren continue to motivate her work in early childhood support.
“There are so many services out there that I know my daughter didn’t know about,” Wardwell says. “I thought, ‘how many other parents with little kids don’t know about these things?’”
She recalls the early days of the pandemic when schools closed and concerns about children’s mental health rose. Since then, the Collaborative has worked to be more involved with addressing these needs — while planting itself more firmly in the community.
“Over the time that I have been board chair, I have been trying to make sure that we become more sustainable, the systems we have in place are more sustainable, and that our executive director is working on a succession plan,” Wardwell says. “In the last year, we’ve gotten some new members who have jumpstarted us and kicked us up to the next level.”
Now, she says, the group is making more progress — calling the work energizing and exciting. She continues to work with state and local governance partners to expand the Collaborative’s outreach and deepen its impact across the community.
“I’ve always loved being involved with teenagers, with youth,” she says. “There is so much talent and so much possibility that I want to be able to do whatever I can to help them, support them, and guide them in any way.”
Wardwell’s community involvement also led her to serve as a judge at the DECA conference at Southington’s Aqua Turf Club, evaluating local students on entrepreneurship, social media, and community outreach.
“One of the things the kids had to create was a social media account for a nonprofit,” she says. “They had to show what they would do to grow its following and create fundraising opportunities.”
She was impressed by their creativity.
Reflecting on her experience raising three children, now grown, Wardwell says parenting helped her form lasting connections in her community. Today, she continues to build those bonds, not only through her work in real estate and with the Collaborative, but also in a close-knit weekly knitting group that offers friendship and support to anyone in search of a welcoming space.
