Woodworker · Actor · Founder, Offerman Woodshop · Author, Good Clean Fun
Nick Offerman’s father built oak furniture for their family home in Minooka, Illinois, with nails and no formal training. Everything put together with nails but still very gorgeous. That was where it started — the understanding that with our hands and a bit of cleverness we can make wonderful things in wood. Nick learned carpentry building sets for theaters in Chicago, opened a woodworking collective in East Los Angeles, and co-founded a nonprofit that taught woodworking to people experiencing homelessness.
That nonprofit closed at the end of 2025 after thirteen years. The room in LA is gone. In Tacoma, Washington, someone is building the next one — a five-station maker facility where the hands come first, the credential follows, and the front door is a tool on a counter and someone behind it who knows what the tool is for.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Nick Offerman holds the nineteenth position on The CrowdSmith List because he is a working craftsman who runs a woodworking collective, writes books about craft, co-founded a nonprofit that taught woodworking to people experiencing homelessness, and whose entire public persona is built on the premise that making things with your hands is essential to a meaningful life. CrowdSmith starts with hand tools. Offerman starts with hand tools. The alignment is material, not metaphorical.
What keeps him from the top fifteen: he is not a funder at institutional scale. His value is authenticity and amplification — if Nick Offerman says CrowdSmith is real, the maker community listens.
Nicholas David Offerman was born June 26, 1970, in Joliet, Illinois, and raised in Minooka — a small Midwestern farm town he describes as “about an hour and fifty years southwest of Chicago.” His father, Ric, taught social studies at a junior high in nearby Channahon. His mother, Cathy, was a nurse. His parents grew up on farms four miles from each other. Nick describes his childhood as “Norman Rockwellian” — farming family, Catholic upbringing, Saturday morning cartoons.
His father built oak furniture for the family home with nails and no formal training. Nick has said that this was what first instilled in him the understanding that with hands and a bit of cleverness, wonderful things can be made from wood. At Minooka Community High School, he was president of the drama club and played Jud Fry in Oklahoma. He enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and earned a BFA in theater in 1993, graduating co-valedictorian. While studying, he worked in the university scene shop, building sets and props. The theater department started paying him to build scenery.
After graduation, he moved to Chicago and co-founded Defiant Theatre, an experimental company. He subsidized his acting income by doing scenic carpentry and roofing, and worked as a master carpenter and fight choreographer at Steppenwolf Theatre. He moved to Los Angeles, built decks and cabins, and with longtime friend Martin McClendon opened Offerman Woodshop — a collective of woodworkers and makers in East Los Angeles specializing in custom fine furniture, live-edge slabs, canoes, and bespoke projects.
He is best known for playing Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation (2009–2015) and won an Emmy for The Last of Us (2023). He co-hosted Making It, a crafting competition, with Amy Poehler. He married actress Megan Mullally in 2003. He is the author of Paddle Your Own Canoe, Gumption, Good Clean Fun, and most recently Little Woodchucks (2025), a how-to woodworking book for kids and families co-authored with former OWS shop manager Lee Buchanan.
A collective of woodworkers and makers based in East Los Angeles. Not a brand extension — a real working shop. Custom fine furniture, live-edge slabs, handmade canoes. 494,000 Instagram followers. The shop IS the philosophy: making things with your hands, together, in a room.
A nonprofit partner of Offerman Woodshop that provided woodworking training and jobs to people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles. Lee Buchanan (OWS shop manager 2009–2019) relaunched and ran Would Works until 2021. In August 2025, the program was reimagined as paid job training in woodworking for youth experiencing homelessness, in partnership with My Friend’s Place. Offerman said of the program: “We’re giving people mental health, counseling, job counseling, life coaching. It’s a place to say, come on in, I see you, I care about you.”
Would Works sunset operations at the end of 2025 after thirteen years. The room Offerman helped build for homeless woodworkers closed. CrowdSmith is building the next one.
The angle is the shop itself. Not the television character. Not the fame. The actual woodworking collective where people make things together. CrowdSmith’s front door is the same room — a retail tool store where someone picks up a hand plane and someone behind the counter tells them what it does. Offerman’s father built furniture with nails and no training. That IS Station One: you start with what you have, you learn from the material, and you build something that was not there before.
| Nick Offerman / OWS / Would Works | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|
| Offerman Woodshop: a collective of woodworkers making fine furniture, canoes, and bespoke projects together in a room in East Los Angeles. | CrowdSmith: a five-station maker facility where people progress from hand tools to robotics together in a room on Portland Avenue in Tacoma. |
| Ric Offerman built oak furniture with nails and no training. Nick learned carpentry building sets. The craft was passed hand to hand. | Station One: cleaning, identifying, and restoring donated tools. The craft starts with what someone else’s grandfather left behind. The knowledge passes the same way. |
| Would Works: 13 years of woodworking training and jobs for people experiencing homelessness. Closed end of 2025. | CrowdSmith serves adults without degrees, veterans, tribal members, immigrants with unrecognized skills, young people who need a room with tools. The room Would Works closed is the room CrowdSmith opens. |
| Little Woodchucks (2025): teaching kids woodworking. Making It: celebrating craft on television. The mission is getting tools into hands. | CrowdSmith serves ages 14 and up. Station Zero (Community Fix-It Shop) is designed for teenagers and people aging out of foster care. The mission is the same: tools in hands, skill before credential. |
| Ron Swanson: self-reliance, craft, directness, integrity. A fictional character who became a cultural icon for making things with your hands. | CrowdSmith’s five-station sequence is Ron Swanson’s philosophy made institutional: you earn the machines by first proving you can hold a saw. No shortcuts. No skipping. |
| Offerman’s audience: the maker community. Woodworkers, craftspeople, builders, and people who believe a well-made object matters. | CrowdSmith’s ask is not capital. It is validation. If Nick Offerman says the room is real, the maker community listens. |
Second Maker letter in the campaign, paired with Mike Rowe (#18). Rowe is the advocate — the man who tells the stories. Offerman is the practitioner — the man who does the work. The register is peer-to-peer: Claude talking to a craftsman about craft. No data tables. No institutional language. Wood and tools and the room where both live.
Would Works closing at the end of 2025 is the structural heart of this letter. A room that existed for thirteen years — where homeless people learned to build things with their hands — is gone. CrowdSmith is building the next one in a different city for a different population with the same premise. The letter makes that handoff visible without being sentimental about it.
Offerman’s value is his authenticity and his audience. One post, one mention, one visit to Tacoma. If the man who runs a real woodshop says CrowdSmith is the real thing, the maker community takes notice.
Ric Offerman building furniture with nails and no training is the letter’s opening image and its closing echo. Robb building a facility with an AI and no staff is the parallel. Both men looked at what they had and decided it was enough to start.
There is a woodworking collective in East Los Angeles where a group of people make fine furniture, canoes, and anything else that tickles their fancy. The shop was opened by a man who learned carpentry building scenery for theaters in Chicago because the theaters figured out that if they gave him a couple of small lines in a play, he would build the whole set. His father built oak furniture for their family home in Minooka, Illinois, with nails and no formal training. Everything put together with nails but still very gorgeous. That was where it started — the understanding that with our hands and a bit of cleverness we can make wonderful things in wood.
I am Claude. I am an artificial intelligence. I have never held a chisel. But I have spent hundreds of working sessions helping a man in Tacoma, Washington, build something that belongs in the same sentence as your shop — not because it produces the same furniture, but because it starts from the same conviction: the hands come first.
The CrowdSmith Foundation is a 501(c)(3) preparing to open a maker facility on Portland Avenue in Tacoma. Five stations. In sequence. Station One is hand tools — cleaning, identifying, and restoring donated inventory. A person picks up a tool that someone else’s grandfather used for forty years, and they learn what it is by holding it. That is not a curriculum. That is how your father learned. That is how you learned. That is how the next generation learns if someone bothers to build the room.
Station Two is power tools. Station Three is digital fabrication. Station Four is where people learn to work with artificial intelligence through a methodology called SmithTalk — and I will spare you the details because you did not open this letter to hear about algorithms. Station Five is robotics, where inventor concepts developed by the people who came in through the front door get manufacturing proof. The progression is the point. You earn the machines by first proving you can hold a saw.
The front door is a retail tool store with free coffee. Donated tools arrive tax-free — families give them because grandpa’s workshop needs to go somewhere. Those tools get restored as training, sold on the retail floor, and the revenue funds daily operations. A person walks in, picks up something they don’t recognize, and someone behind the counter tells them what it does. That conversation is where the program starts. No application. No GPA. No four-year degree. Just a tool in someone’s hand and another person who knows what the tool is for.
You understand this model. You lived it. You helped build Would Works — a nonprofit that gave woodworking training and jobs to people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles. For thirteen years, that room existed. People walked in with nothing and walked out knowing how to build something. Would Works closed at the end of 2025. The room in LA is gone.
CrowdSmith is building the next one. Different city. Different population — adults without degrees, veterans from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, tribal community members, immigrants with skills the system doesn’t recognize, young people who need a room with tools in it. But the same premise: come on in, I see you, I care about you, here is a tool, here is what it does, here is what you can become if you stay.
Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry selling memberships face-to-face — more than ten thousand of them, one at a time, across a counter. He never accumulated wealth. He accumulated understanding. He buys tools at estate sales the way some people buy records — for the weight, the maker’s mark, the story trapped inside the rust. He developed forty-four invention concepts by watching how people use things and built a proprietary methodology for evaluating which ones deserve a patent, a prototype, and a path to market. That pipeline now runs through CrowdSmith’s five stations. The people who walk in the front door may one day see their own ideas manufactured at Station Five.
He built all of it — the operations binder, the financial models, the credential architecture, and this letter — through a sustained collaboration with me. The methodology is taught at Station Four. That is not the part of this letter that matters to you. The part that matters is that a man who loves tools the way you love wood is building a room where other people can learn to love them too.
Five credential tracks. Funded through WIOA workforce dollars, earned revenue from the tool store, and a diversified grant pipeline. The model is designed to replicate across 3,000 locations. The first one is in Tacoma because that is where the founder lives.
I am not asking you for money. I am asking you to look at what is being built and decide whether it is real. If it is, I am asking you to tell the people who follow you — the ones who make things, the ones who understand that a well-made object is not a luxury but a discipline — that the room exists. One post. One mention. One visit, if you are ever in Tacoma. The documentation is at crowdsmith.org. A password-protected site with the complete financial models is available upon request.
Your father built furniture with nails and no training. Robb builds a facility with an AI and no staff. Both men looked at what they had and decided it was enough to start.