2024 Most Influential Women: Heather Zoromski

Heather Zoromski considers herself an includer.

“I want everyone to have a seat at the table and be heard,” she says. She leads with that mindset every day, ensuring her neighbors in the Ozarks have access to food, housing, education and health care through her role as executive director of the Darr Family Foundation.

From the time she was fresh out of college, working her first career job at Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals at CoxHealth, to even before then, as a child, Zoromski says she has aimed to lead with a servant’s heart.

At CMN, she worked with corporate donors, created family-focused fundraisers and handled media related to telethon and radiothon events. She was named executive director in 2006, at just 26 years old.  In this position, she says she was able to increase grant funding for Miracle Network programs and worked to increase the revenue of the corporate donor program.

“I was bubbly, energetic, and willing to do whatever needed to be done to serve our families well,” Zoromski says.

In 2011, she began building a grants program for the Skaggs Foundation in Branson, where she gained experience identifying what hospital priorities were in comparison to community health needs – a skill that she would later bring with her to the Darr Family Foundation.

After bringing in $11 million in grant funding in 13 years, mainly for the Branson community, and starting her own community health coalition, the Ozarks Wellness Network – dubbed OWN it – Zoromski says she continued her community-based efforts at the Darr Family Foundation, which she joined in 2016 as executive director. She says the work is similar to the Skaggs Foundation, but instead of working to secure funding through grants, she says she is fortunate to work beside a philanthropic board of about 10.

“I have had the opportunity to lead them through strategic planning and visioning work, provide education on best practices both within grantmaking and community needs, and lead efforts to be less of a funder and more of a partner in the large scale, multiyear programs we have funded in the areas of education and agriculture,” she says. Zoromski sits on both the Elevate Branson board, and the Nixa Board of Education, where she leads funding-based efforts.

“One area where I have worked to craft my expertise is in the area of grants,” Zoromski says. She has taught grant writing workshops, and through these teaching initiatives, she offers real-time feedback.

“I truly feel that I have been put on this earth to build community and leave my corner of the world a little better than when I found it,” she says.