2025 Community Leaders of the Year: Amanda Cole

Amanda Cole, executive director of Plexus LGBT & Allied Chamber of Commerce since 2019, grew up in a blue-collar Ohio town, the oldest of six children.

Cole credits her place in the birth order as the early foundation for her natural responsibility toward others and her leadership skills.

“But more than anything else, I would point to Antioch College, where I went for my undergraduate degree in cultural interdisciplinary studies,” says Cole, who also has a master’s degree from Wright State University in public administration.

 “Antioch is a very radical liberal arts college, and those things are built into the fabric of the school,” she adds. “We were pushed forward to see the ills and problems of society and to figure out what our roles were in making it better for everybody.”

As part of a college co-op project, Cole worked on an organic farm that grew turmeric, papaya and ginger and lived in a treehouse in Hawaii. Cole took those lessons and applied them to her volunteer and previous career positions. That includes a stint at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland from 2017-2019. That coordinated well with Cole’s passion for modern art and dance and her quest to make those arts accessible to all.

But it was at Plexus LGBT & Allied Chamber of Commerce (founded in 2006) that Cole truly found her mission.

“My trajectory was always to become an executive director of a nonprofit, and acting within a queer space would have been great,” says Cole, who lives in Kent with her family and who especially enjoys gardening.

Since becoming the first executive director of Plexus, Cole said her passion and commitment to community partnerships, plus a strong board of directors, have allowed the organization to grow from a small volunteer entity to an impactful economic force in northeast Ohio. Cole serves on the DanceCleveland and Cleveland VOTES boards and, in her free time, investigates Cleveland’s thriving culinary scene.

Currently, there are only 55 LGBT chambers of commerce in the United States, and most of those are volunteer-only, says Cole. Plexus boasts of 450 members, 40 of whom are corporate. Its members can take advantage of unique training and educational opportunities as well as networking.

“It’s important to be out and about and visible if you are an LGBT professional or small business owner. Being up front and being proud is a really good business decision,” says Cole, who is looking to recruit additional minority members and encourage more members and allies in the manufacturing sector. “At the same time, those things can come with risk to LGBT business owners because you may lose some clientele because of discrimination.”

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