Kellene Cole
Kellene Cole serves as Director of Club Fellowship at Fellowship House in Miami, Florida, where she leads programs supporting adults with serious mental health conditions, including veterans, individuals reentering the community after incarceration, and those experiencing homelessness. She oversees a team serving more than one hundred individuals each month, while working closely with community partners and advocating for expanded, family-centered services.
Alongside her professional work, Kellene is the founder of Combat Wounded Spouse, a platform that supports military spouses navigating the invisible wounds of war. Rooted in her own experience, CWS provides resources, community, and faith-based tools for spouses carrying what most people never see. She is the author of Faith. Fight. Frontlines., a journal designed to help military spouses move through grief, grit, and purpose.
Her roots trace back to Jamaica, where she met Orett before both immigrated to the United States. That background: immigrant, caregiver, advocate, founder, informs an understanding of resilience that is neither theoretical, but earned. Her advocacy is shaped by lived experience. Her husband Orett, a U.S. Army veteran and Apache Helicopter mechanic, served 12 years, including two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. He returned home with a severe spinal injury requiring surgery, chronic pain, PTSD, a traumatic brain injury, and tinnitus. Kellene has navigated displacement after a tornado, relocation to Florida, and raising homeschooled children, all while building infrastructure for others in the same fight.
As an advocate, Kellene looks forward to raising the public’s understanding that caregiving is a long-term, often lifelong role that involves far more than appointments and paperwork. She believes, “Military caregivers function as an invisible extension of the military and veterans' healthcare systems, absorbing gaps in care and preventing higher institutional and public costs. Supporting caregivers is not charity but infrastructure, and meaningful support requires caregiver-inclusive healthcare planning, workplace flexibility, access to respite and mental health services, and recognition of caregivers as essential partners in veteran care at both the community and national level.”