Tiffany O'Donnell entering race for Cedar Rapids Mayor

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Former KGAN/KFXA news anchor and current CEO of Women Lead Change Tiffany O'Donnell is running for mayor of Cedar Rapids. An official announcement is expected later this week. O'Donnell has lived in Cedar Rapids for 20 years, spending the last five leading Women Lead Change. She is challenging Mayor Brad Hart, who announced in January he is seeking a second term.O'Donnell, who was named Miss Iowa in 1988, went on to graduate from DePauw University where she double majored in communication and French. Her first broadcasting job came after at WHO-TV in Des Moines. She came to Cedar Rapids in 2001 as the new lead anchor at KGAN/KFXA, a role she held until 2006 and again from 2008 until 2014. After, she became COO of Women Lead Change before succeeding Diane Ramsay as the group's Chief Executive Officer. The mother of two girls has been married to her husband Michael, who is President of The Rose Company, for 28 years. O'Donnell is currently the co-chair of the statewide public/private EPIC Corporate Challenge serving with Governor Kim Reynolds as the Honorary Chair. Nearly 250 Iowa companies and individuals have signed on to take the Challenge which asks Iowa companies to measure their progress in advancing women leaders. In 2020, O’Donnell led the addition of a metric to the Challenge that specifically identifies progress in advancing women of color.Among the groups O'Donnell has been associated with, Kids First Law Center, an organization that represents children in high conflict divorce and custody cases, Alzheimer’s Association of East Central Iowa, Revival Theatre Company and Chair of the Board of the Iowa Children’s Museum. Today, she proudly sits on the steering committee for ConnectCR and is a part of the capital campaign for HallMar Village, an expansion of Mercy Medical Center’s current HallMar facility. She and her husband are also advocates for the Indian Creek Nature Center. The Center was co-founded by her late mother-in-law, Jean. O’Donnell.The election for mayor will take place Tuesday, November 2nd. Because it is a non-partisan position, results could lead to a runoff election between the top two vote getters the following month.