As Delaware Source reported, Chamber Board President Amy Pawlikowski said this summer, "We're supporting local businesses, we're creating meaningful connections and we're helping each other grow," while standing inside Standardized Brewing in Evans Farm as Lewis Center's business community went from operating under the Powell Chamber to running a chamber of its own.
That sentence carries more weight than it lets on. For two years, the businesses now organizing under the new Lewis Center Chamber of Commerce operated as a business association tucked inside the Powell Chamber of Commerce, an arrangement that gave the area's businesses an organized footing while a standalone chamber took shape. Interim Executive Director Pamela Miller, who stepped into the role after retiring as executive director of the Powell Chamber, has said plainly that other people tried to launch a standalone Lewis Center chamber before and it never got off the ground. This attempt did, and it did it fast. The new chamber signed up 180 members almost immediately, most of them businesses that simply carried over from the old association.
That number is easy to skim past, but it says something specific. Two years under the Powell Chamber gave the association time to build relationships and a membership base. What launched at Standardized Brewing this summer is the next step: a chamber with its own board, its own events calendar, and leadership drawn from Lewis Center addresses. The momentum is already visible, and Miller says she is ordering the giant scissors for a run of ribbon cuttings she expects to do soon.
Who Actually Runs It
The board reads like a cross-section of the corridor that has been filling in around Evans Farm for the past few years, not a committee assembled from the outside.
- Board President Amy Pawlikowski owns the Lewis Center location of Whit's.
- Vice President Mark Robinson owns Standardized Brewing, the taproom that hosted the kickoff.
- Treasurer Brian Blankenship is a Business Banking Relationship Manager at Fifth Third Bank.
- Interim Executive Director Pamela Miller ran the Powell Chamber before stepping into this role part time while she finishes her own retirement.
The seven-member board grew out of the committee group that had been quietly overseeing the old business association, which means the people now setting the chamber's agenda are the same people who spent two years figuring out what Lewis Center's business community actually needed before they had the standing to build it themselves. Miller has said the chamber is already averaging 20 to 30 people at every event, with monthly coffee chats and after-hours business mixers on the calendar, and plans in motion for a women in business group and a young professionals group down the line.
The First Real Test Is This Month
The chamber's first big public moment lands October 11, when it hosts a Taste of Lewis Center business expo at The Ohioan Hotel, the event venue on Green Meadows Drive that already anchors a fair share of Lewis Center's weddings and conferences. Details are still being finalized, which is normal for an organization barely three months old, but the shape of the event tells you what the chamber is trying to prove. A taste-of-the-town expo is a chance for the 180 member businesses to stand in one room together, in a venue their own community already uses, and show that Lewis Center has enough independent commerce to fill a program without importing a single outside vendor.
That is a different kind of proof than a ribbon cutting on a new restaurant. Plenty of towns can point to a new storefront and call it growth. Fewer can point to a business community organized enough to run its own expo inside its first year of existing as a formal chamber.
Why the Timing Makes Sense
None of this happens in a vacuum. The reason a standalone Lewis Center identity makes sense now, rather than five years ago, is that the physical footprint finally caught up to the population. Evans Farm, the roughly 1,250-acre development built around four-story mixed-use buildings with ground-floor retail and apartments above, has been slower to fill its commercial spine than its housing, but that has been changing through 2026. Sexton's Pizza has been open there for a while, and Johnson's Real Ice Cream, the Bexley-founded brand now expanding rapidly across central Ohio, opened its tenth area location at 5915 Evans Farm Drive this spring.
A few miles away on Columbus Pike, David & Mary's opened in December 2025 as a year-round indoor market built entirely around Ohio-grown and Ohio-made food, at 6001 Columbus Pike. It gave Lewis Center shoppers something the area hadn't had before: a farmers market feel that doesn't disappear when the weather turns, filling a gap that had pushed local-food shoppers to seasonal markets scattered across the county.
Put the ice cream shop, the pizza place, the indoor market, and Standardized Brewing's taproom in the same sentence and you get the actual argument for why a chamber makes sense now. These are independently owned, independently named businesses, and together they have reached the point where the people running them have enough in common to organize a chamber centered on Lewis Center.
What This Looks Like Going Forward
A chamber of commerce is a slow-burn kind of institution. It doesn't change the businesses that already exist so much as it gives them a shared calendar, a shared voice at township meetings, and a shared reason to show up for each other. Miller's plans for coffee chats and after-hours mixers sound modest next to a business expo, but they are the mechanism by which 180 separate storefronts start acting like a single business community instead of a collection of addresses that happen to share a zip code.
The next concrete marker on that path is October 11, when the doors open at The Ohioan Hotel for the first Taste of Lewis Center. Whatever the finalized vendor list ends up looking like, showing up will tell you more about where Lewis Center's business identity stands than any single new restaurant opening ever could.
If you're watching how Lewis Center's business community keeps organizing itself and want to talk through what that means for the neighborhood you already call home, Keys + Company is always happy to talk shop over coffee, no transaction required.
