MN Ethical Leadership Award given to MCC Respectful Conversations

Minnesota Council of Churches Receives Ethical Leadership Award

The award is the fourth honor associated with the depolarizing MCC Respectful Conversations program in 24 months.

The Minnesota Character Council awarded the Minnesota Ethical Leadership Award to MCC Respectful Conversations in a ceremony on May 6th. According to their website, “The Minnesota Ethical Leadership Award was developed … to honor exemplary community programs that are building character strengths and ethical leadership skills in its participants.”

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The Minnesota Ethical Leadership Award spotlights character and ethical leadership development, honors organizations with exemplary efforts, motivates honorees for continued effort and success, and inspires others with examples to replicate. Organizations are nominated for the Minnesota Ethical Leadership Award, then invited to submit an application that is reviewed by a blue-ribbon panel.

When presenting the award to Rev. Jerad Morey, Director of Strategic Relationships, who received it on behalf of Minnesota Council of Churches, Synergy & Leadership Exchange’s event MC Carla Beaurline said:

MCC Respectful Conversations pairs a trained lead facilitator with a community experiencing or anticipating toxically polarizing conflict. Through volunteer training and deploying large-scale conversation events – whether on a campus, in a municipality, or via a faith community – they strengthen relationships, reduce affective polarization, and build the peacemaking capacity for all involved. Participants leave with a deeper understanding of people with opposing viewpoints and better equipped to navigate future polarizing conflicts.

Key highlights of the event included a message from Minnesota Education Commissioner Willie Jett along with a presentation of Governor Walz’s “Character Recognition Day” proclamation, an inspiring keynote from Suwana Kirkland, Dakota County Community Corrections Director, and an awards presentation highlighting innovative and successful practices, programs, and outcomes in character and ethical leadership development.

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“MCC Respectful Conversations has thrived on the passion of trained lead facilitators, the can-do spirit of our volunteer table facilitators, and the courage shown by the cities, campuses and faith communities who step up to say ‘we want to be a source of peace’ in the midst of polarization,” said Morey. Also present to celebrate the award was Joan Haan, a founding Lead Facilitator of MCC Respectful Conversations and coach.

For 13 years Minnesota Council of Churches’ Respectful Conversations have engaged over 9,000 people in Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota in empathy-building events with lasting impact. Begun with support from the Bush Foundation in 2012, MCC Respectful Conversations have been offered on a fee-for-service basis since 2015. In 2024 about 700 people participated in 11 Respectful Conversations through cities, campuses and congregations to address conflict over belonging in their community, the Presidential campaign, and other polarizing topics.

In answering the call to volunteer at a Respectful Conversation last year, one person said of their first MCC Respectful Conversations experience a decade earlier: “It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.”

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The Minnesota Ethical Leadership Award is the sixth award associated with MCC Respectful Conversations since its inception and the fourth in the last 24 months. The award comes on the heels of a seven-screening Better Together Film Festival, another depolarization initiative the Council held during the National Week of Conversation – which In its third year in Minnesota, saw record engagement.

“The success of this program shows what good can be accomplished when we work together across our differences to live out our values,” said Elder Suzanne P. Kelly, CEO of the Minnesota Council of Churches.

Previous MCC Respectful Conversations-related honors include:

• January 2025: MCC Respectful Conversations Lead Facilitator Victoria McWane-Creek received the Star Tribune Bridge Builder 2024 Award in part for her leadership of A Respectful Conversation about This Election at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Saint Cloud.
  
  
• September 2024: Rev. Jerad Morey, was named an Obama Foundation USA Leader in part for his leadership of the depolarization work of MCC Respectful Conversations.
  
  
• October 2023: Minnesota Council of Churches won the competitive Strengthening Democracy Field Test grant award from Stanford University’s School of Humanities and Sciences’ Polarization and Social Change Lab for an experiment in boosting democratic attitudes with MCC Respectful Conversations as the platform.
  
  
• September 2022: Rev. Jerad Morey was named an Aspen Institute Better Arguments Ambassador, in part for the impact of MCC Respectful Conversations.
  
  
• May 2020: Respectful Conversations in Schools, which MCC co-developed with Civic Youth Minnesota (now YMCA Center for Youth Voice) was named a Promising Practice by the Minnesota Academic League, Synergy & Leadership Exchange, and the Minnesota Service Corporation.

You can plan a MCC Respectful Conversations event by contacting Rev. Morey or going to www.mnchurches.org.

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About Minnesota Council of Churches

Representing 27 member judicatories and around 1,000,000 Christians, the Minnesota Council of Churches builds the common good through programs like Refugee Services, Racial Justice Truth & Reparations, Interfaith Relationships, and Respectful Conversations™. Learn more at www.mnchurches.org