Some People of JRLC

Former Executive Director Brian Rusche

"I was blessed to have that job and I thought it was a really important part of our public life to have the religious communities commit to working together when they could. To me, that’s like what citizenship is. I commit to work with you even though I know I’m gonna have disagreements with you. Man, if you don’t have that, it’s really hard to have a governing democracy. So I would argue that JRLC was really an important part of Minnesota’s commitment to public life and democracy."

2019 Community Organizer Katie Powell

"From where I’m sitting, one of the beautiful things about the JRLC is that our first commitment is to interfaith work and not to a specific agenda. And our legislative agenda changes every year, and while there are obvious themes that run through the work that we do, first and foremost, we want to make sure that we are able to work together as people from different faith backgrounds."

Board Member Rev. Curtiss DeYoung

“I am the CEO of the Minnesota Council of Churches, I have been in this position for two years, but the Council of Churches has been around about 70 years...We represent a fairly wide range of Protestant Christians, probably if you put all the memberships of all those denominations together, it’d be close to a million people in Minnesota. So we bring a clearly Christian perspective, a progressive side of the Protestant church for the most part. But we bring also a very strong commitment to, not only JRLC but to the work that we do, that we try to do in partnership with other faith groups in the state.”

Board Member Rabbi Tamar Grimm

"I got involved with the JRLC through the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), I’m on both boards and the JCRC asked me to sort of be a liaison for them.  On the JRLC, part of our jobs, as board members, is to help the executive director and the staff figure out what their agenda is going to be for the year, like what are the issues they’re really going to be working on. And we try to do that in a way that is comfortable for all the different constituencies on the board."