The Morgan Hill Toastmasters club presented former mayor Dennis
Kennedy with its
”
Excellence in Community Leadership
”
award for his work in developing Morgan Hill’s Sister Cities
program and other public involvement.
The Morgan Hill Toastmasters club presented former mayor Dennis Kennedy with its “Excellence in Community Leadership” award for his work in developing Morgan Hill’s Sister Cities program and other public involvement.
The award was presented to Kennedy by the club’s president Jim Carrillo March 24 at BookSmart bookstore in downtown Morgan Hill where the group meets every Thursday morning.
“Toastmasters is not just a club about public speaking. It’s also a club about leadership,” Carrillo said in presenting the award. “We’ve developed an award to give to a community member who exemplifies leadership traits. Former mayor Dennis Kennedy is a citizen of Morgan Hill who truly has shined as a leader who has made our community better.”
Kennedy moved to Morgan Hill 35 years ago when he worked for IBM. At IBM, he became a Toastmasters member at the suggestion of a company manager.
“I attribute Toastmasters to really helping me be able to accomplish a lot of good things that a lot of us – all of us – would like to do,” he said at the award presentation. “Toastmasters has been a wonderful help in my life. And I’m happy to see a group with so many women in it. I don’t think we had one woman in the Toastmasters club I was a part of (at IBM).”
Kennedy was Morgan Hill’s first directly-elected mayor. His term ended in 2006, and he continued to participate in various projects and groups in Morgan Hill. One of his proudest accomplishments as mayor was establishing Morgan Hill’s Sister Cities program, an initiative which now connects the community with cities in Ireland, Italy, Mexico and Japan.
“When I was first elected mayor, we had no sister cities,” Kennedy said. “So I made this a passion and a goal for me to establish sister cities. I had served in Europe in the Army, in the military, and had traveled to other countries and I could see that so many other Americans didn’t understand other cultures, other countries, because they are living in a very closed environment.”
The Sister Cities program was started by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 to build cultural bridges between the United States and other nations and thus break down the barriers that lead to misunderstandings and conflicts.
Kennedy said that one goal he is working on now for Morgan Hill’s Sister Cities program is to establish a cultural relationship with a Middle East nation.
“Our challenge now is to be able to establish a Sister Cities (program) with a country where there are major misunderstandings,” he said. “We’re thinking of a country in the Middle East – a Muslim country – for our next sister city. That’s an initiative of the Sister Cities International program, because there are a lot of misunderstandings between Muslim countries and (prominently) Judeo-Christian countries of the world.”
The Excellence in Community Leadership Award was established in 2010 by the Morgan Hill Toastmasters and is given out every spring to a resident or group based in the South Valley region who has served as a high quality leader. The Morgan Hill Toastmasters club meets every Thursday morning at 7:30 a.m. at the BookSmart bookstore.
To see the video of the award to Kennedy, visit http://www.blip.tv/file/5010847.
