About BERC

BERC, also known as the Business Ethics Resource Center, is an open-access website that makes business ethics resources available freely to the public with the intent to educate business leaders and assist them in building and maintaining strong organizational cultures and practices of ethics and compliance in the businesses and industries they serve. BERC provides users with the opportunity to gain a foundational ethics and compliance information as well as learn best practices. BERC offers solutions to ethics and compliance challenges commonly experienced by small and medium-sized businesses in all industries.

BERC Partners

The Melrose and The Toro Company Center for Principled Leadership at the Opus College of Business at the University of St. Thomas (the Center) has a longstanding commitment to ethics and corporate responsibility as well as an investment in one of the largest and distinguished business ethics faculties in the United States. The Center originated in 1978, as the Minnesota Center for Corporate Responsibility (MCCR). Initially, established in the minds of a small group of chief executives, it expanded exponentially reaching tens of thousands of individuals in more than 300 companies.

Just as the business marketplace has evolved, so has the Center. In 2020, the Center rebranded as the Melrose and The Toro Company Center for Principle Leadership. The Melrose and The Toro Company Center for Principled Leadership connects learning in the liberal arts and humanities to leadership practice, meaningful work for employees, and the greater societal purpose of business in advancing the common good.  The Center accomplishes this mission through dialogues, programs and events to facilitate practical learning and actionable scholarly research about professional responsibility and ethics.

Our partnership and commitment to BERC is built on a foundation of shared vision of ethics-based business practices and developing principled leaders, who think globally, act ethically, and create enduring value for society.

Founding sponsor, is the fifth-largest commercial bank in the United States, with 74,000 employees and $467 billion in assets as of December 31, 2018. The Minneapolis-based bank is committed to serving its millions of retail, business, wealth management, payment, commercial and corporate, and investment services customers across the country and around the world as a trusted financial partner, a commitment recognized by the Ethisphere Institute naming U.S. Bancorp a 2019 World’s Most Ethical Company. U.S. Bank has received this honor since 2015.

Shared Purpose

Through the Melrose and The Toro Company Center for Principled Leadership, BERC aims to:

• Advance principled leadership ethical business practices across industries and all levels of employment.
• Serve as a practical resource for businesses to promote, develop, and maintain ethical organizational cultures.
• Invest in promoting ethics education across all boundaries in service to the common good.