CONTRIBUTED PHOTO For the second year in a row, Mitchell Family Funeral Home is the only funeral home in the State of Iowa to be recognized with the Pursuit of Excellence Award from the National Funeral Directors Association, at a convention and expo held in Chicago October 26-29. Left to right: Rich Green, Lauren Borcherding, Marty Mitchell, Christopher Robinson (the 2025-2026 immediate past-president of the NFDA) and Shannon Bowers.

For the second year in a row, Mitchell Family Funeral Home is the only funeral home in the State of Iowa to be recognized with the Pursuit of Excellence Award from the National Funeral Directors Association, at a convention and expo held in Chicago October 26-29. The award has been given for the past 45 years to funeral homes around the world.

“Funerals are based on relationships with the public…It’s not just supporting people during funeral times. It’s supporting community in any time,” said Mitchell Family Funeral Home Owner Marty Mitchell.

He noted that members of his team attend the expo yearly, whether awards are won or not. Employees trade off going, as the entire group can’t be out of office at once due to the fast-paced nature of the funeral business.

“We’ve gone every year since we opened (in 2004),” he added. “There’s continuing education in the lines of professional development, both with care of the decedent and different abilities to do services to personalize them.”

This could include better understanding new technology and products that may enhance services, plus gaining insights from contemporaries in the field. Iowa law requires mortuary licensees to complete 24 hours of continuing education every two years.

“Every day, funeral homes across the country and around the world develop innovative ways to support grieving families and serve their communities. Whether it’s a unique memorial event, an impactful community outreach program or a fresh approach to helping families navigate loss, these ideas make a difference — and they deserve to be recognized,” according to information obtained online via the National Funeral Directors Association.

Mitchell noted that approximately 280 funeral homes across the world from the United States, Canada, Philippines, Mexico and others qualified for the award.

“The staff seen in the picture accepted it on behalf of you — the public and every family we serve. It does not represent us but the people who have allowed us to care for someone special to them. We have not accomplished this without flaws — we have a human side — and those stick in my mind every day. My biggest fear in life is not illness or loss, but letting someone down,” Mitchell said.

While death and dying can be uncomfortable topics, Mitchell said he’s committed to educating the public about it, in the form of presentations given to schools, retirement communities, senior groups, fraternal organizations, social clubs, and more.

“The younger the group is, the more gory details they want to know about,” he said with a laugh. “The older the person gets, the conversation turns to how much is this going to cost me?”

Removing the taboo and opening up the conversation, he notes, can save heartache when the time comes for final expenses.

“We’re seeing that there is a large population that we are working with, percentage wise, that maybe one spouse elects cremation where the other spouse elects burial,” he said. “There’s one similarity between all the funeral homes that are involved in this, and it could be from coast to coast or border to border, and that is just the change in family dynamics, change in preferences on things, but that’s one that we universally are challenged with.”

In addition to burial and cremation, Mitchell said he’s worked with aquamation, an environmentally friendly alternative to flame cremation that uses a water-based process called alkaline hydrolysis to reduce a body to bone fragments, as well as terramation, whereby a body is transformed into soil over several weeks in a controlled environment.

“We can do green burial, but for aquamation we have to go to Minnesota. It’s the nearest state we can do that with,” he said. “For terramation, we have to have the body flown to Oregon.”

Then, the remains can be brought back to the State of Iowa.

Mitchell Family Funeral Home has sponsored free swim days at the aquatic center, kennels at the Marshalltown ARL, sports teams and racecars, and more. It also sponsors scholarships for Marshalltown Community College, Des Moines Area Community College and Mitchell’s alma mater, Worsham College of Mortuary Science.

“For MCC, if there’s not a person going into mortuary science, then we just let the school decide who to give it to, in an adjacent field,” he said.

In 2017, Mitchell founded the Iowa Funeral Museum and Education Center with the goal of preserving the history of funeral service in Iowa. It is free admission and located at 1201 Iowa Avenue West near the funeral home’s office. It is open by appointment only.

Mitchell Family Funeral Home may be reached at: 641-844-1234.