Build Better
March 30, 2026
When you walk through the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial at the Wassmuth Center, you are surrounded by the ideas of people who changed the world: Frederick Douglass, Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr. Their words are etched in stone because they spoke truths that endure, truths that point toward something larger than any single life. But none of the people quoted on those walls were perfect. Some caused real harm. And the Memorial does not ask us to pretend otherwise.
The Memorial asks something harder: to accept that a person can articulate a profound truth about human dignity and still fail to live it fully. Wisdom can come from flawed sources. The work of justice has never depended on finding perfect leaders, but on building shared commitments strong enough to outlast any individual’s failures.
This tension is in the news right now. A recent New York Times investigation revealed that Cesar Chávez — who organized one of the most important labor movements in American history, giving voice and power to farmworkers — sexually abused women and girls within the movement. Dolores Huerta, who co-founded United Farm Workers with Chávez, has come forward at age 95 to say that she, too, was assaulted. The courage and sacrifice of that movement were real. And so was the abuse. Huerta’s decades of silence reveal how deeply hierarchical movements can trap even the strongest people inside systems that prioritize a leader’s reputation over the safety of the people they were built to protect.
This is not a new story. We have seen it in religious institutions, political parties, corporations, entertainment industries, and in the revelations of the Epstein files. The settings change; the structure repeats. When a movement focuses on a person rather than a set of principles, protecting that individual becomes paramount, and the people the movement was meant to serve become expendable.
The lesson is not that leaders don’t matter. They do. But when we place people on pedestals, we create the conditions for the very abuses we are working to prevent. Pedestals concentrate power. They discourage dissent. They make it easy for those closest to a leader to look away, and for those harmed to believe that their suffering is a necessary cost.
What if we built differently?
We have evidence that it is possible. When white supremacist groups established a compound in northern Idaho in the 1970s, the community’s response could have coalesced around a single charismatic figure. Instead, Bill Wassmuth and others deliberately built a coalition: the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. Its leadership was distributed across clergy, educators, business owners, law enforcement, and neighbors. The work belonged to the community, not to one person. Years of threats and intimidation tested the coalition’s resolve. And when Wassmuth eventually left Idaho, the movement did not collapse — because it had never depended on him alone. The principles held. The coalition outlasted the hate groups it was built to confront, enduring through the work of organizations, including the Wassmuth Center.
That model — principles over personality, shared ownership over hierarchy — is what we carry forward today through the Wassmuth Powerful Practices that guide our work. These practices are designed to be lived by everyone, not held by any one person. Here is what that looks like:
- Design for Belonging — shaping the spaces and systems around us so that everyone is included and able to fully participate — means no one has to trade their safety for access.
- Listen Deeply — offering your full presence without judgment or the impulse to fix — creates the conditions for people to speak the truths that hierarchies silence.
- Stay Curious — approaching people and situations with openness and humility — helps organizations catch their own blind spots before they harden into culture.
- Notice and Name Bright Spots — looking for what is working and saying so out loud — builds momentum without requiring a single heroic figure to carry it.
- Align Actions with Values — pausing to check our commitments before we make decisions, especially in moments of conflict — is the discipline that keeps a movement honest when it would be easier to look away.
- Collect Joy — savoring and sharing moments of connection and delight that sustain us — ensures that endurance does not come at the expense of wholeness.
These practices do not rise or fall with any single leader. They are habits that any person, in any role, can take up — at a kitchen table, in a classroom, at a board meeting, or in a movement for justice. They distribute leadership across a community rather than concentrating it at the top.
We can learn from the people whose words live in the Memorial without idolizing them. We can honor what Chávez’s work accomplished while refusing to excuse what it cost the people inside the movement. We can hold Huerta’s lifetime of courageous leadership in one hand and her agonizing silence in the other, and let both sharpen our resolve to build structures where no one has to make that choice.
The bright spots in history are real. So are the failures. The question is whether we build organizations and movements that learn from both, or keep replicating systems that demand loyalty to people over fidelity to shared commitments.
The wise words that fill the Memorial were not carved in stone to honor the people who said them. They are there to inspire and challenge us. This is the unfinished work: to build something together that embodies our highest values.