Expanding the Crew

Expanding the Crew April 20, 2026 When the Artemis II crew arrived at Kennedy Space Center before launch, they introduced the fifth member of the mission: a small plush Moon wearing Earth as a baseball cap, designed by eight-year-old Lucas Ye. Inspired by the Earthrise photograph taken during Apollo 8, Lucas named his design Rise. Inside the plush, on a tiny SD card, were 5.6 million names submitted by people who wanted some part of themselves to make the journey, too. It was a fitting beginning. Because what made Artemis II historic wasn’t only where it went, though the four astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any human beings before them. What made it historic was who went. The last time humans traveled to the Moon was December 1972. Every astronaut who had ever made that journey — each person who had seen Earth from lunar distance — was white, male, and American. On April 1, 2026, that changed. Victor Glover became the first Black astronaut to fly to the Moon. Christina Koch became the first woman. Jeremy Hansen became the first person from outside the United States. The crew that carried humanity back to the Moon looked, for the first time, something like humanity itself.  This matters beyond symbolism. Who is trusted with the mission — whose perspective is considered essential, whose presence is treated as belonging — reflects what a society believes about who counts. For decades, the answer to who explores deep space was narrow, not because of ability, but because of barriers built by discrimination and exclusion. Glover, Koch, and Hansen didn’t arrive on the crew by accident. They arrived because people before them fought to open doors that had been closed: in classrooms, in military flight programs, in the astronaut corps itself, and in the international agreements that made a Canadian seat on an American spacecraft possible. Each of those fights is a human rights story. And each of those stories was, until recently, one NASA was willing to tell.  When the crew was announced in 2023, NASA celebrated the milestones openly: the first woman, the first person of color assigned to a lunar mission. By the time of the launch, that language had been removed from the agency’s website and public communications, following an executive order directing federal agencies to dismantle diversity programs. The firsts still happened. The crew still flew. But the institution stopped saying it out loud. Whose stories get told and whose get erased matters. It is never a neutral choice. It is one of the ways dignity is either honored or withheld.  But the public saw what the government would not name. In a season when the news has felt relentless and heavy, millions of people stopped what they were doing and watched. It was the first lunar mission many of us had ever witnessed, and the first broadcast in high-definition video. The crew witnessed a total solar eclipse from behind the Moon, a sight no human eyes had ever seen. And when they looked back at Earth — blue, green, brown, swirled in white clouds, luminous against the dark — they struggled to find words for what they were seeing. During the flyby, Koch radioed Houston: “We hear you can look up and see the moon right now. We see you, too.” Teachers gathered their students around monitors. Children followed the progress and declared their own future plans to become astronauts. Many could see themselves in the crew.  Each of the four astronauts was once one of those children, shaped by communities that encouraged them to be curious, to reach beyond what seemed possible. Now their work will inform the next mission, which will inform the one after that. This is how progress moves: not in a single leap, but through sustained, iterative effort passed from one set of hands to the next.  This is also the work of the Wassmuth Center. Every April, our Wassmuth Youth Leaders and Human Rights Education Fellows gather to share what they have built over the year — classroom initiatives, community projects, new strategies for interrupting injustice. We pause to celebrate what they have learned and who they have become, and then they pass the work forward. New cohorts of students and teachers arrive. The questions evolve. The mission continues, shaped by everyone who came before and everyone who will follow. And each year, the crew expands. More voices. More perspectives. More people who see themselves as belonging to the work.  The day the astronauts splashed down in the Pacific, Commander Reid Wiseman was supposed to leave Rise behind in the capsule for later retrieval. He didn’t. He tucked the little plush into a dry bag and carried it out with him. An eight-year-old’s vision of Earth and Moon together, designed to represent all of us, was too important to leave behind. 

Boundaries of Belonging

Boundaries of Belonging April 13, 2026 On March 31, hundreds of Idahoans gathered on the Capitol steps to honor Transgender Day of Visibility. They showed up to be seen, to be counted, to claim their place in public life. Inside the building, Governor Little signed a law designed to push them out. House Bill 752 criminalizes transgender people for using public restrooms that align with their gender identity. A first offense carries up to a year in jail. A second offense becomes a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. The law reaches beyond government buildings into private businesses: restaurants, hospitals, malls, museums. It takes effect July 1.  Think about what this means in practice. A traveler pulls into a gas station on a long drive and reaches for the restroom door. A teenager slips away from friends at the movies. A patient steps into a clinic bathroom before an appointment. Every one of us understands the ordinary need behind these moments — a need so basic, so human, that we have built an entire architecture of dignity around it. Walls and doors. Locks and signs. The understanding that this space is important and private. Under House Bill 752, what most of us never think twice about becomes a serious risk for transgender Idahoans. Not because they have done anything wrong. Because of who they are. This is not a minor policy adjustment. It is the state declaring that certain people do not belong in shared public spaces.  House Bill 752 does not stand alone. It is part of a broader pattern of legislation in Idaho that has, year by year, narrowed the rights of transgender people. In 2020, Idaho became the first state to ban transgender girls and women from school sports. In 2023, providing gender-affirming health care to transgender youth became a felony. In 2024, Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care was eliminated. Each law builds on the last. Each draws the boundaries of belonging a little tighter.  There is a word for what happens when policies steadily make life untenable for a group of people: elimination. We often associate elimination with catastrophic atrocities such as death camps or ethnic cleansing. But elimination can also unfold more quietly, when the state makes life so unsafe that people retreat from public life, hide who they are, or leave altogether. Transgender Idahoans and their families are being forced to make painful decisions to close businesses, leave jobs, and even leave the state.  This legislation echoes a much older chapter of American law. Beginning in the mid-1800s, dozens of cities and states passed laws criminalizing people for wearing clothing associated with another gender. For more than a century, these laws were used to police, harass, and jail transgender and gender-nonconforming people simply for appearing in public. The logic was the same then as it is now: certain people do not belong in shared spaces, and the state has the right to punish them for being visible.  But those laws did not stand unchallenged. Transgender people were at the forefront of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, a moment that helped launch a broader movement for civil rights and recognition. Cross-dressing ordinances were struck down in courts across the country. In 1993, Minnesota became the first state to ban anti-transgender discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, and public services. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that federal civil rights law protects employees from discrimination based on gender identity. At the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is etched in stone: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. That declaration is not a suggestion. It is the standard against which every law should be measured, including House Bill 752. Dignity is not something the state grants only to people who fit comfortably within its categories. It belongs to everyone. When a law denies dignity, we have a responsibility to respond.  Responding starts with listening — seeking out the voices of transgender community members to understand what this moment means for their lives. It means paying attention to the laws being passed in our name. And it means doing the daily work of building communities where everyone belongs: supporting businesses owned by marginalized neighbors, creating welcoming public spaces, and having the honest conversations with friends and family that this moment demands. Every signal matters. Every gesture that says you belong here pushes back against a law that says the opposite.  That traveler at the gas station. The teenager at the movies. The patient at the clinic. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, our children. They deserve to reach for a door without fear. That is what dignity looks like: the ordinary, unremarkable act of moving through public life. We owe each other that much. And we owe it to ourselves to be the kind of community that makes it true. 

Make Room

We keep naming laws after children who were harmed. 

Isaiah’s Law. Benji’s Law. Megan’s Law. The Adam Walsh Act. Jessica’s Law. Erin’s Law. Each name is a memorial and an indictment — evidence that a child suffered because the systems meant to protect them moved too slowly, listened too little, or looked the other way. 

Build Better

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.

The Imagination Gap

The Imagination Gap March 23, 2026 Whether we recognize it or not, we are constantly deciding how much other people’s lives matter to us — in the stories we tell, the policies we tolerate, and in the moments we speak up or stay silent. Dignity is not something we grant. It is something we acknowledge. Or fail to. And what is being tested, what has always been tested, is whether we actually believe that every person’s life is valuable.  Most of us would say yes without hesitation. But belief is not the same as imagination. And imagination — the capacity to feel the weight of someone else’s experience as equal to our own — is where we most often fail.  It is not a failure of information. It never has been. In 1942, when Japanese American families on the West Coast were forced from their homes, their businesses, and their communities, the facts were not hidden. Neighbors watched it happen. They saw the suitcases, the boarded-up storefronts, the children pulled from school. Most did not act out of hatred. Many simply could not imagine themselves in those families’ place. The suffering was visible, but it did not register as urgent — because it was happening to someone else. A decade earlier, as Mexican American families were swept up in mass deportation campaigns that removed as many as two million people from the country, including many American citizens, the same dynamic held. Families who had lived in their communities for decades were loaded onto trains heading south. The loss was enormous and the injustice was plain, but for most of those unaffected, it remained someone else’s problem. That pattern has never stopped. When we read a headline today about families being separated, most of us feel a flicker of concern — and then we scroll past. Not because we are cruel, but because those families remain abstract. We do not know their histories, their hopes, their lives. Without that specificity, suffering stays at a comfortable distance. But consider what changes when a story becomes particular, when the headline becomes a mother in your community who fled violence, rebuilt her life, and now faces deportation to a country where she has no one left. Suddenly the policy is not a debate. It is life.  This is why the Dignity Dispatch exists. Not to tell you what to think, but to close the distance between the abstract and the personal. Each week we share history that reveals patterns, stories that make those patterns personal, and concrete ways to act on what you learn. Because the gap between knowing that injustice exists and feeling compelled to address it is almost always a gap of imagination. When a policy affects someone you can picture — a friend, a neighbor, a family you have come to know through their story — it becomes much harder to look away.  We are not asking you to carry the weight of every injustice at once. We are inviting you to widen, just slightly, the circle of lives you pay attention to. Read one story this week about someone whose experience is unfamiliar. Learn one piece of history you were not taught. Ask one question about who is affected by a decision you previously took for granted. These are small acts, but they are the building blocks of a more imaginative — and therefore more just — community. The opposite of injustice is not perfection. It is attention.   

The Rooms We Build

This is ultimately the work. Not perfect institutions, but open doors. Not grand gestures, but the steady, faithful practice of asking, every time we gather:

Who is not yet here? What would it take to make room?

Who is here, but feels like they don’t belong? What would it take to welcome and value them?

These questions, asked seriously and often, are how we keep building the rooms we all long to live in.

Architects of a More Just and Peaceful World

Architects of a More Just and Peaceful World March 9, 2026 The flowers and posts from yesterday’s International Women’s Day are still fresh, and Women’s History Month asks us to keep this energy alive. We must reckon honestly with how far women have brought this world, how much further there is to go, and what is ours to do next.  The rights of women — hard-won over generations of organizing and sacrifice — are now under coordinated attack. Reproductive autonomy is being legislated away. Gender-based violence remains pandemic in scale. Economic inequality persists with stubborn consistency. And the institutions designed to protect human rights are weakening at precisely the moment they are needed most.  History is consistent on this point: where women’s rights contract, instability grows. This and the unraveling of peace are not separate crises. They move together.  We are living through a time of extraordinary global conflict. The number of active wars has grown year over year, and 2026 is on pace to be the most violent year in recent memory. As we see the war in Iran expand across the region, adding to the crises of Ukraine, Sudan, and others, we rightly wonder: how do we build peace? New technologies make conflict more precise and, paradoxically, more remote — distancing decision-makers from the human cost of what they unleash. We have centuries of history showing us the steps that lead here. And yet, we repeat them with devastating outcomes.  That is why conflict and peacebuilding — and the women who have always been at the center of both — deserve our focus. Far from bystanders, these women have often shouldered the costs of conflict and led the work of rebuilding.  While men die in disproportionate numbers on the front lines — a loss that hollows out families and communities in ways that reverberate for generations — women face a different and targeted brutality. Sexual violence is frequently deployed as a deliberate strategy, a weapon of terror and destabilization. The women of Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Ukraine, Sudan, and so many other places know this reality intimately. They are often the ones left to hold everything together when the fighting moves on: raising children alone, rebuilding economic life, tending to the traumatized and the grieving. The burden of survival falls heavily on their backs.  And still: they build.  Women have always been at the center of rebuilding what violence destroys. Not because they are peripheral to power, but because they have so often been excluded from the rooms where war begins, they have built different rooms entirely. Rooms where the conversation is about what people actually need: food, safety, education, healthcare, a future worth building together. Increasingly, women also serve in uniform as soldiers and as a growing presence in international peacekeeping forces. Research consistently shows their participation improves outcomes for civilian populations. And their work does not begin when the guns go quiet. Peacebuilding is prevention as much as repair. It is tending the conditions that allow communities to survive and, eventually, to thrive.  In 1977, a Kenyan woman named Wangari Muta Maathai started planting trees. She had watched poverty and ecological destruction erode her community and recognized them as the kind of instability from which conflict grows. She started by teaching women to plant and care for trees, one at a time. This Green Belt Movement grew into a force that restored land, created livelihoods, and helped women build confidence and civic voice. Desertification that had left communities destitute began to reverse. The movement spread across the continent and demonstrated that peacebuilding does not always begin at a negotiating table. Sometimes it starts with a seed and a woman who believes a better future is possible. This Women’s History Month calls us not only to celebrate what women have built, but to protect the rights that make that work possible. Women have always been among the most powerful architects of a more just and peaceful world — in movements that span continents and in the church groups, book clubs, and community organizations that sustain connection and belonging when the world feels like it is pulling apart. Understanding this history is not an act of nostalgia. It is how we find our footing, recognize what is ours to do, and build the kind of future we know is possible.

Progress is Not Permanent

Progress is Not Permanent March 2, 2026 Women today are more educated, economically independent, and politically represented than at any point in human history. And those gains are under attack. In country after country, progress is being met with organized resistance. Rights that took generations to secure are being contested, narrowed, and in some places eliminated. Progress and regression are unfolding simultaneously, and history reminds us that neither direction is guaranteed.  Human dignity is not conditional. It does not depend on geography, ideology, or election cycles. But around the world, women and girls encounter laws and cultural norms that treat their rights as negotiable. Women’s History Month invites us to celebrate hard-won advances, and to name the work that remains.  Rights rarely disappear overnight. They erode — incrementally, strategically, and often under the language of reform or as a return to “traditional values.” In the United States, this erosion has taken the form of organized anti-democracy and White Christian nationalist movements calling for rigid, hierarchical systems rooted in patriarchal authority — systems that begin in the family and extend outward into civic life, resting on the premise that men hold primary authority while women and children occupy subordinate roles. The consequences are significant. Since 2021, thirteen states have enacted abortion bans. In some of those states, women have faced delayed or denied care for ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, and cancer treatment while legal teams debate whether their conditions qualify as emergencies. Bodily autonomy has become geographically determined.  Legislative efforts in multiple states are also working to narrow protections against discrimination. At the federal level, policy blueprints such as Project 2025 and Project 2026 outline sweeping changes that could weaken education, employment, healthcare, and voting rights. These are not hypothetical threats. They are policy positions with named authors, legislative sponsors, and implementation timelines.  The same pattern is visible globally, and the warning signs are even starker. In Afghanistan, girls remain barred from secondary and university education. Just six years ago, Afghan women held more than a quarter of the seats in Parliament. Today, women are excluded from national leadership, and many former officials live in exile. The near-erasure of women from public life illustrates how quickly rights can disappear when institutions fail to protect them.  Democratic backsliding in countries such as Hungary, Israel, and Turkey has also coincided with declining women’s political representation and weakened legal protections. History is consistent: when women’s rights contract, broader human rights instability often follows. The status of women is an indicator of democratic health.  This is precisely where education becomes prevention. When people understand how dehumanization works — the ways language shifts, legal standards narrow, and normalization dulls concern — they are better prepared to interrupt it. The loss of rights rarely begins with a single dramatic event. It starts when harmful ideas go unchallenged and small changes go unquestioned.  The forces working against women’s rights are real, organized, and growing. So is our capacity to respond. The question before us is not whether these challenges exist. They do. But history also tells us this: when people choose to meet such moments with courage and conviction, progress that once seemed impossible is eventually won.

Choosing Compassion

Choosing Compassion February 23, 2026 When you walk into the Philip E. Batt Education Building at the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights, you are not simply entering a building. You are stepping into an ongoing conversation about human rights. More than 30 works of art line the walls and fill the alcoves, each inviting reflection on what it means to live in community with others. One of the most striking pieces is Compassion, painted by Mary Frances Donelinger. The painting is a visual meditation on interdependence — a reminder that no life stands alone and that communities endure through mutual care. At its center are words from a Catholic nun who inspired Bill Wassmuth, the Center’s namesake. Sister Joan D. Chittister reminds us: Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the sufferings of others. Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community. That image of compassion as a gate feels especially poignant now. A gate is not a symbolic decoration; it determines who is welcomed, protected, or turned away. In moments of social tension, the question is not whether we admire compassion, but if we use it to drive our collective decisions and keep the gate open. When compassion guides decision-making, it opens pathways to stronger care systems and a deeper recognition that our well-being is intertwined. Yet we are living in a moment when compassion itself is increasingly contested. Rather than focusing on the urgent challenges facing Idaho families — access to healthcare, economic stability, safety, and opportunity — some proposals emerging from the Statehouse risk narrowing who is considered worthy of care, who is allowed through the gate. A bill introduced last week, for example, would criminalize certain forms of assistance to people who are undocumented. For faith communities, food pantries, domestic violence shelters, and after-school programs, this could create an impossible moral position: serve neighbors in crisis or face legal consequences. Behind policy language are real people seeking safety, stability, and dignity whose lives are directly impacted by our collective compassion. Beyond policy specifics lies a deeper question about the kind of community we are building. Laws and public rhetoric do more than regulate behavior; they signal whose suffering matters and whose humanity is recognized. When compassion is framed as weakness or dismissed as naive, exclusion can begin to seem normal. This is often how human rights violations begin. Gradual shifts in language and priorities make it easier to look away from the suffering of others.  And still, compassion remains one of humanity’s most enduring values. Last week’s rare overlap of Lent and Ramadan offers a reminder of our shared moral inheritance. Though rooted in different faith traditions, both observances invite reflection, restraint, and generosity. They encourage people to notice suffering — their own and others’ — and respond with intention. The calendars may not often align, but the message is consistent: communities grow stronger when compassion is practiced. Ultimately, compassion is a daily decision to widen the circle of care, especially when doing so feels inconvenient, uncomfortable, or unpopular. It asks us to resist the temptation to divide the world into those who deserve dignity and those who do not. As civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson encouraged us, “Never look down on anybody unless you are helping them up.” His words name compassion for what it truly is: a practice of meeting vulnerability with care, a way of keeping the gate to community open even when it is difficult. Every act of care — expressed through public policy, advocacy, or everyday kindness — becomes a hand on that gate. Each time we choose compassion, we push it open a little wider, creating space for dignity and belonging. When fear urges us to close it, we can be strong and hold it open for one another. Healthy communities are not built by deciding who must stand outside, but by choosing to let compassion guide who we become together.

Strength in Community

Strength in Community February 16, 2026 A room full of people committed to connecting, learning, and creating compassionate communities carries real power. This spirit is at the heart of our work at the Wassmuth Center, and it came vividly to life at last month’s Cultivating Compassionate Communities Conference. Nearly 300 people gathered not simply to attend an event, but to practice what it means to be in community — listening across differences, grappling with complexities, and imagining how to create a more just and joyful world.  The Wassmuth Center’s third annual conference became a living example of how communities grow stronger when people come together with curiosity and courage. Throughout the day, participants engaged in sessions and conversations that invited reflection and action. Whether exploring how to rebuild connection across deep divides, examining the neuroscience of compassion, or wrestling with what authentic allyship looks like in practice, we leaned into learning that was both challenging and hopeful.  This year’s conference theme — Everyone Is Welcome Here – Let’s Make It Real — invited participants to move beyond aspirational language and consider what belonging actually requires. Across sessions and conversations, we explored what it looks like to create more welcoming schools, workplaces, congregations, neighborhoods, and civic spaces through thoughtful design, courageous leadership, and daily practices that honor the dignity of all people.  Keynote speaker Dr. Mitchell Maki grounded these ideas in history, sharing the story of Japanese American incarceration during World War II and the long struggle for redress that followed. His reflections challenged us to learn from the most difficult chapters of our country’s past so we can develop the moral clarity to recognize and respond to injustice in our own time.  There was an unmistakable energy throughout the day: warm exchanges in-between strangers, serious questions posed, and a shared recognition that the challenges before us are significant but not insurmountable. Participants left with new relationships, deeper knowledge, practical tools, and a renewed commitment to stay engaged in their communities.  Whether or not you were able to join us for this year’s conference, we encourage you to seek out places to connect, learn, and create. From neighborhood associations to faith communities, workplaces to classrooms, there are countless ways to step into this important work and draw strength and courage from each other.