Carry the Song
Carry the Song July 6, 2026 Morning sun streams through the windows of the Wassmuth Center as the children arrive for the first day of Kindness Camp. Some cling to their caregivers; others drift toward the books and the art supplies waiting on the tables. They have all come to spend the week exploring one idea: kindness. Soon they gather in a circle, clapping out the rhythm of the welcome song and greeting each other by name. They lose the words, laugh, and start over. The sound rises, young voices feeling their way to the end of a verse — and finding it, together. It would be easy to just call this a pleasant way to spend a summer week — somewhere to put children while the serious business of the world goes on elsewhere. But a child learning a song is also learning that her voice carries, that others will catch it when she falters, that she has something worth saying. Later that morning, she will lift a paintbrush and set down her own vision of what kindness looks like. And later still she will add her piece to the wall — a paper leaf, a bright flower, a piece of the sun — until the separate small efforts become one forest the whole group has created together. This is where justice begins: in a room where a child learns her voice will be caught, and that her small part joins something larger than herself. Children grasp this sooner than we expect. In Birmingham in 1963, the campaign against segregation had stalled. Adults who marched risked losing their jobs. So the movement turned to the city’s children, and they showed up. Thousands walking out of school, singing. The city met them with fire hoses and police dogs. The photographs traveled the world, and within weeks President Kennedy went on television to call segregation a moral wrong the nation could no longer ignore — a turn that led, the next summer, to the Civil Rights Act. Young people continue to step into public life. A few years ago, just across the Idaho border, sixteen young Montanans sued their state over its role in the warming climate. They did not speak in the abstract: they testified to the wildfire smoke that kept them indoors, the snow that came late or not at all. The courts agreed that their right to a clean and healthful environment had been violated — the first climate case of its kind in the country to reach trial, and they won it. They spoke, and the courts listened. But no one walks into a courtroom naturally assured her voice counts; that confidence can be developed early, in far smaller settings — places like this one. Kindness Camp asks the youngest of them to practice being kind: to themselves, to one another, to the earth. They learn that each person carries an invisible space that is theirs alone, and that kindness can mean asking before you cross into someone else’s. By the last day you hear it from the children directly: “I need a little space,” or “That’s too loud for me. Could you use a quiet voice?” Each of those small sentences is a child discovering she has a say: that she can name what she needs and be answered, that the world is partly hers to shape. It is among the first rights anyone practices: the right to one’s own self. Those early lessons about honoring another person’s dignity eventually become something larger: the same moral ground the Birmingham students marched onto and the Montana plaintiffs stood upon. What children need from us is not protection from the hard questions but company inside them. A child notices early who is left out and what is unfair, and says so plainly, before anyone has taught her to look away. The instinct is to smooth it over, to tell her the world is gentler than it is. The truer thing is to stay in the question with her — to walk beside her rather than out front, to treat a five-year-old’s sense of fairness as the real thing it is. But none of this needs to be solemn. Joy is not the opposite of those questions; it is what gives the child the nerve to keep asking them. So we collect joy on purpose — the wrong note that gets more delightful each time it comes around, the freeze dance that dissolves into giggles the instant the music cuts out, the flower that runs in the wet paint and turns into something nobody planned. She learns as much from these as from anything graver: that a room can hold her mistakes, that she can begin again, that she is cared for even when she gets it wrong. A child who has felt how good it is to belong will spend a lifetime building that feeling for others. On the last morning of camp, the children sing the welcome song all the way through. Their words are steadier now, and when one voice wavers the others carry it. Behind them on the wall, the forest they made is complete. The children will take the song with them — they will leave the forest for whoever comes next.
Do the Unheard-of Thing
More than a century ago, Rebecca Brown Mitchell lit a candle in a bottle on a dirt floor. The light is still on, in rooms across Idaho and throughout the country, kept burning by each person who decides to act. Rebecca made her corner of the country better, one unheard-of thing at a time. So can you. Mark this milestone in our nation’s story: find the thing no one around you has done yet, and do it. Then leave the light on for those who will come next.
The Ground in Front of You
The Ground in Front of You June 22, 2026 In Siem Reap, every one of our Idaho students held a rat in both hands — bigger and gentler than expected, and the reason a stretch of Cambodian land is safe to walk across today. These rats are trained to smell the explosive inside a buried landmine. Light enough to walk over a mine without setting it off, a rat is able to find what is hidden, mark it, and trot off for a treat — and a patch of the earth is safe to live on again. Cleared ground becomes a field to farm, a path to a well, a road a child can take to school. Decades of war left hundreds of thousands of landmines in Cambodia’s soil, and clearing them happens slowly — meter by careful meter, by people and rats who give years to the patch in front of them. Since 2014, the APOPO humanitarian organization and its Cambodian partners have cleared more than 33 million square meters this way. The reward isn’t simply the danger removed. It is everything that can grow once the ground is safe. That slow return — danger cleared, life growing back — is what our H-RISE youth leaders crossed the world to understand. They saw how human rights are stripped away, and how they are built back. Their trip was the culmination of a year spent studying human rights and Cambodian history. The landmines were never really the subject. They were how something larger came into focus: dignity itself. Every person is born with equal dignity and rights. This is the founding promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But being born with a right is not the same as being able to live it. A child has every right to an education; a minefield between her home and her school can still keep her from it. The dignity is already hers. The conditions to live it are what people have to build — and learning to do that is what we came for. In Cambodia, we learned beside the people doing the work. We followed their lead, lent our hands, and listened to the survivors who are rebuilding their communities. In Kampot, we waded into the coastal mud to plant mangroves, fragile slips of green that take years to root and will one day shelter a whole shoreline and the village behind it. We visited a pepper farm where the vines bear nothing for years and then give for decades; at a silk farm outside of Siem Reap, a single thread unwound from one cocoon. None of it is fast. All of it begins small. And all of it lasts only because someone chose to nurture it and to stay. At three schools in the Svay Leu District, we traded mud for metal. One hundred and fifty bicycles stood in rows, kickstands down, waiting for their riders. We tightened bolts, fixed baskets to the handlebars, and played with the kids before they hopped on their new bikes and wobbled down the road. Now they can safely reach a classroom that used to be too far to walk. A bicycle is a simple thing. It is also a child’s education made suddenly possible, joy and opportunity rolling down the same road. The teachers told us plainly about that distance and the other obstacles between a student and a full day of learning. Their hopes are much like ours at home. You can read in an American textbook that all people are born equal in dignity and rights. You understand it differently with mud on your hands. Sometimes you have to leave home to see your own community clearly — and to understand that a Cambodian child’s dignity is bound up with your own, that none of it stops at a border. Now the H-RISE youth leaders are home, where the lessons have to prove themselves. They did not come back with the whole world figured out. They came back with something smaller and more useful: the knowledge that repair is ordinary work, and that it starts with people who decide to begin. What they learned among the landmines and the mangroves applies to their own streets. The barriers to dignity in Idaho are not buried in the ground. They show up in a classroom where a student doesn’t feel safe, a workplace that treats someone as less than equal, a state’s policies that leave people out. But we can overcome them with the same steady, shared effort. This summer, these young people are getting started, turning what they saw into initiatives of their own. They are not waiting to be older, or for someone with more authority to go first. They are beginning with the ground in front of them. The rats never see the whole minefield. Each one knows its own patch, clears it, and leaves the ground ready for whatever comes next — a crop, a footpath, a child on a bicycle. You tend the patch in front of you. You plant what will outlast you. You do it beside others. And somewhere, a child pushes off, finds her balance, and rides.
What We’re Building Together
In 1995, nearly 50,000 people stepped into Anne Frank’s story when a traveling exhibit arrived in Boise. It was a charged, uncertain time. The Aryan Nations was active in North Idaho, where Bill Wassmuth and other community leaders had spent years building a coalition to confront white supremacist ideology with steady, public resistance. The same currents were pressing further south, where the campaign for Proposition 1 was spreading anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and the local NAACP leader had a rock thrown through the front window of her home. The message was clear: who belonged — and who did not — was up for debate.
But that is not the only story that was unfolding.
Notice, Name, and Build
Notice, Name, and Build June 8, 2026 Bobby Gaytan’s mother worked the fields. While most children were expected to stay there with their parents, Maria Luisa Gaytan insisted that her six children always be enrolled in school. She did not stop at her own family. Maria Luisa passed out college applications, helped families fill out their income tax forms, interpreted, and navigated systems that most people found impenetrable. There were often long lines at her door of people seeking her aid. She kept at it. Maria Luisa went on to earn a GED and a teaching certificate in college and worked as a liaison for migrant families in her school district. Her kitchen table was a command center for change. The building where the Wassmuth Center does its work is named for another Idahoan who understood farm labor: Governor Philip E. Batt, a former onion farmer who advanced fair wages and safer working conditions for farm laborers. He also founded the Idaho Human Rights Commission. Maria Luisa and Governor Batt never worked side by side, but they were working toward the same goal. One through grassroots aid. The other through institutional authority. Both through the power they had. After his mother died, Bobby began seeing butterflies everywhere. Travelers. Carriers of beauty. And then he did something with that. His mother’s work — the kitchen table, the tax forms, the college applications, the long lines at the door — could have disappeared. Most unglamorous work does. But Bobby noticed what his mother had built. And he named it — in color, in light, in a painting that now hangs in a building dedicated to human rights. At the Wassmuth Center, we call this practice Notice and Name Bright Spots. It is the discipline of paying close enough attention to your community that you can see where the world you want is already being built. It requires looking past what is broken — not to ignore it, but to identify what is working. That discipline matters right now. It is June in Idaho, and there is plenty to worry about. The 2026 legislative session brought bills targeting immigrant communities, trans Idahoans, and the basic question of who belongs here. It would be easy — and not inaccurate — to call this a hard time for human rights. But what you pay attention to determines what you can build. During this session, while harmful bills moved through committee after committee, over a thousand Idahoans contacted their lawmakers. Faith leaders showed up at the statehouse in solidarity with immigrant and trans neighbors. And SB 1293 passed, restoring access to crime victim services for undocumented Idahoans. For years, that access had been blocked. People who experienced domestic violence or assault could be denied help because of their immigration status. This bill’s passage didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people had been doing the work for years: building relationships, showing up to testify, making the case that everyone in Idaho deserves safety. If you only watched for what went wrong this session, you would miss it. Every community has bright spots. Most go unnamed, which means they cannot be learned from and they cannot grow. Maria Luisa Gaytan’s work at her kitchen table could have been one of them. But her son saw it, and named it, and now she stands on the wall of a human rights center in Boise — in a wide straw hat and work gloves, a hoe in her hands, monarch butterflies lifting off around her, smiling.
Still Here
Still Here June 1, 2026 For more than a decade, a Pride flag flew outside Boise City Hall, and recently, a signature pulled the flag down. On March 31, Governor Brad Little signed HB 561, banning this flag from government property. Within minutes, the city lowered its flag. A week later, city workers wrapped the building’s three flagpoles — base to banner – in the colors of the Pride flag. Not flown. Wrapped. In full compliance with the letter of the law and full defiance of its spirit. Pride is the opposite of shame. And shame depends on invisibility to do its work — every euphemism, every law written to make a community disappear. The people who first claimed the word pride for this fight knew that. On June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. Patrons were supposed to comply quietly, as they always had. This time, they refused. The uprising lasted days. One year later, thousands took to the same streets in the first Pride march. They chose the name because they demanded to be seen. Fifty-seven years later, the distance between safety and danger remains staggering. The Equaldex Equality Index ranks 197 countries on a scale of 0 to 100, measuring legal protections alongside public attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people. Iceland sits at the top. Marriage equality, adoption rights, and hate crime protections — nearly every safeguard is in place. In a 2024 Gallup survey, 93 percent of Icelanders said their community was a good place for gay and lesbian people to live. In 2009, the country elected Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir as prime minister, the world’s first openly gay head of government. Her sexuality was barely a headline. That is what arrival looks like: belonging that requires no announcement. Belonging that welcomes us for who we are. Somalia, at number 197, is on the other end. Homosexuality is punishable by death. There are no protections of any kind. Equaldex lists no public opinion data; the questions cannot be asked safely. The United States sits at number 33, somewhere in the uneasy middle, where on issue after issue — housing, adoption, gender-affirming care — the entry reads the same way: varies by region. Sometimes law determines opinion. Sometimes culture leads law. But neither moves without someone willing to go first. Idaho has been here before. In 1994, the Idaho Citizens Alliance placed Proposition 1 on the ballot. The measure would have barred LGBTQ+ people from anti-discrimination protections, restricted library materials, and prohibited schools from affirming that gay and lesbian people are normal. It lost by 3,098 votes out of more than 450,000 cast. That margin was razor-thin, but it held. And the energy from that fight did not dissipate. A year later, a coalition of Idahoans came together to build something lasting. In 1996, they founded the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights. The conviction at the Center’s core was simple: when exclusion rises, you answer it not just with opposition but with the long work of building a community where everyone belongs. That work is not finished. HB 561 was written to remove a symbol. But you cannot legislate people out of sight — not in 1994, and not today. This June, the poles on Capitol Boulevard still stand tall, wrapped in every color the law tried to prohibit. They are not decoration. They are a promise that the people in this community will be seen, and safe, and ours to defend.
The Right to Speak
The Right to Speak May 24, 2026 On the evening of September 15, 1986, Bill Wassmuth had just come home from a run. He was standing in his living room in Coeur d’Alene when a pipe bomb packed with shrapnel detonated against the back of his house. The blast shredded the siding, blew out the windows, and launched metal fragments through a neighbor’s garage door. Wassmuth was the pastor of St. Pius X Catholic Church in a small Idaho city. What had prompted this attack? The simple offense of speaking out. From the pulpit, in the newspaper, at community meetings, he challenged the Aryan Nations, which had established a compound near Hayden Lake and was working to make North Idaho inhospitable to anyone who didn’t look like them. The bombing was meant to deliver a simple message: stop talking. Wassmuth didn’t stop. He was already helping lead the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. This diverse coalition of Republicans, Democrats, business owners, clergy, and law enforcement helped turn the community decisively against the Aryan Nations. Their efforts didn’t succeed because everyone shared the same politics. They succeeded because they shared a commitment to the principle that public life belongs to everyone. A message delivered as a pipe bomb is an extreme case. More often, the desire to silence an inconvenient voice arrives dressed in official language. In Idaho, that official language has an address. The attorney general is the most powerful lawyer in the state. The office carries the authority to investigate, to issue legal opinions that shape how laws are understood, and to choose the fights the state’s full legal weight will be thrown behind. When that office is used to discourage participation, it has been turned against the people it exists to serve. Consider a letter from the Attorney General’s office to the Twin Falls school board chairman, concluding that he violated state law after encouraging district staff to vote in an upcoming election. Not for any candidate. Just to show up. Or a published column by the attorney general arguing that a former Idaho Supreme Court chief justice should no longer be listened to. These are not bombings. But they rest on the same premise: some people’s participation in public life is a problem to be managed rather than a right to be protected. When the state discourages participation, it doesn’t just silence individuals. It narrows the conversation for everyone. At the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, many of the words carved in stone come from people who understood how quickly the space for dissent can narrow. The Memorial exists not as a monument to a distant past but as a reminder that the civic habits of democracy require active protection in every generation. Ronald Reagan understood this when he warned that freedom “is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” That warning belongs to no political party. It belongs to all of us. Idaho was built by people who showed up — to school board meetings, to community forums, to polling places — and expected their government to answer them, not the reverse. The strength of that tradition rests on a principle so simple it shouldn’t need defending: the answer to speech we disagree with is always more speech. Never violence. Never silence. Never the state’s most powerful lawyer suggesting that participation itself is the problem. No one in power gets to decide whose voice counts. The right to speak belongs to us all.
The Climb
Pnyx Hill still stands in Athens. The assembly is long gone, but the slope remains: open, weathered, ordinary. What made it extraordinary was never the stone. It was the people who climbed it to do the work of governing together. Voting is that climb. The outcome is never guaranteed. But showing up is itself an act of muscular hope — a vote not just for a candidate but for the belief that self-governance is worth the effort.
Still Learning
This is why Stay Curious is one of the Wassmuth Powerful Practices. It is not a suggestion to be more open-minded in the abstract. It is a commitment to keep asking questions, especially when the answers are uncomfortable, when the stories are unfamiliar, when it would be easier to look away.
Wells started with a question about three men she knew. But her curiosity didn’t stop there — it carried her into the stories of hundreds of people she had never met. We do not need her courage or her platform to do what she did. We just need to keep asking. Keep learning.
Ancora imparo. At 87, at any age.
Create Something True
Create Something True May 4, 2026 A woman stands in front of an American flag, holding a broom in one hand and a mop in the other. The photograph is called American Gothic, taken by Gordon Parks in 1942. He had come to Washington, DC on a fellowship to photograph American life for the Farm Security Administration. Our nation’s capital showed him what it thought of people of color like him instead. He was turned away from stores, refused service at restaurants, and kicked out of a theater. When he returned to the FSA building, shaken, his supervisor suggested he start his project with someone right there. Parks found Ella Watson, the woman who cleaned the offices every night. Her father had been lynched. Her husband had been shot to death. Her daughter died young. She was raising her grandchildren alone. No one in that building full of photographers had thought to ask her to sit for a portrait before. Parks posed her in front of the flag with the tools of her labor. He created an image that insisted she belonged in the picture of America she had been hired to clean around. What Parks made that day was not just a portrait. It was a refusal to let Ella Watson remain invisible. To create is to make a moral claim: this exists, this matters, look. It is a way of putting something into the world that most people have not yet seen. A photograph did not end segregation, but it made one woman impossible to dismiss. Art does this. It takes what has been reduced to a category or a statistic and insists it is a person. That is how human rights are honored — not just through protest and policy, but in the moments when someone is finally seen. This is why the Wassmuth Center is filled with art. Walk through the front door of the Philip E. Batt Education Building, and you stand under Conscious Flight, Filip Vogelpohl’s mobile of five hundred hand-blown glass wings suspended in the atrium light. This piece is rooted in Vogelpohl’s family’s experience of persecution and survival. The wings turn slowly, each catching the light. Move further in, and you’ll find art on every wall. These pieces are not decoration. They are invitations — to stop, to look, to let a work of art change the way you see, so that you walk back out into the world ready to make something of your own. For twenty-five years, the Wassmuth Center has extended that invitation to Idaho’s youngest artists. The Human Rights Arts Awards is our longest-running statewide education program. This year, we invited kindergarten through twelfth grade students to engage with Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the right to be free from discrimination regardless of race, gender, language, religion, political opinion, national origin, or any other status. What does equality mean in your community? How do we challenge discrimination when we see it? What does inclusion look like in action? They answered. A fourth grader sat down at a kitchen table and drew what fairness looks like. A high schooler wrote an essay about his friend who was told he didn’t belong in Idaho. A sixth grader composed a poem. A first grader picked up a paintbrush. Not because someone told them the world was waiting. Because something inside them needed a form. Through paintings and poetry, sculpture and story, these students illuminated truths that are sometimes joyful and sometimes painful — and insisted the rest of us look. Come see these pieces for yourself. If you are in the Treasure Valley, please join us this Thursday, May 7, at JUMP to view the students’ work, hear their words, and celebrate the power of art alongside local nonprofits committed to the same work. For those outside the area, look for the students’ work to be showcased on our website and in upcoming social media posts. And wherever you are, the invitation is the same one Parks answered in 1942, the same one these students answered this spring. What does the world need to see, and what will you make to show it? A photograph. A poem. A song. Whatever form fits your hand, pick it up. The world does not have a shortage of content. It has a shortage of people willing to create something true. This week, during Idaho Gives, we hope you will add your voice to what we’re building — so that invitation stays open for every person with something to say.