Under the Same Sky
October 19, 2026
If you watch long enough on a clear night, the stars wheel slowly overhead. One of them seems to stay still. The North Star isn’t especially bright, but since it sits almost directly above Earth’s North Pole, it holds its place while the rest of the sky turns. For centuries, travelers have steered by it. The star shows the way. People who lived generations apart looked up under the same sky and found it right where it should be. A community needs a fixed point like that, especially in unsettled times. Thirty years ago, a group of Idahoans set out to help their community find one.
In 1995, a traveling exhibit about Anne Frank opened in Boise and drew tens of thousands of visitors. Idaho was tense that year. The Aryan Nations still operated a compound near Hayden Lake. The previous November, a ballot initiative that would have barred state and local governments from protecting gay and lesbian Idahoans from discrimination had barely failed. In that climate, a team of community members worked to bring the exhibit here and make it succeed. Many of them had been working for human rights in Idaho for years.
Inside the exhibit, people stood together before photographs of a girl who went into hiding at thirteen and never came home. Her diary let them hear her voice and see her courage. The organizers learned something from watching them: Anne’s story was an entry point to challenging conversations about human rights in Idaho. They wanted to keep that conversation going. A year later, they founded the human rights education organization that would become the Wassmuth Center, so the momentum they had built would not leave town with the exhibit.
Raising the money for a permanent memorial and ongoing education programs took years of steady effort, and the gifts came from across the community. When the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial opened in 2002, it paired one girl’s story with the promise the world made after the war that took her life. Anne Frank died in a concentration camp in 1945. Less than four years later, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, naming the rights that belong to every person, everywhere. At the Memorial, all thirty articles are etched in stone, making it one of the few places in the world where the full Declaration is on permanent public display. The sky turns. The words stay put. Anyone who looks can see them.
Those thirty articles describe what the founders hoped Idaho could become: a place where human rights are a lived reality for all. Like the North Star, a right carved in stone can only point the way. It becomes real when people do the work of making it so, and everyone can count on it in their own neighborhoods. For thirty years, the Center has worked toward that reality by holding two commitments together: justice and joy. Justice asks whether every person can actually claim the rights the Declaration names. Joy is how it feels when they can, when people are welcomed and valued and free to be fully themselves.
On October 10, justice and joy filled the room at our annual Change Your World Gala. That night, 344 people gathered to celebrate thirty years of human rights education. The theme was Under the Same Sky, and the evening held serious purpose and real delight side by side. At the Memorial, the Declaration’s first article sits beneath that sky every day: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. From the start, that promise has been the Center’s North Star. The gala’s high points came when we honored two Idahoans who help others find their way by it.
Kerry Thomas, our 2026 Idaho Human Rights Educator of the Year, teaches in Rigby, three hundred miles east of Boise. For 25 years, he has taught high school students the history of the Holocaust — how a government stripped its own citizens of their rights and how ordinary people looked away, joined in, or, sometimes, risked everything to protect their neighbors. Students who study this history eventually wonder what they would have done. Kerry asks them what they will do now. To help them answer, he brings them to the Memorial, where the words carved in stone can point them in a direction.
Melanie Flitton Folwell, our 2026 Idaho Community Changemaker of the Year, is a lifelong Idahoan and the executive director of Idahoans United for Women and Families. Her work starts at kitchen tables, where Idahoans make decisions about their health and their families. She has spent countless hours protecting their freedom to make those decisions themselves. Melanie is known as much for how she treats people as for what she achieves. She listens, makes space for other people’s fear without hiding her own, and thanks volunteers one by one. That respect has drawn more than a thousand volunteers from across Idaho, people of different politics, faiths, and zip codes. She has shown our community what it looks like to honor people’s dignity.
Kerry and Melanie weren’t yet part of the Wassmuth Center’s story in 1995, and neither were most of the people at the gala. Now they carry forward the work the founders and so many others began, alongside community leaders, teachers, volunteers, neighbors, and donors whose gifts keep the Memorial open and most of our programs free. We are all guided by the same North Star.
At the end of the gala, every guest switched on a small star wand. Each gave off only a soft glow. Raised together, hundreds of them filled the dark. In 1995, a community of determined people worked together to bring Anne Frank’s story to Boise, then refused to let the conversation they started end. This October, hundreds of their neighbors gathered to carry it forward. Then they took their lights out into the night, home to classrooms and kitchen tables across Idaho and beyond. We are still under the same sky, and the star that guides us is steady. Now more of us are making the journey.