‘A beacon of light’: Wassmuth Center seeks to open $3 million education center in Boise
The Wassmuth Center for Human Rights, home to Idaho’s Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, is planning to build a new education center at the memorial.
The center would include 3,500 square feet on the first floor for daily operations, including staff space, a Docent Center to begin and end tours, and a memorial shop. A “Human Rights Classroom” would be on the second floor and offer 2,200 square feet of space.
That would make room for more programming, including traveling exhibits. The classroom would be able to host professional development for teachers as well as human rights clubs for students in 7th through 10th grades and at Boise State University. A metal sculpture from Boise artist Ken McCall, inspired by the text of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration for Human Rights, would also be installed.
“We’ve grown so much in the past 25 years, but we haven’t done it alone,” Dan Prinzing, the center’s executive director, said Wednesday by phone. “We’re recognizing not only what has been done but recognizing the need to sustain and expand human rights education in Idaho.”
The center would be behind the waterfalls of the Anne Frank Memorial. Prinzing said the project would cost about $3 million.
“For the last six months, we’ve been in a silent phase of fundraising, reaching out to a number of businesses and foundations throughout the state, throughout the country,” he said. “In that six-month silent phase, we’ve raised $1.5 million.”
Work will begin when the center is able to raise the remaining $1.5 million, he said. The ideal timeline would be to begin in September or October with a ribbon-cutting by next spring.
The building would have a sloped ceiling that rises from 9 feet tall to 20 feet, reflecting “the soaring of the human spirit,” he said.
The design for the project is from Erstad Architects, a Boise firm. The architects had a lengthy tour of the memorial, Prinzing said, before exploring it on their own.
“The building is a reflection of how the memorial touched them,” Prinzing said. “It is a beacon of light — with the placement of the windows, that is literally that the light will emanate even in times of darkness.”
The Anne Frank Memorial was vandalized last month with stickers that had a swastika on them and the phrase “we are everywhere.” Local government and business leaders condemned the vandalism. The Downtown Boise Association donated money to create banners to be hung downtown with a photo of Anne Frank with the message “Love is everywhere.”
The defacement was a “punch to the heart,” Prinzing said, but the call from the community afterward was to “get even larger, to really examine our role within the community and the state.”
“The overwhelming public support we received because of the defacement has been reaffirming,” he said. “Yes, there is value in this. And more importantly, the work is not done.”
This story was originally published January 21, 2021 at 12:25 PM.
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