SANDPOINT — Wingnuts make a lot of noise. Racists love to draw attention to themselves.

And good works — while sometimes flying under the radar — continue to grow in power and touch the lives of more people all the time. At least, that’s the way things have turned out for the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force.

After successfully facing down the racist rancor of the likes of Richard Butler, Vincent Bertolini and their ilk, the task force entered a new chapter in 2012. That was the year when the estate of Dorothy Adler bequeathed $370,000 to the group and changed everything.

With that money in hand, BCHRTF went from being a collection of good-hearted souls with no real funding to a powerful force for community change with the money to spread around on an annual basis.

“When we got that generous donation from Dorothy Adler’s estate, we put it with the Idaho Community Foundation,” said task force president Brenda Hammond. “Now we take the interest each year and distribute it in the form of community grants and activities.”

“This year, the grants will total about $18,000,” added treasurer Sharon McCahon.

The organization just opened the application process for 2019 grants, with a deadline for filing of April 30.

In the past, the door for those grants has opened and closed in a relatively quiet way. But with money to invest for good causes, the task force is stepping things up.

“We decided to make a bigger noise about it this year,” Hammond said. “We’re now working with the Cityaof Sandpoint, which wants to have a stronger collaboration around human rights.”

Grants are available for up to $8,000 to community non-profits, educational and governmental agencies for the development and implementation of projects specific to the issues of human rights. The human rights connection might be non-negotiable, but the 501c-3 requirement has some added wiggle room, thanks to the new focus on collaboration.

“We’re encouraging groups to think outside the box this year,” the group president said, adding that, in the past, groups without non-profit status would not have had access to the grants. “For example, a group that isn’t a 501c-3 could collaborate with one that is. So there’s room for a lot of creativity.”

Having a yearly pot of money to share has become a high-grade dilemma for the task force, which started thinking creatively more than a year ago as grant applications rolled in for the 2018 period. When the Bonner Community Food Bank submitted a grant application last year, the 9-member BCHRTF board approved its request.

“Food is a basic human right,” McCahon explained. “We decided that it seemed like a good fit. We’ve expanded our view of human rights to include health, mental health and environmental health.”

The task force sprang up in the face of the ugly brand of hatred espoused by Butler and his small but vocal neo-Nazi following in the region. When Bertolini brought his hate show to Sandpoint, the group was there again to shut down the racist agenda. Most recently, when accused racist robo-caller Scott Rhodes sought to gain a foothold here from which to advertise North Idaho as a supposed haven for white supremacy, the group helped counter the message with one of unity.

Butler ended up angry, broke and alone, Bertolini left town in shame with his tail between his legs and Rhodes has slunk across the border to spew his increasingly less effective message from Libby, Mont. All of them learned the hard way that Sandpoint is an unwelcome environment for racism and intolerance.

The community must remain ever vigilant against the inevitable emergence of the next round of ugliness, but, thanks in large part to the task force, it is no longer in the position of playing what once felt like a non-stop game of racist whack-a-mole. Instead, something beautiful has bloomed in its place.

“We’re now about showing support for all the good things in this community,” said Hammond. “With this money to share, we are finally in a position to highlight the things we are for, as opposed to the things we are against.”

Does that feel like a turning of the page for the BCHRTF?

“It does,” she said. “It was a challenge, at the end of the Aryan Nations era, to reinvent ourselves.”

Ironically, the nasty antics of Butler-Bertolini-Rhodes acted as the combined catalyst the task force needed to affect that transition. Best of all, a tidy $370,000 came with it when Dorothy Adler further acknowledged their efforts. And that, according to Hammond, has made the biggest difference of all.

“I remember, for our very first event we held, Donna Parrish, Buzz Arndt and I went out and literally begged people for money, because we had less than $100 in our bank account,” she recalled. “What a turnaround.”

As the 2019 grant application period opens, the task force is confident that it has still not mined all parts of the community that could benefit from financial support. One area that has been particularly fruitful is the group’s support of the arts in Sandpoint, where BCHRTF helps to fund the Pend Oreille Arts Council’s annual Student Art for Human Rights show featuring the work of county high school students, as well as human rights-centric performances and events by organizations such as the Music Conservatory of Sandpoint.

“Art, music, literature – those are the universal languages that transcend so many boundaries,” Hammond said.

Grant applications can be submitted online at idcomfdn.org/home and clicking on the BCHRTF Donor Advised Grant link. For more information, call: 208-342-3535.