While furthering the legacy of her late husband, Helen Jackson created her own.
After Sen. Henry M. Jackson’s untimely death in 1983, Helen Jackson moved back to the family’s Everett home and launched a tireless, two-decade career in local community service. Before illness forced her to the sidelines in recent years, she was an integral part of a long list of charitable organizations and boards, making a quiet difference in countless Snohomish County lives.
Chief among her passions was the cause of human rights, and her work on that issue brought her into international prominence during the pinnacle of her husband’s career and after his passing. Scoop and Helen Jackson shared a deep commitment to the establishment of laws and policies to protect fundamental human rights, and each played a successful role — Scoop as a lawmaker, Helen as a smart and persistent promoter — in fighting the oppression of Jews and other minorities in the former Soviet Union.
To honor that dedication, The Henry M. Jackson Foundation is making a $1 million gift to establish the Helen H. Jackson Endowed Chair in Human Rights at the University of Washington. The endowment will allow the UW’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies to enhance its human rights activities and, it is hoped, offer a doctoral program, creating one of the nation’s premiere centers for the study of human rights.
The foundation hopes its $1 million gift will spark others. Through the end of the year, it’s offering to match individual gifts of as much as $1,000, up to a total of $100,000. Those contributions will be used to provide support for top students to conduct research abroad and work as interns for human rights organizations, to bring prominent human rights practitioners to the UW for lectures, and to support conferences and workshops on human rights.
Peter Jackson, Helen’s and Scoop’s son and a member of the foundation’s board, says his mother would be quick to deflect the attention that goes with this honor, focusing instead on a larger point.
“She’d say, ‘This isn’t about me. It’s about training the next generation of human rights practitioners. Times change, but human behavior doesn’t change. Here’s an opportunity to give kids a hand up so they can study about human rights, then go out and practice what they’ve learned.’”
A legacy truly worthy of Helen Jackson.
For more information, visit the Henry M. Jackson Foundation at www.hmjackson.org.
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