We are never the first to imagine a different world. We build because others had the audacity to believe it was possible, and spent their lives making a way for us.
Dolores Huerta was one of those people.
Yesterday, during our staff retreat, beneath the towering pines of Tahoe, we sang “Lean on Me” with the full moon setting behind the mountains. After hearing of Dolores’s passing, there was a particular tenderness in being together, making room for joy and uncertainty, and remembering what sustains us.
We are gathered at a threshold. Election Day is coming, and the future has not shown us its face. Behind us are generations of organizers who made a road where there was no road. Ahead is the weight of what we cannot yet see. Dolores gave her life to a fierce and enduring love for the world, and that love is still here. We are not starting from nothing.
“Lean on Me” rings differently in this moment. Sung under those trees, it became a vow. Courage is something we pass from hand to hand, the way a flame is passed, so that no one has to carry it alone in the dark.
Dolores spent more than seven decades organizing for the dignity and power of farmworkers, women, immigrants, and working families. She helped build the United Farm Workers, led the Delano grape strike and a nationwide boycott, and fought for protections that changed the lives of working people. She faced arrest, threats, sexism, and brutal police violence. She kept going. She built the Dolores Huerta Foundation to grow grassroots leadership and ensure that communities most affected by injustice could shape their own futures.
Her life was not a simple story of triumph. Dolores carried painful truths about the movement she helped build, including the sexual abuse she endured from César Chávez, which she spoke publicly about earlier this year. She kept silent in an effort to protect the movement. Her decision to speak was also an act of care, and a demand for the movement to live up to what it stands for.
More than twenty years ago, Women’s Foundation California was the first funder of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. Today, they are still one of our grant partners, and we are honored to be arm in arm with them in this work.
We are inheritors of a long lineage of feminist power: of possibilities generations before us fought into existence, and the work they left in our hands. So we continue what Dolores asked of the movement. We will move resources to the people building power. We will look after one another. We will tell the truth, even when it costs us. And we will keep imagining, because every world we have ever built began there.
We do not know what the coming weeks will bring. But we know who we are in relation to one another. We know that the work continues, that grief and hope live alongside each other, and that we have never been asked to do this alone.
Con amor y gratitud,
Bia Vieira and all of us at Women’s Foundation California