History of Women in the Civil Rights Movement in Idaho

Idaho’s history is filled with major civil rights victories, including the amendment to its Constitution providing women the right to vote in 1896[i]—years before the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed—and the 1961 civil rights bill outlawing the Ku Klux Klan from wearing masks in public was also passed.[ii] A year before women had the right to vote in Idaho, Helen L. (“Nellie”) Nichols Young was granted admission to the bar by the Idaho Supreme Court during a time when Idaho statutes limited the admission of attorneys in Idaho to “white males.”[iii] Women have been at the forefront of Idaho civil rights legislation since the territory became a state. The accomplishments women have fought for will never be forgotten and have propelled the current civil rights leaders to where they are today.

The Current Women Lawyers Involved in Civil Rights in Idaho

The following women have dedicated their careers to advocating for civil rights for Idahoans at their law firms. These firms include Disability Rights Idaho,[iv] which provides free civil legal and advocacy services to Idaho citizens with disabilities, Idaho Legal Aid Services,[v] which provides free civil legal services for low-income and senior Idahoans, and the Intermountain Fair Housing Council, whose mission is to ensure open and inclusive housing for all persons.[vi]

Amy Cunningham, Executive Director of Disability Rights Idaho

Amy has been with Disability Rights Idaho (“DRI”) since 1996, first serving as staff attorney before transitioning to Legal Director and then being appointed Executive Director in October 2020.

What made you pursue public service?

I began my legal career as a public defender where I learned the majority of my clients experienced some sort of a disability. Upon moving to Idaho, I pursued an opening at Disability Rights Idaho where I could combine my work as a public defender and my personal experience of growing up in a home with a brother who experienced chronic persistent mental illness.

There were many times when my family could not help my brother and had to rely on others to provide that assistance. Working at DRI has allowed me the opportunity to pay back those who helped my family and pay forward by helping others with disabilities.

What has been the biggest highlight of your career?

The biggest highlight of my career was when my team worked to make large systemic changes to help Idahoans with developmental disabilities, with mental illness, and deaf individuals in the prison. My team and I conducted an abuse and neglect investigation at the Southwest Idaho Treatment Center, issued a public report on our findings, hired an expert to monitor the facility and made recommendations to the administrator and the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare.

This investigation ultimately led to a restructuring of the adult developmental disability crisis system,[vii] which is still a work in progress. The process has involved an introduction to the START model in Idaho, which builds crisis support in the community to reduce the need for crisis support in institutions.[viii] My team also initiated a licensing rule change, requiring all psychiatric hospitals to follow Medicaid regulations on the use of restraint and seclusion. And finally, my team sued the Idaho Department of Correction to provide video remote interpreting for deaf inmates.

What has been the biggest challenge in your line of work?

My biggest challenge has been the recurrence of previously litigated or settled issues.

What do you want your legacy to be?

I would encourage all lawyers to consider practicing in public service for at least some part of their career. Idaho needs attorneys to represent people who do not have a voice. While the practice can be frustrating, it is also immensely rewarding.

What is one piece of advice for future generations pursuing a similar career?

Do not let the work consume you. People do not call DRI because good things are happening. This can be overwhelming, but it is also why public service attorneys are needed. While you can become overwhelmed by the calls or reading and learning about the injustice the clients are experiencing, it is important to find the work-life balance. You need to make sure you take care of yourself, or you will not be able to take care of your clients.

Sunrise Ayers, Executive Director of Idaho Legal Aid Services, Inc.

Sunrise Ayers is the Executive Director of Idaho Legal Aid Services (“ILAS”), where she has worked for over 18 years. She is a graduate of Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College and the College of Idaho. She resides in Boise with her husband, two boys, a cat, and two dogs. Sunrise is the 2024 recipient of the Bertha Stull Green Award presented by Idaho Women Lawyers for her demonstrated commitment to her community and public service.

What made you pursue public service?

I grew up in a very low-income family; my mom was a waitress and my dad was a logger, so we were just scraping by when I was younger. There were times when we were relying on food stamps and donations from our community to meet our basic needs. So, I felt really lucky that thanks to the great public schools I attended, and having parents who cared about education, I was able to go to college and then to law school.

It felt so improbable that I would ever get to be in that position, so I knew I wanted to use my education to give back in some way. When I saw the job opening at Idaho Legal Aid to work with seniors, I thought that sounded really interesting. I had no background with elder law and hadn’t taken any elder law classes in law school, but I applied for the job and I loved it from the beginning. I realized within the first few years of being at ILAS that working in poverty law could be a passion and lifelong career for me.

What has been the biggest highlight of your career?

It’s hard to pick one highlight from my career but I’ll try. I really enjoyed doing the guardianship cases for developmentally disabled adults and minors because a lot of times with these cases, at the beginning, you would encounter a person at risk and there was a lot of chaos and uncertainty in their life, but by the end of the case you feel like you’ve set someone up with certainty, security, and a clearer pathway forward. On the casework side of things, that’s a highlight.

A highlight for me on the administrative side of my career, comes from when the pandemic was first hitting Idaho. I had to build from scratch an infectious disease policy, a telecommuting policy, and a new service delivery model, so that our staff would be able to continue helping our clients. It was really challenging, because you’re nervous that you’re not getting it right, and there was no guidance at first. I’m really proud of the fact that we were able to keep services going during the pandemic and keep helping clients during a time of a lot of uncertainty.

What has been the biggest challenge in your line of work?

The biggest challenge came recently with the change in my position from Deputy Director to Executive Director. We were coming out of a period of growth at ILAS where we had received a lot of federal funding over the years, but a lot of that funding went away in 2025.

So, the biggest challenge has been having to adapt quickly and analyze some complex questions in a short timeframe. How do we diversify our funding? How do we adapt our services based on changes in federal grants? And another challenge is assessing how funding concerns affect staff morale statewide—because there is so much uncertainty for me and for staff.

That has been really difficult because all of our staff are wonderful and I feel like they shouldn’t have to worry about the federal funding cuts and, in an ideal world, should be able to keep their focus solely on the really difficult work they are doing for our clients every day. I am still navigating how to keep staff really well-informed without burdening them with worry.

What do you want your legacy to be?

I would love for my legacy to be, that by the time I leave ILAS, it’s a place that is able to recruit and keep some of the most talented attorneys, support staff, and outreach workers in the state. That I was able to make that happen through both the quality of the workplace experience and by ensuring the staff and the community clearly see the impact of our work. That combination of meaningful work and an appealing workplace—that is what I would be happy to see as my legacy. If we can create that environment, it will improve our services to clients and broaden ILAS’s positive impact across the state.

What is one piece of advice for future generations pursuing a similar career?

I feel like what has helped me the most in doing such a demanding job—that also doesn’t have the same salary as something in the private sector—is that I was intentional about creating ease and contentment in my personal life. My piece of advice would be to center contentment in your life over the constant need to strive for more or compare yourself to others. To have that lower stress level and lower sense of hustle outside of work has allowed me the energy I need to be able to manage a high-demand work environment really well.

Zoe Ann Olson, Executive Director of Intermountain Fair Housing Council

Zoe Ann Olson is the Executive Director of the Intermountain Fair Housing Council, Inc. (“IFHC”) and has been there for 13 years. In 2022, she was the recipient of the Idaho Woman Lawyers’ Bertha Stull Green Public Service Lawyer Award and the Inns of Court Unsung Hero Award. She has represented numerous complainants in fair housing complaints to the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development and in eviction prevention and housing cases.

What made you pursue public service?

My dad and my sister are lawyers—so that probably had something to do with it. I graduated from the University of Washington, and I wanted to be a teacher, but there were some things that were happening that made me feel that children were not being treated justly within our systems. I went to Seattle University for law school, to focus on public service law. When I got a public interest grant from my law school, I was able to go to Idaho Legal Aid Services and work there for a summer, and I really loved it. I decided that was what I really wanted to do.

After law school, at ILAS, I fell in love with housing law. At the time, IFHC was in the same building as ILAS, so we collaborated a lot. When the job opened up to be the director at IFHC, I just knew that it was what I wanted to do—to continue to do the work that we do around the state and in the community and do what I love every day.

What has been the biggest highlight of your career?

I think when I started at IFHC, we had three full-time and two part-time employees. We grew the organization during the pandemic, which was really, really hard, and at that time we had a staff of 30 helping with eviction prevention, rental assistance, and doing fair housing work.

Some highlights include: getting over $1 million in rent to people; handling some systemic eviction issues dealing with ADA, FHA, and Olmstead violations and removing barriers for people with disabilities to access housing; working with the NAACP, the Idaho Organization of Resource Councils, College of Idaho, realtors, Senator Wintrow, county clerks, and others to create a law to remove racial covenants from deeds without cost to homeowners, eliminating racial barriers to the creation of generational wealth; and keeping people housed for over two years in northern Idaho where a mobile home park owner was engaging in mass evictions so that affordable, unsubsidized housing for people that was maintained.

Build a work environment that works for you and your colleagues. I could bring my kids to work when they were younger at ILAS and IFHC. At IFHC, this includes being able to work remotely, having flexible hours, and a shorter workweek, generous leave policies, including elder and pet leave policies.

I ultimately think to myself: “What kind of world do I want to live in?” and try to make that happen so that people are treating people better. I also love when we have college and law students because we learn new things by engaging the next generation in our work.

What has been the biggest challenge in your line of work?

I think funding for this line of work is a huge challenge all the time, and we should just always have housing protections in place and security for our community members, but I think always trying to write grants, litigate cases, and worrying about how to get more funding to support our wonderful clients and work families and coworkers is difficult. Also, balancing family and work life while navigating community, clients, and staff where people do not always get along with everyone is always challenging.

Not everyone is going to love the way you resolve conflicts or make choices and you have to work hard to navigate those issues. I just think the importance of justice and civil rights are who we are as a country, and we should always be striving for a better world and that’s why we’re here. If you’re creating justice, people are fed, have housing, have good healthcare, and access to all the things that make us thrive.

What do you want your legacy to be?

I want to leave my organization and the community better off than it was before me and my work. I would love to put myself out of a job by ending discrimination in housing. I look to the next generation to continue this work—we work with undergraduate and graduate students and I feel like they will move the fair housing movement forward.

You leave something better than you found it and have a group of people to carry on the work after you leave so that it outlasts us and continues to give to the community. It’s more than me—it’s creating a community of civil rights and justice, and I am truly grateful to be a part of that.

What is one piece of advice for future generations pursuing a similar career?

Don’t do it the hard way—I hope that we all can be really good mentors to those that want to do this kind of work and understand that each person is an expert in their own lived experience. Connect them with people you know who do something similar—what can I do to make it easier for them to learn the law and who knows more than I do? All the resources you have, you should use.

Every clinic and experience—ask, “Is this right for me?” Try everything—small and large firms, nonprofit and private practice—think, “What do I love?” I think it’s necessary to seek out mentors along the way and I really recommend that for a young or new attorney to both learn and network. How can I be a good learner and listener and also a good mentor? Find a good mentor or group—it’s just so important as a public interest lawyer to have a network or village of people to help you create the community you want to create and go where you want to go.

Conclusion

These women have shaped civil rights law for Idahoans and continue to make an impact to this day. As reflected in these interviews, there is still work to be done in this area of law. All of us in the Idaho legal profession can follow these women’s example and fight for the civil rights of all Idahoans.

Jenna L. Furman is the Deputy Director of Idaho Legal Aid Services. She is a member of the Board of Directors for Idaho Women Lawyers and serves on The Advocate’s Editorial Advisory Board. She was formerly licensed as an attorney in Michigan and has been a licensed attorney in Idaho since 2020.

Abbey Schulz is a staff attorney at Disability Rights Idaho. Abbey has been an advocate for the disabled community since her younger brother, Sam, was diagnosed with Autism. She worked at both the Indiana and Illinois Protection & Advocacy agencies before moving to Idaho. Beyond work, Abbey loves traveling with her husband.

[i] Idaho State Historical Society, Women’s Suffrage in Idaho, Women’s Suffrage in Idaho | Idaho State Historical Society (last visited Jan. 15, 2025).

2 Fields, Kim, Local civil rights leader: People often forget Idaho’s progressive history, KTVB7, April 4, 2018, Local civil rights leader: People often forget Idaho’s progressive history | ktvb.com.

3 Idaho Legal History Society, Idaho’s First Woman Lawyer Practiced Law Before She Could Vote, Volume II, Issue 1, Jan. 2010, ILHS Newsletter 3.

4 Disability Rights Idaho, What We Do, What We Do | Disability Rights Idaho (last visited March 7, 2025).

5 Idaho Legal Aid Services, Inc., About Us, About Us | Idaho Legal Aid Services, Inc. (last visited March 7, 2025).

6 Intermountain Fair Housing Council, Home, Housing Resources | Housing Discrimination | Tenant Rights (last visited March 7, 2025).

[vii] A copy of the public report from this investigation can be found at Disability Rights Idaho, 2018 DRI Public Report on SWITC Investigation,  Reports Archives – Disability Rights Idaho (last visited April 28, 2025).

[viii] University of New Hampshire, Institute on Disability, National Center for START Services, National Center for START Services® | Institute on Disability (last visited April 28, 2025).