By Charlie Cornforth
F – Fearless
Fearless doesn’t always mean the absence of fear, in my mind, it’s more about how someone responds when fear is present. My dad embodied that truth. He had an uncanny ability to face challenges that would make most people freeze, and instead, he kept his focus on finding a solution.
We will start with a more humorous story of Dad’s. As a young college student at a Christian college, he and his friend had the brilliant idea to go and toilet paper the college chapel. They ended up getting chased off by campus security and snuck back into their dorm to come face to face with the Dean of students…They were both thinking they had just been caught but continued to keep their cool. The Dean then said that he was so happy to run into them because he needed help tracking down the “possessed” people that were toilet papering the chapel! He and his friend then went and helped the Dean look for themselves for the next two hours.
Later in life, his fearlessness showed up in more serious ways. He organized many mission trips around the world and was once on a trip to Eastern Russia. There was talk of a civil war erupting and Dad made the decision to get his team out of there. When they got to the airport, they were met with serious pushback from the local military who were preventing them from getting on the last plane out. After some conversation and a crisp 20 dollar bill, his team was able to safely depart the country and get back to the US. No matter the situation, he didn’t let fear stop him; he leaned into it and kept moving forward.
R – Resilient
If my dad believed something was right, he would not back down. He had a determination that was, in a word, resilient. Dad’s primary business was building low-cost housing in areas that needed it. When a major housing project in Baton Rouge, LA was rejected by HUD, most people would have accepted the decision. But not Dad. He got on a plane to D.C., walked into their office, and made his case. He argued for the housing needs of Baton Rouge with such persistence that they eventually approved the project, which would become the Renaissance development.
That resilience extended to his work in politics too. Even in a deeply red state, he pushed forward as the chair of the state Democratic party. I’ll never forget when a friend who worked for Brad Little once told me, “We’re trying to figure out what to do about this Fred Cornforth guy.”
Dad made waves because he never gave up on what he believed in. At his core, his relentlessness came from love. He wanted the best for all people, regardless of race, religion, or orientation, and his work in politics while shortened by his cancer diagnosis, was dedicated to making Idaho a better place for everyone.
E – Empathetic
What made Dad’s determination so powerful was that it wasn’t just about winning battles, it was about people. He was deeply empathetic, always able to see and feel what others were going through, having gone through many financial and personal hardships early in his life.
He had a special place in his heart for students who were struggling to get by while finding their place in the world. He knew what that was like, he once lived off nothing but a bag of dried banana chips for two weeks. That empathy led him to create student food banks at Idaho’s 4 biggest universities, amongst many other efforts: such as starting more than 50 orphanages around the world, hosting “Shark Tank”-style pitch contests for young entrepreneurs, and funding 73 charitable organizations each year through his company, Community Development Inc.
Dad’s empathy wasn’t passive; it moved him to act. He saw others’ struggles as his own, and then did something about it.
D – Dynamic
Dad was extremely dynamic, energetic and always in motion. He never stopped looking for new ways to make the world better. Food banks, thrift stores, free health clinics, women & children’s shelters, supporting up-and-coming political leaders…he poured his creativity and energy into building solutions wherever he saw need.
He was a hard charger, but more than that, he was a visionary. He could take broad, abstract ideas and turn them into real, tangible results that changed lives.
One of my favorite stories comes from Kyiv, Ukraine where Dad supported an orphanage. In an effort to help the orphanage leaders become self-sufficient in providing for the children, he had bought goats to provide ongoing milk and meat. One day, a government official came through for an inspection and said they would have to eat all of the goats or they would lose their government funding for the orphanage. Dad initially thought it was just a strange policy and agreed to meet their demands.
Later on, Dad took a different approach and provided the orphanage with 200 chickens for eggs and meat. The same government official came back with the same threat, that they would need to kill all of the chickens in order to maintain Government aid. Rather than backing down, Dad insisted that the orphanage was simply babysitting his 200 chickens, and that killing them would be a destruction of property case. The government official, realizing that Dad had found a loophole, decided to back off. His creative thinking helped the kids to keep their reliable food source, and still maintain good standing to receive other much needed resources. That’s who he was: bold, inventive, and unstoppable.
Fearless. Relentless. Empathetic. Dynamic. That was Fred Cornforth. My dad lived out each of those qualities not just in words, but in action. Whether it was in big moments that changed communities, or small moments that showed his humor, courage, and heart. His life was proof that one person can be all of those things at once, and leave behind a legacy that inspires the rest of us to keep going.