He once said: "Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own."

Saturday is Cesar Chavez Day, a Colorado holiday honoring the memory of a great American leader and role model.

Chavez led a nonviolent movement that transformed the lives of some of our nation’s poorest and hardest-working citizens. He was a crusader, a civil rights leader and a humanitarian – a religious and spiritual mentor, a community organizer and a visionary. And his life itself was a model of the American Dream.

He spent his childhood as a migrant farm worker after his family lost its home and farm in the Depression. After service in the U.S. Navy, defending rights and freedoms that he believed in with a passion – even though they were often denied to him and his fellow farm workers.

Chavez became a champion of those rights, rising to become an inspiration to people worldwide. He was a leader who was unfailingly humble, humane and untiring in his service to our nation’s most disenfranchised citizens.

In 1994, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian honor.

This holiday named in his memory is a chance each year to measure our progress, as a society, in continuing the work he started. Are we providing the opportunities people need to improve their lives and the lives of their children? We believe that, as a community, we can point with pride to such efforts as the Murphy Center for Hope, Project Self-Sufficiency, our educational institutions and other efforts to create pathways out of poverty and toward opportunity. But certainly there is much work ahead. Today, there are still too many hard-working people here in our own community who are struggling just to survive and care for their families as they work toward a better, more stable future.

Cesar Chavez Day is a time to restate our commitment to making such a future possible for all in our community – through education, opportunity and a strong network of resources and support.

In Fort Collins, we’re honoring the holiday with a week of activities that begin today and are open to the public. A complete listing of these events can be found at www.fc-cesarchavez.org, and a highlight will be the free concert performance by folk singer Tish Hinojosa at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Lory Student Center East Ballroom.

Our future will be a shared one, and the more people who are safe, educated and engaged as members of our society, the more we all benefit.