Reflections on the Champions Framework: Freddy's Story

When I traced the life of James Oglethorpe, I used it to draw out the whole Champions framework, stage by stage — a life examined from the outside, three hundred years on.

Freddy Mutanguha's story does something different, and in some ways more important.

Where Oglethorpe lets us illustrate the framework, Freddy lets us test it — under the most extreme pressure a human life can face.

And there is something I should say plainly at the start: Freddy's story is not merely an example of the Champions methodology.

It is one of the stories from which the methodology was drawn.

So much of what Steve Kelly and I came to understand about human agency, connection and repair, we learned in Rwanda, walking beside people like Freddy.

When his life reinforces the framework, then, it is not a coincidence. It is the source speaking back.

So: does his story hold up the framework? It does.

Let me walk through the map, as I did with Oglethorpe — the starting journey, the pathway, and the core — and draw out what emerges.

1. Starting the journey: becoming the person you want to become

At the very heart of Champions sits one principle:

Humanity is not where we start, but who we choose to become

We do not choose the canvas we are handed.

But at some point the brush passes into our own hands — and from that moment the question is no longer only what happened to me? but

what will I choose to do next?

No life makes that principle clearer than Freddy's, because he lived it out from the very worst starting point a human being can be handed.

The starting canvas — from the opposite extreme

We do not choose the canvas we are handed; we choose what we paint next.

Oglethorpe proved this from one end of the spectrum. His starting canvas was privilege and complicity — he was a deputy governor of a slave-trading company, hardly a saint, and had spent five months in jail after being arrested for murder.

His journey was one of redemption: a man born inside a great evil who chose to turn against it, and to transform it from the inside, using its very levers as tools of transformation.

Even when the system turned against Oglethorpe, his 'core' had become such that it simply opened up new opportunities to transform more. But it did not start like that.

Freddy proves the same principle from the exact opposite end.

And, simply put, you cannot keep a good man (or woman) down.

His starting canvas was not privilege but devastation. He was not complicit in a great evil; he was its victim, stripped at eighteen years old of his parents, four of his five sisters, his whole extended family, his village, his world.

If Oglethorpe's danger was comfort, Freddy's was catastrophe, and the hurt, anger and revenge that would normally follow. You know, we see it all the time, sadly, 'the abused becomes the abuser'.

Not with Freddy.

And here is what that teaches us about the framework: it holds across the entire human spectrum.

It is not only a path of redemption for those who have done wrong, nor only a path of resilience for those who have been wronged.

It is both.

Whether your canvas is one you must atone for or one you must survive, the same truth applies — your humanity is not fixed by where you began.

Two lives, starting as far apart as two lives can, arriving at the same place: proof that the pathway is genuinely universal.

We become the painter — a charge handed to us in love

At some point, the brush is placed in our own hands.

And what puts it there is usually a prompt — the moment that wakes us.

For Oglethorpe it was a friend's death in a debtors' cell, and before that a jail cell of his own, which could have, potentially, led to the hangman's noose.

Freddy's prompt teaches us a new kind. His came as five words from his mother, knowing she would not live to see him again: "If you survive, be a man."

It was not only a crisis that woke him; it was a commission — a charge handed to him, in love, by someone who would not live to see him fulfil it.

Freddy says that at some point during the 100 days that the genocide raged, he lost the fear of death. It no longer had any sting: he had already lost so much.

For many survivors, survival is not automatically experienced as a blessing.

'You were lucky, you survived', is a typical and well-meaning reflection from those, like me, who have never known such loss. Lucky is not how survivors describe their lot. Grateful maybe, but not lucky.

In Freddy's case, like others, it removed the fear of death itself.

Back to prompts. It is worth adding to how we understand prompts.

Sometimes what puts the brush in our hand is not only something that happens to us, but something entrusted to us — a responsibility placed in our keeping by someone who believed in us, more than we believed in ourselves.

Yes, Freddy had lost the fear of death, a new form of strength. But how would he use it?

Freddy spent the rest of his life responding to his mother's request.

Many of the Champions I have known are, in some quiet way, keeping a promise to others — laying down comfort, status or self-protection in order to serve.

In Champions terms, Freddy's mother gave him the reason, the motivation to act for the good of others, to be a man. She called his humanity forward.

Or in Oglethorpe's vision for Georgia: Not for self, but for others.

2. Becoming a Champion: the Champions Pathway

How does the transformation actually happen?

Through the Champions Pathway — the three movements of Choice, Connection and Creation by which we activate and deepen our own humanity.

And they are written straight through Freddy's life.

Choice. It runs from the very first: the choice to survive when survival felt pointless, to honour his mother's charge and be a man, to go back to school — and, hardest of all and over nearly seventeen years, the choice to forgive, and even to walk perpetrators into the Memorial.

None of these were forced on him. Each was chosen, at real cost.

Connection. His survival began in it — Jean Pierre's "I'll die with you" — and so did his healing: the fellow survivors he gathered around him, the Association of Student Survivors he helped found, and the testimony he now carries into refugee camps and classrooms, where a stranger's story becomes real enough to change a heart.

Even his mother, she called his humanity forward. She could have said anything. She could have asked him to avenge their likely deaths; to think of himself, grab everything you can, because you never know.

We cannot forget the role of the Smith family, Marina, and her sons, Stephen and James, their dedication in establishing and then leading the Kigali Genocide Memorial. They provided Freddy, and other survivors, with a family, people who cared because they cared, people willing to lay down their lives for others.

In the eyes of survivors, when the world abandoned them, that is incredibly precious.

Creation. And out of choice and connection came the things that outlast him: a movement of collective healing, the Kigali Genocide Memorial, a nation that is reconciling with its past, peace education woven into every subject of Rwanda's curriculum, and a model of repair now carried across borders.

Choice turns inward, connection turns outward, and creation turns them both into something real and enduring.

But the pathway has an engine and its own particular mechanisms — and Freddy's story shows two of them with unusual force.

Proximity — turned toward the wound, and the one who caused it

With Oglethorpe, we learned that proximity is the fuel of the whole pathway — his relentless choice to draw close: to the prison cell, the refugee ship, the dying friend. He activated his humanity by refusing to keep suffering at arm's length.

Freddy reinforces this powerfully — the whole of his healing began with drawing close to other survivors and sharing his story.

But he also shows us proximity's hardest form, one Oglethorpe's story never demanded.

Freddy drew close not only to the wounded, but to those who had done the wounding. He took perpetrators from his own village — men who had killed his neighbours — to the Kigali Genocide Memorial, and stood beside them in the evidence of what they had done.

That is proximity at the very edge of what a human being can bear — the fuel of the pathway taken to its most demanding extreme.

Champions Angels — the ones who share the risk

In the framework, Champions Angels are the protectors who arrive, often unbidden, and change everything.

Oglethorpe's was the Duke of Argyll — a powerful patron who reached down and pulled him clear.

Freddy's Champions Angel was of an entirely different kind, and it deepens the idea.

His was Jean Pierre — not a duke, not a patron, but a childhood friend, a peer, a boy his own age.

And Jean Pierre did not rescue Freddy from a position of safety above him. He stepped down into the danger, saying the words that still stop me every time: "Freddy, I'll die with you."

So the framework's angels are not only the powerful reaching down.

Sometimes they are equals reaching across — offering not protection from above, but solidarity in the same danger.

That may be the purest form of it. And it reminds us that any of us, whatever our station, can be someone's Champions Angel.

In the language of Champions we would call Jean Pierre a Protector — one who stands in the gap when hatred demands that everyone else step aside.

And notice how protection pays itself forward: his single act did not save one life only. It created the man who would go on to protect countless others, some of them not yet born.

There is, in fact, a third kind of Champions Angel in Freddy's story — and it carries us all the way back to where this whole series began.

When Freddy and I first met, in 2004, it was through a remarkable British family, the Smiths: Marina, a Methodist minister's wife who had mentored me as a young man, and her sons Stephen and James.

It was the Smiths, through their Aegis Trust, who led the creation of the Kigali Genocide Memorial, and who have given their lives to standing beside survivors.

And notice the thread — the Smiths are Methodists, heirs three centuries on to the very movement born on a storm-tossed ship out of Oglethorpe's Georgia. The line from that Savannah bluff runs, unbroken, to a memorial on a hill in Kigali.

Their kind of angel is different again.

Preventing a genocide is a matter of almost unbearable complexity — of politics and power, and of warnings the whole world chose not to heed.

But comforting a survivor is not complicated.

It asks only that we draw close, recognise another human being's pain, and honour their humanity.

That is what the Smiths did, and go on doing: not snatching anyone from danger, but bearing witness to the wounded, holding their stories, refusing to let their suffering go unseen — and their role in building and then stewarding that Memorial should never be understated.

Some Champions Angels save a life in a single moment, as Jean Pierre did.

Others spend years helping the saved find a reason to live.

Both are vital.

3. Developing our Champions Core: bending the arc of history

As we walk the pathway, something is being built inside us — our Champions Core, made of empathy, enterprise, and the moral standards we will not trade whatever the cost.

As that core strengthens and gains "mass," it develops a kind of moral and human gravity — a weight that begins, quietly, to bend the world.

Freddy's story shows us what that core is made of, and tests it at the very outer limit.

The human spark — humanity is never fully extinguished

The whole Champions framework rests on one foundational belief: that humanity is inherent in every person, that it can be buried but not destroyed, and that it can always be reactivated and strengthened.

As George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, realised nearly four centuries ago, every person carries an “inner light” — an inherent capacity for humanity.

That is a beautiful claim. It is also an easy one to doubt — until you meet someone who has tested it in the only place where it truly counts.

There was a reason he did it, and it speaks straight to what Champions means by leadership.

At the time, Freddy was leading the pilot of Rwanda's Peace and Values Education programme at the Memorial, and one question pressed on him without mercy: would he live what he was asking others to learn?

Could he lead a programme built on peace and shared humanity while leaving the hardest ground of his own life untouched?

To lead others onto the pathway, he first had to walk it himself.

It is the same mirror Michael Thurmond described in Oglethorpe — the courage to look honestly into your own life and change what most needs changing — turned now not upon a perpetrator, but upon the one who had been wronged.

Standing in the Memorial beside the men who had murdered his neighbours, Freddy watched some of them break down and weep.

And in that moment he saw what he has never let go of: that even in men who had done monstrous things, there was still a human spark.

Not an excuse. Not a forgetting. But a recognition that the capacity for humanity survives, even in its worst betrayers — and that if hatred can be taught, so can its opposite.

There are words carved at the Kigali Genocide Memorial that hold the whole of it:

If you knew me, and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me.

What Freddy set down in that moment was the clean, comprehensible world of them-and-us. What he picked up in its place was understanding — and, out of it, a mission.

Oglethorpe's life assumes that foundational belief.

Freddy’s life bears witness to it at the outer limit. It is hard to imagine stronger evidence for the framework than this.

Forgiveness — turning vices into virtues

The framework has always spoken of turning vices into virtues — of transforming the bad that happens to us into good that flows from us.

Oglethorpe did this: he turned grief and injustice into law and colonies. But Freddy takes it into territory Oglethorpe's story never reached.

He shows us forgiveness as a core Champions capacity — perhaps the hardest one of all.

And he teaches us precisely what it is, and is not.

Forgiveness, Freddy learned over nearly seventeen years, is not a gift to the perpetrator; it is a gift you give yourself — the setting down of a weight only you are carrying.

It is not forgetting, and not excusing; he was relentless about the truth, even seeking out the man who killed his family and finding no remorse there at all.

It is nuanced and freely given, not owed — he could forgive one perpetrator who confessed, and extend forgiveness into the silence of another who never would.

Most powerfully of all, Freddy feared that if he did not forgive, the bitterness would pass to his children — that hatred is inherited unless someone chooses to break the chain.

This is a profound addition to the framework: forgiveness is how a Champion stops a cycle of harm from being handed to the next generation. It is not softness.

It is the most consequential act of will there is.

And Champions never mistakes it for forgetting, nor humanity for weakness: forgiveness without truth becomes denial, and accountability without humanity becomes vengeance.

Freddy's life holds the harder balance between the two.

The heart that regenerates

There is an image Freddy gave me once that I have never forgotten, and it belongs right here, at the centre of what the core really is.

We were in Australia together, around 2016, visiting friends, when he came across something in his reading that stopped him.

There is a small tropical fish, the zebrafish, with a remarkable gift: after its heart muscle has been severely injured, it can regenerate — grow the damaged tissue back and beat on, whole again.

Freddy turned to me and said, quietly, that he felt his own heart was doing the same. Not that it was fully healed — he was always careful about that — but that the regeneration had begun. The muscle was slowly knitting back.

I think that is one of the truest things anyone has ever said to me about the Champions Core.

We sometimes speak of building the core as though from nothing, brick by brick.

But for those who have been wounded — and above all for those who have been dehumanised, told by a whole system that they are less than human — the work is not only construction. It is regeneration.

The human core can be wounded and tested by the worst that is done to us — but Freddy’s story shows it need not be destroyed.

Like that small fish's heart, it keeps the capacity to heal, to grow back, to beat again — often slowly, rarely all at once, but really.

That, perhaps more than anything, is the quiet hope the framework holds out to anyone carrying trauma: your heart, too, can regenerate.

And I have watched it happen.

Just a few years prior, when Freddy came back from carrying Rwanda's story into the Central African Republic — a country then in the grip of its own killing — I heard in his voice a man who had, as he put it, come alive.

The grief he had carried for twenty years was now giving life and hope to others, and in the giving it was healing him.

The heart that pours out hope, it turns out, is the very heart that regenerates.

Time, and the limits of sight

Oglethorpe's transformation unfolded across decades, and so did Freddy's — his forgiveness alone took seventeen years.

Both remind us that building a human core is slow, and rarely linear.

But Freddy sharpens a particular point the framework insists on: that we do not need 20/20 vision of the outcome.

He has spoken of times he felt a complete failure, certain it had all come to nothing. Some things are simply beyond our line of sight.

And that, paradoxically, is exactly why the core matters so much — because when we cannot see where the road leads, our behaviour has to come from within us, from the values we have built, rather than from the results we can measure.

Freddy kept choosing well long before he could see what those choices would become.

Champions Catalysts: humanity is a team sport

A core strong enough eventually does more than steady one life — it begins to activate others.

Oglethorpe showed us that the truest Champions become catalysts, calling the humanity forward in those around them until change ripples outward through networks no one could ever map.

Freddy is that principle in its clearest modern form.

One adrift young man's choice to seek connection became a survivors' movement; that movement became a career of remembrance and healing; and that work fed a nation's astonishing choice to reconcile — survivors and perpetrators living side by side — and to build peace education into the whole of its national curriculum, subject by subject, child by child.

Like Oglethorpe writing his conscience into laws and cities, Freddy and Rwanda wrote humanity into the very structures of a society. And then it crossed a border, to a grieving woman in the Central African Republic who found she could forgive her son's killer.

That is the ripple effect — the spirit of the 3.5% rule made visible: not grand gestures from the powerful few, but one person’s courageous choices rippling outward.

And here is what sets Freddy's story apart from Oglethorpe's in one crucial respect: his is not yet finished.

Oglethorpe's arc we can trace to its end and measure across three centuries.

Freddy's is still bending, right now — today he leads the Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial, still teaching, still travelling, still calling the humanity forward in young people in Rwanda and far beyond.

The ripples have not settled; they are still spreading, into lives and countries whose stories are not yet written.

When we say a life can bend the arc of history, we usually mean it as a verdict passed long after the fact.

Freddy reminds us that the bending is a living, present-tense thing — that the arc is being bent, by ordinary courageous choices, even as we speak.

And that it was never his to bend alone. It is ours too.

The whole map, in one life

So, does his story reinforce the Champions framework?

Completely. Every stage holds: the canvas we do not choose, the prompt, the pathway of choice, connection and creation, proximity and the angels who stand in our gap, the slow-built core, and the catalyst who multiplies it all.

But it also teaches us four things Oglethorpe's story alone could not.

That the framework is truly universal — it works from devastation as surely as from privilege, for the wronged as much as the redeemed.

That a Champions Angel can be an equal who shares our danger, not only a patron who lifts us out of it.

That forgiveness — as a gift to oneself, and as the breaking of an inherited cycle of hate — belongs at the very heart of the human core.

And that the framework's deepest claim, that no human being is ever wholly beyond the reach of their own humanity, is not wishful thinking.

Freddy has seen the spark relight in the very worst of us.

And notice how the two lives rhyme even in their words.

Oglethorpe wrote Not for ourselves, but for others into the founding charter of Georgia; Freddy's mother gave him the same truth in five: If you survive, be a man.

Both come, in the end, to one thing — the capacity to act for the good of others — which is the whole of what a Champion is.

There is a reason his story sits so close to the origins of everything Champions teaches.

Oglethorpe let us draw the map. Freddy walked it through fire — and came out the other side to help others do the same.

A Personal Reflection

A final reflection, a personal one, as I have walked many of these steps with Freddy for the past 22 years. We have been colleagues, co-workers, friends.

In 2010, some 6 years after the Memorial was established, Freddy asked if I would help develop a new strategy. In a volunteer mode, I travelled to Rwanda with a colleague, Peter Whittle, who has an exceptional gift for discernment. We had worked together in business.

It was this strategy that recommended the focus should be on the education program, then a very small part of the overall activities.

I took up a mentoring role, working alongside Freddy and the senior team at the Memorial, visiting most months from the UK, again in a volunteer capacity.

I saw the team grow and strengthen. In 2011, his second child was due. There was a concern for his wife, Natacha, as she nearly died when their first child was born.

The thought of losing his wife, also a survivor, was almost too much for Freddy to bear. Somehow, we managed to arrange medical care for Natacha. The baby was born late, but healthy, and Natacha was healthy too.

Freddy was impatient for the birth — he had meetings, trips and travel ahead. I joked that they should name her “Patience,” because she was already teaching him patience.

The list goes on. Australia, America, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Kenya, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and the UK also, are places that we have travelled together.

And this is not a one-way street. Once, I was taken very ill whilst in Rwanda, a rare occasion. Freddy was there, arranging things. And more besides, too much to mention.

In August 2023, Freddy celebrated his forty-seventh birthday with the adult members of his family. In many families in Rwanda, across Africa, or indeed anywhere in the world, such a gathering would normally be full of relatives. Freddy was joined by six people. There was a seventh: me.

As on that evening in April 2004, nineteen years earlier, when I attended the vigil for his family.

Thank you Freddy for inviting me, for inviting me to be part of your life, your journey.

It is an immense privilege to be part of his story, to see him grow into the man his mother had called him to become.

Become a Champion

Freddy’s story shows that our humanity can be wounded, buried and tested — but it need not be destroyed. It remains the most powerful force we have.

When people choose empathy over fear, connection over division, and forgiveness over the cycle of hate, whole nations can be rebuilt.

If this story stirs something in you, don't let it stay a feeling.

Do what Freddy did — turn it into a choice, a connection, and then create the future you want to see; become that future.

• Join the 35Champions site as a free member, and follow the movement as it grows.
• Pay it forward as a paid member, helping young people join the Champions program and become Humanity Champions in their own communities.
• Most of all, choose a pathway of humanity — and make the courageous, human choices, one at a time, that ripple outward to those around you.

Join as a member, read and share Stories of Humanity, and help fund the next generation of young Champions.

I'd love to hear your reflections below.

Glen