As a college student at Brown University in the 1960s, Dallas native Penny Wells organized a voter registration week in Alabama. She also participated in the March Against Fear, later known as the Meredith March after its organizer, James Meredith, was shot. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stepped in to lead that march through Mississippi into Jackson in 1966. 

Fast forward 40 years later, Wells—a middle school history teacher in the Youngstown City School District—was attending a teacher’s conference in Orlando, Florida, when she met Jeff Steinberg, founder of Sojourn Project. The California-based nonprofit leads an immersion program for middle and high school students centered on a nine-day trip through the Deep South retracing the steps of the Civil Rights Movement. 

“That workshop in Florida really grabbed my soul,” she said. “I wanted to take students on this journey. More so than any other time in my life, I thought this is what I was meant to do.”

The following year, in 2007, she started Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, modeled off of the California nonprofit. Since then, she has taken more than 250 high school students on a life-altering journey that—to Wells’ credit—only begins with the nine-day trip to the South. 

“It’s more than just taking them on this experience,” she said. It’s about learning “what are you willing to stick your neck out for, how are you willing to make a change, first in yourself and then in your community, when you return.”

Every fall, Wells accepts between 12 and 15 students into the program. Most are 10^th graders from Youngstown area schools. The application includes a short essay where students share why they want to go and what they are willing to do when they return. Each student receives a full independent study history credit. There are readings and lessons leading up to the trip, assignments during the trip and a final paper.   

Wells raises most of the money needed to cover the cost of the trip, which is around $4,400 per student, though the students do some fundraising as well. She first got connected to the Wean Foundation during the early days of starting Sojourn to the Past and has been a Wean grantee for many years.

Each journey is a little different in terms of whom the students meet and the places they visit. Wells meticulously plans very engaging and unique experiences for each group that center on lessons in nonviolence, social justice and racial equity. The students have had the chance to meet several Civil Rights leaders over the years, including Rep. John Lewis before his passing and Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of African American students to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

“The goal is, when these kids have these experiences, they realize they have the power to make a difference,” Wells said. “A lot of the students feel very hopeless, that life hasn’t had very much to offer them. They are in an economically declining community. They’ve known poverty. They’ve known people who have been imprisoned. … This experience gives them hope.”

Wells has seen how motivating the experience can be.

In 2010, upon returning from the trip, the student participants decided they wanted to have a nonviolence week in the schools. Wells met with them all summer long, but the students led the planning. They approached the superintendent of the Youngstown City School District, who asked them to expand it to the grade schools. The event continued to grow. Three years later, the student participants were able to get a law passed in the state of Ohio that recognizes the first week of October as nonviolence week throughout the state. 

Wells also makes deep connections with many of the students who participate. Long after the program is over, they call to wish her a happy Mother’s Day or reach out for advice when they are in trouble or need help.

“I tell these kids,” she said, “I’m here for you ‘til the day I die.”