Pilgrimage to the South

Community Building

We begin our Pilgrimage to the South with learning and community building at home. We come together for a series of mandatory sessions where we learn from each other and about ourselves through respectful dialogue, reading and video assignments, and participatory exercises. We believe in the popular education model, in which every person in our community has the capacity to teach and to learn. We believe these sessions are vital to a successful experience in the American South.

Impactful Places & Spaces

Then we embark on our Pilgrimage to the South where we visit key places in the Black-American freedom struggle and spend time with foot soldiers who lived history then and leaders of movements making history today. Some of the places we visit include: Montgomery and Selma, AL; Money and Philadelphia, MS; Nashville and Memphis, TN. Along the way, we process together, support Black-owned business and restaurants, and ultimately bond closer as a group.

Reflection & Integration

This experience impacts in both expected and surprising ways. As we evolve through the journey, it provokes us to examine our own lives and why we act, where we disrupt, and how we resist. The Pilgrimage to the South does not end when we arrive back home. Sankofa Impact hosts post-travel community conversations and facilitated exercises for each cohort to enrich and support the work of reflection and integration. We contemplate, process, and create plans of action.

Program Goals

To build and sustain a community of everyday activists.
To confront our shared history of racism and resistance by visiting locations that tell the story of the Black American freedom struggle.
To highlight and celebrate the similarities and differences between the Pacific Northwest and the American South.
To uplift, study, and honor the ordinary people who have taken extraordinary actions to change systems of oppression.
To have an impactful experience that leads to transformative social justice within personal and professional circles.

Costs

The cost of the trip is all inclusive, with the exception of airfare to and from the South. Food, lodging, ground transportation and admission to various sites is included in the cost of the trip, which can reach $4000/participant.

Sankofa Impact is committed to creating equitable access to our programs. If cost is a barrier to your participation, we offer a limited number of scholarships on a sliding scale.

Apply

At this time, we are asking prospective participants to enter our Pilgrimage Portal. This short pre-application will enable us to gauge the readiness of our potential cohort. Please enter the portal by clicking here.

Our participants are from all walks of life and include folks across many different identities. When seating the bus, we look to include a broad range of individuals with these characteristics in mind:

Will choose to invest time in the Pilgrimage experience, from start to finish
Has willingness to have transformative conversations about race and identity in mixed company
Embody the resilience necessary to spend long days traveling by bus across many miles to study and uplift narratives of Black history
Make an unflinching commitment to everyday activism and collective liberation

“Overall the experience has definitely been one that will continue to inform my equity work. In particular, I will be using a lot of the insight gained from this trip to work with white folx on building up their “racial stamina” and offering more context for both black and non-black POC.”