Local man helps youth through cultural trips

Our community is blessed to have so many people with warm and generous hearts.

Fred Pennington belongs high up on the list of those people in Cape Girardeau.

As features writer Jeff Breer recently reported, Pennington, 62, has for several years been organizing trips for disadvantaged youth in our area and taking them on trips to experience culture and history that they would not otherwise get to experience.

For Pennington, these trips offer hope to these young people, for them to be able to see a different world and different culture than what they see at home.

It started decades ago, according to Breer's story. Pennington served as a coach in church league basketball and Cape youth tackle football when his six children were growing up. He was contacted by Congressman Bill Emerson to help be the point person when one of Emerson's colleagues started a program to host youths from Southeast Missouri for a week of activities in Wyoming dealing with nature.

From there, Pennington's vision for helping youth changed, and he wanted to show youths about history "what makes this country tick and all the museums and different stuff."

So in 1995, he organized "The Heartland Dream Team" with the goal of taking groups on cultural destinations. He's taken young people to Washington, D.C., to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis to gain appreciation for life and other destinations relating to the Civil War and civil rights movement. He has also taken students on tours of different college campuses.

Pennington is paying it forward. As a child growing up in a poor family, a generous family opened up new worlds to him by taking him to a camp. "I'd never done nothing like that," Pennington said. "They just wanted to do it. They wanted to pay for it, and they paid for it. My mother let me go to that camp. I went to camp and I was doing stuff I never realized existed. ... It just opened up a whole new world for me. A lot of kids in my neighborhood didn't get anything like that; they just didn't because of their situation. They just weren't exposed to that stuff. These people put it in their heart to give me the opportunity to go."

As an adult, he is showing the world to others. He and the students raise money and seek donations for the trips.

We offer our gratitude to Pennington for such important work in our community. While hoping to inspire others in their formative years, Pennington himself is an inspiration to young and old.