We Understand Youth (WUY) became a coaching & training client of Embrace in June of 2022.  WUY is seeking to strengthen the Farmville Community by investing in our future community leaders - the youth of Prince Edward County.  WUY is currently in the process of building out a youth center in the south Virginia Street community which will be a hub for youth development activities in the Farmville area. You can learn more about WUY here. 

2023 Update:

Torrie Patterson of We Understand Youth launched her first action team, Teen Talks, in the spring of 2023 and successfully executed their first community initiative, a year end community-wide field day.  This youth-led youth-development focused group completed their first formal listening project in the summer of 2023 conducting over 40 individual interviews with students from Prince Edward High School.  Through this listening effort they discovered that roughly 50% of the youth had creative expression gifts (music, art and writing) that they were willing to invest in strengthening their school and community.  Youth named student wellness, school culture and expanded vocational opportunities as projects they would be willing to take the lead on. This listening project served as the basis for recruitment of local partners to a second learning cohort and the emergence of a second creative expression based action team that will focus on school culture shifting in 2024.