The Best of Youth
Aleah Gammon loves the Mary and Frances Youth Center. The Richmond fifth-grader has been attending programs there for three years, since her mother, Renea, spotted lines of grinning children outside the youth center’s Virginia Commonwealth University campus home and inquired inside.
Aleah was enchanted from the start, reveling in everything from honing her burgeoning tennis game on the courts to learning new skills and lessons during academic and cultural programs. Aleah can talk with enthusiasm about how she learned about different countries during the World Cup by sampling various international foods, how much she loves swimming with her friends in the pool at the Cary Street Gym or how the center’s instructors make every activity seem fun and exciting with their infectious enthusiasm. She only has trouble talking about her time at the center when asked to name her favorite part.
“I love all of it,” Aleah said. “I always have so much fun there.”
The Mary and Frances Youth Center, part of the Division of Community Engagement, has been operating at VCU for more than a decade, serving thousands of children like Aleah in after-school and summer programs. The center opened Sept. 28, 2007, with financial support from Michael Fraizer, former CEO of Genworth Financial Inc., and his wife, Elizabeth. (Tennis greats Steffi Graf, Andre Agassi, Lindsay Davenport and James Blake attended the facility’s 2006 groundbreaking.) The center is named in honor of the Fraizers’ mothers, Mary Desmond Fraizer and Frances Meunier Royer.
Read the full VCU Exposure article.