One Love Foundation, in honor of slain lacrosse player Yeardley Love, returns headquarters to Baltimore
BALTIMORE -- Baltimore native Yeardly Love was killed by her ex-boyfriend 13 years ago.
For more than a decade, her mother has been working to help end relationship abuse with One Love Foundation.
Love was a 22-year-old college student, playing lacrosse at the University of Virginia, when she was killed by her ex-boyfriend, George Huguely, in 2010.
The One Love Foundation, which was founded in honor of Love, has returned to Baltimore after being in New York.
Sharon Love, Yeardley's mother and her former lacrosse coach, said there is a significance about the foundation returning to Baltimore.
The One Love Foundation is dedicated to ending relationship abuse and now the foundation is doing that work at its new headquarters in Timonium.
"Baltimore is my hometown. Baltimore was Yeardley's hometown," Sharon Love said. "Really, we got our start here."
In 2010, Huguely broke into Love's room and left her with multiple external injuries and a fatal head injury.
He was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 23 years in prison.
"When I sent Yeardley off to college, my biggest fear was that she could be in a car accident, to or from school, or maybe get hurt on the lacrosse field," Sharon Love said. "This never even occurred to me. It was foreign to me."
Sharon Love said she was blindsided that her daughter was killed as a result of domestic violence.
She says now she works to make sure that this doesn't happen to anyone else's child.
Julie Myers, One Love Foundation's CEO, was Yeardley's lacrosse coach at the University of Virginia.
"The work that we do here at the foundation is so incredibly important," Myers said. "I wish that I knew more in 2010 because I would like to think that maybe I could have had a conversation with Yeardley."
The One Love Foundation works to engage young people to have honest and healthy conversations about healthy and unhealthy relationship behaviors.
There are currently 400 youth leaders in the youth leadership program throughout the country.
The foundation has worked with more than 373,000 students in Maryland.
Myers said she worked with the One Love Foundation when she was a coach at Virginia. The foundation now works with a number of colleges, high schools and middle schools throughout the country.
"We could never guarantee that it would never happen again, but we certainly wanted to make every effort to put ourselves in the position that we could be successful and have healthy relationships and really look out for a friend, and know what to say to someone you may be worried about," Myers said.
In addition to the community outreach, the One Love Foundation has online resources that are free to help serve their mission.
