 We are the women of the PMC Lawson Cancer Center. We are here to support your journey, deliver hope, and provide solutions that will advance your care. Our purpose is saving lives. On Thursday, October 27th, the University of Pikeville hosted the East Kentucky Strong Forum. This yearly gathering of young women across Pike County schools is made possible by U-Pike First Lady Kay Webb. The local outreach program is a way to empower these students and help build their confidence and self-esteem. East Kentucky Strong is an outreach program that we offer each year to 11th grade girls here in Pike County. And the purpose of it is to help them feel empowered, help them know that they have a voice that needs to be heard and that they have a lot to share and to give to our communities. It's really important to hit girls at around the 11th grade year or that transitional year as they're starting to think about life after high school and what they might be doing once they graduate from high school, whether it be going on to college, going into a vocational training of some sort, just to give them thoughts about how they can be more than what maybe others around them have said that they can be and how they have so many options available to them. Throughout the day, the students are exposed to motivational speakers and breakout sessions with the intent of spreading positivity in their lives. Webb is proud to be a part of this impactful program. We began in 2016 and we started as a seed program off of some work that Toyota Corporation was doing in some of the larger cities. And we wanted to find a way that we could bring some of those ideas and a conference to our girls here in Pike County in Eastern Kentucky. In addition to that, the East Kentucky Strong has been the springboard for work that now Rotary Foundation is doing with empowering girls and they're starting to expand that throughout the state. And we're very proud that we were kind of the beginning of that and we've shared those ideas with them. Reporting from Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Colum.