What's the local climate?

Well, I think the local climate is progressing, is challenging, is, you know, it's all about, you know, educating and people to understand that, like Cornell was saying earlier, difference does not mean...

Bad.

Right.

Difference does not mean fear.

Difference.

We all have to learn how to understand the difference between people.

And I'm wondering, you know, with this war he started here, what kind of effect has that had? Have you seen personally and locally, what kind of effect has that had?

That was his ethos right from the beginning, right?

Yes, it was, and that shows in the research he did and the groundbreaking discoveries he made in relation to melanoma, but it's also true of how he approached his own illness, which was really, in a way, very public, but that was for a reason.

It was to give other people hope and the strength to carry on their own struggles.

The farewell today will feature, I think, a number of tributes from some important people, but it's also going to be attended by many of the patients who've been helped by Richard Scalia through the years.

Yeah, I think there'll be plenty of those people there because Richard, together with his colleagues... made discoveries and improved our understanding of how melanoma should be treated and turned what was a devastating and almost always fatal disease into something that can be easily controlled or well controlled in the majority of people.

Michael Boyer explained it like this.

The shadow of a cancer typically will appear as a white area.

So too will the shadow of pneumonia.

So too would a fungal infection.

You know, there's a whole series of things that have a similar appearance.

And, you know, Michael Boyer said context like that matters, right?

It's important because if we really want to say in this story, well, here was someone that was told he had cancer.

He went back to live his wholesome lifestyle on an island in Greece and his cancer went away.

Michael Boyer explained it like this.

The shadow of a cancer typically will appear as a white area.

So too will the shadow of pneumonia.

Um, so too would a fungal infection.

You know, there's a whole series of things that, that have a similar appearance.

And you know, Michael Boyer said context like that matters.

It's important because if we really want to say in this story, well, here was someone that was told he had cancer, he went back to live his wholesome lifestyle on an island in Greece, and his cancer went away, before you can draw any conclusions from that, you've got to be really, really certain that he had cancer in the first place.

Michael, this might be a good time to take a minute and remind folks how the Diversity Coalition was originally founded.

Yeah, thank you for that.

Back in 2011, there was a little bit of a movement in the southern portion of the county around some white supremacy movement.

And in April of that year, there was a cross burning in the house of a black family in Arroyo Grande.

And, and, and, and that was the spark, right? That's the one that got every, got a group of people together, a group of community leaders, civic leaders, um, religious leaders, uh, together to talk about, you know, as a community, how should we address it? And eventually the people that perpetrated that crime were, uh, you know, were arrested and, uh, and, and they, they served their time.

But really, that was when we started the coalition.

There was a group of, I would say, really led by the city manager of Aurora Grande at the time, Steve Adams, who really, you know, through the first few years, shepherded the organization, got PGE to be a sponsor, and so on.

Holy cow.