Every year, the Cancer Community Award, sponsored by AstraZeneca, presents an individual or organization with the President's Award.

This award recognizes those who are making a meaningful impact in the lives of cancer patients.

In 2021, Margaret Stoffer received the President's Award for her work as the Chief Mission Officer of the Cancer Support Community in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As we prepared for this year's awards, we reconnected with Margaret to hear more about what's happened since she received the award.

Well, Margaret Stoffer, it's such a joy to get a chance to talk to you. I can't wait to hear what you've been up to the past year.

Thank you. It feels like a blur, but we'll try to break it out a little bit.

When you explain the Cancer Support Community to people who've never heard of it and people who aren't sort of part of the Cancer World, how do you explain it to them?

I say it's a place where people can come together and connect with others who understand what it's like to be dealing with a cancer diagnosis.

And it's a place where they can become informed and empowered as they're going through cancer treatment and beyond.

And it's also a place for loved ones to get support for what they are going through as well as the patient.

I understand that your mother went through a pretty brutal experience when she was diagnosed with cancer.

Do you mind telling me a little bit about that experience and how it informed your work?

Sure. First of all, I want to say it was a long time ago. So things have changed dramatically both in terms of treatment and in terms of psychosocial support.

But when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she had a radical mastectomy and there were no support services for her.

She just had the surgery and she was expected to go on with her life. But her life was impacted tremendously by that.

She was a pianist. She had to deal with lymphedema in her arm that made that difficult.

She didn't know anybody else that had gone through something similar to what she had gone through.

So it was very isolating and lonely and challenging for her, even though we as her family tried to do what we could,

but we didn't really understand either at the time what the impacts were.

So what really drew me to the work at cancer support community was being able to create a place where people could get that support,

where they could learn about treatment options, where they could feel a sense of connection with other people who know what it's like to be dealing with this.

If your mother could have benefited from the cancer support community, what do you think she would have done there? How would you have set her up with emotional and social support?

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