At this year’s Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Kirkland resident and breast cancer survivor Peggy Maimon’s team intends to honor a friend – coworker and fellow breast cancer survivor Char Davis.

“She was the glue that held us all together,” Maimon said. “We’ve had more laughs than I can count.”

For Maimon, a volunteer at Susan G. Komen, her team’s name, “Char’s Dream Team,” reflects not just the kind of the relationships she had with Davis, who recently passed away, but with other coworkers past and present since she first started working there five years ago.

“I fell in love with each and every one of them,” she said. “It was so positive, I hated going home.”

When she first approached the foundation with the idea of working for them, she attended health fairs, but decided that she needed to work at the office.

“The moment I walked in, I had friends,” she said. “I fell in love with them. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed working there and with women who volunteer.”

Since then, she said she has done “everything there is to do,” which included heading the volunteers for the annual Race for the Cure.

“It is so exciting to see 500-600 volunteers to show up in the morning,” she said. “It is truly amazing…what a wonderful group of volunteers, and we need more of those.”

One of the highlights of her time with Susan G. Komen was chairing Seattle’s Power of a Promise Luncheon in 2013. Since 2008, the luncheons have raised more than $1 million for breast cancer research, according to the foundation.

Among the things she said she’s learned since working at the foundation is their vigilance in determining where grants should go. Sitting in on a grant committee meeting on one occasion, she said she was in awe of how the committee examined grant applications to ensure the money was spent correctly.

Diagnosed with breast cancer 15 years ago, Maimon said the women in her family have dealt with it going back to her great-grandmother.

“They were both very strong wonderful women,” she said of her mother and grandmother. “A lot of women are not like that. A lot of women wallow and feel sorry for themselves and cry. The women I know through Komen do not do that. I guess that’s leaning on other people and knowing other people understand you.”

Because of her family medical history, Maimon said when she diagnosed herself she was not shocked.

“It was just always wondering when I would get it,” she said. “But I’m a survivor and I’m healthy and I’ve been taken care of.”

At the same time, by the time she had breast cancer, she said a lot of progress had been made since her mother had been diagnosed when Maimon was in junior high. Although her mother survived and lived to be 80, Maimon said there is a hush-hush attitude around the disease, which was far less understood than it is now, and so it was rarely discussed.

“People died in those years, and now there’s people reaching out to be people, women reaching out to women,” she said. “It’s amazing how women reach out to women. Before, it was a quiet disease.”

While she said she doesn’t know whether or not a cure will be found in her lifetime, progress is still being made, and major advancements in the medical field allows doctors to provide more options and better advice for patients in recent years.

“They’ve come a long way in treating breast cancer,” she said. “There’s been a lot of research and success that has Komen dollars behind it.”