We're starting our October Breast Cancer Awareness month reporting with a skilled surgeon from Waterbury Heath System with nearly a quarter century of hands-on experience supporting breast cancer survivors - for an informed and heartening conversation focusing on some positive news regarding breast cancer research, awareness, and recovery.

Then we're returning to a subject we've been covering for several years, bringing you an important update highlighting Connecticut's Workforce Alliance 'Recovery Works' initiative and how it is poise to help employees and employers working through addiction recovery.

And we'll close circling back with the CT Coalition to End Homelessness to get the latest on how COVID-19 is impacting our state's most vulnerable homeless population as winter approaches, and checking in on activities at this week's CCEH Annual Conference.

Our first field report in weeks finds us at Newtown's first-ever drive-up COVID-19 testing center. Check our chat with a PhysicianOne representative, the community's lead health official and First Selectman talking about testing and more.

Then we'll celebrate all the front line responders and kick off National EMS week with a small town EMS volunteer and a municipal fire official about how they work with dispatchers and medical professionals to save lives 24/7 and especially during the pandemic.

And we'll close with a medical expert representing Greenbrook TMS NeuroHealth Centers. We'll get a crash course on Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation / TMS and how it could help mitigate depression or anxiety as a result of the coronavirus emergency or other life challenges.

We'll engage the new Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer at the University of New Haven - Lorenzo Boyd - who also heads up the UNH Center for Advanced Policing, for the first of a couple of conversations we're planning around police practices, movements to de-fund police agencies, and the crossover points where racial diversity intersects with community policing.

Then we'll talk arts and humanities with the director of CT Humanities - and find out how this decades old agency is reinventing itself as a digital and community resource, while supporting and funding intriguing programs and projects across the state.

And we'll close with our partners at the CT Coalition Against Domestic Violence. If anything, the COVID pandemic has made things harder for the thousands of intimate partner and domestic abuse victims across Connecticut, so we'll touch base and get a snapshot of what's been happening in terms of prevention and response over the past few months.