About 1,000 people gathered on the Center for Organ Recovery and Education’s (CORE) sprawling campus in O’Hara on Sunday morning to honor the 472 organ donors from the region whose donations saved hundreds of lives in 2024.

The memorial was CORE’s 32nd annual “A Special Place” ceremony and also honored the more than 900 cornea donors who helped restore sight to 884 people last year and the over 1,600 tissue donors who provided healing — in the form of bone, skin and heart valve transplants — to nearly 125,000 others.

Before the ceremony, relatives of donors and members of the transplant community were invited to pin squares onto quilts to honor their loved ones and pour vials of colored sand into a large vase, creating a collective sand sculpture with each color representing a donor fami

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