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GREENSBORO — Live in a place long enough, and you think you know it.

Then came last week.

I was sitting at the Atrium at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex, listening to yet another breakfast about the power of diversity, when up came the PowerPoint presentation about Greensboro as a Town of 100.

Here’s what I found out. We really like to drive alone, we steer clear of public transportation and we’d rather work in education, health care and social assistance than try to sell something to somebody.

But dig into those statistics, which the city staff unearthed from recent U.S. Census information , and you see our city of 260,000 broken down into a number that you can visualize on your block.

Or in this case, a corner conference room.

Let’s break it down. Out of those 100 people:

•  86 of us completed high school, and 34 of us finished college.
•  25 of us are between 20 and 34 years old, while 11 of us are 65 and older.
•  18 of us live in poverty.
•  12 of us speak a language other than English at home.
•  9 of us are veterans.
•  2 of us take public transportation.

Surprising, huh? Pat Boswell thought so, too.

“It shatters the old Greensboro Mayberry stereotype,” says Boswell, the city’s public affairs director. “We like to think we have that Mayberry friendliness. But Mayberry never looked like Greensboro does now.”

Mayor Bill Knight asked Boswell and her crew for the number-crunch because he wanted to give a deeper meaning to this word “diversity.”

In our city of 260,000, diversity is sometimes spelled out as black and white. But in our Town of 100, you see diversity is much broader than the color of our skin.

That’s what Knight wanted to show last week when he spoke to a crowd of 200, one of his largest audiences away from City Hall since he became the symbolic face of Greensboro on Dec. 1 .

He wanted people to see that diversity could be a tool that could unite us and stoke volunteerism, engage the community, and attract companies that could create much-needed jobs.

As Marilyn Chandler , executive director of the Greensboro Jewish Federation , told the audience: “There’s an old Jewish saying that teaches us that each of us carries a piece of the other within us.”

Nearly three years ago , these diversity breakfasts began as a community outreach project that The HR Group , a human resources management firm in Greensboro, held every few months with employees from United Guaranty.

Back then, anywhere from 25 to 35 people came. Today, these quarterly breakfasts have attracted bigger crowds and started conversations among a wide swath of our community, from public officials to recent college grads.

But it ain’t easy. Lenora Billings-Harris will tell you that. She’s a diversity consultant based in Greensboro.

“When people lean into their fear, so they can have the courage to allow them to be uncomfortable, what I know is opportunities open up,” said Billings-Harris, who spoke at last week’s breakfast. “We see things differently.”

Adrian Russell has. Three years ago at UNCG , he was approached by the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity about joining. He was black, the two guys who approached were white, and they talked to him about the need to be more inclusive, less segregated.

“Man, am I going to be a sellout if I join a white fraternity?” he asked himself.

But he didn’t run away from that fear.

“It was crazy,” Russell said Wednesday. “We had a guy from England and one guy from the Ukraine, and when we all came together, all that other stuff didn’t matter. We were one brotherhood.”

Today, Russell works as the volunteer coordinator at the Volunteer Center of Greensboro. He’s 22, a native of Butner who graduated last May with a degree in political science from UNCG.

And last week, he went to the Atrium, sat near the back and heard about our Town of 100.

It reminded him of Pi Kappa Alpha, a time when he was known as “Slice,” a time when he realized change can happen.

“Hope,” he says, “is nothing without will power.”

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com