Think It Over….
It’s the “the Marching Season” – Walk to End Alzheimer’s – that time when we engage our communities to bring Alzheimer’s to the fore, to raise funds and awareness for our cause. Our communications team is hard at work trying to entice the media into paying attention, our public policy team is activating our advocates to influence policy makers, and all the while, we answer the phone and meet with families for whom concern and awareness and public policy are at best secondary issues.
We’re an Association of big dreams, but honestly, we didn’t start that way. We began just trying to make the journey a little easier for those who followed. As we worked, we learned that Alzheimer’s is not normal aging, not inevitable”¦ we learned to hope. We learned that if we want to change the future, we need to organize, we need to engage, we need to lift our heads from the challenges of day-to-day caregiving.
Today we – you, me and millions we’ve never met – are a movement. We created the National Alzheimer’s Project Act, we moved its passage and now we have to make it matter. Our job in a very tangible way is to change the facts as we know them today”¦ to quadruple Federal funding for Alzheimer’s research, to create better options of care, to reduce the stigma of Alzheimer’s, bringing it out of the closet and talking about it and diagnosing as the disease it is.
Walk to End Alzheimer’s is all about this. It is about moving concern and awareness, it is about linking people to help, engaging our families, neighbors and co-workers in a movement that reclaims the future for millions. It is about raising the essential dollars that stoke our work and allow us to expand our impact.
I love Walk for many reasons. I suspect part of it is being a child of the 60’s”¦ seeing hundreds, even thousands of people out in the streets is, for me, cathartic. All those people, diverse strangers motivated by the same cause. Imagine if there were so many people turning out for Walk that we couldn’t hold the crowd, not enough parking, ran out of t-shirts. How big a crowd would it take for the media to cover the event? I don’t know, but I’d love to find out. If you care about this issue, for yourself, for your partner or spouse, for your parents, for your children or grandchildren, you need to be there. Sign up, raise money, raise hell. Be the change we want to see. See you there.
Wm H. Fisher, wfisher@alz.org
Helpful information related to this story
