Wes Milligan does not have a direct connection to Alzheimer’s disease. Yet the 40- year-old corporate communications manager has become one of the Walk to End Alzheimer’s top 100 fundraisers. Last year he raised more than $20,000 for the Alzheimer’s Association, and he plans to raise $200,000 in the next decade.
His connection is based on happenstance. In 2004 Milligan, then a journalist, wrote an article about the disease and was moved by the people he met. “The stories were heart-wrenching: a father forgetting his daughter, a grandmother not knowing her granddaughter,” he says. “I decided to champion Alzheimer’s.”
Milligan is one of a growing number of people who are choosing to support the Alzheimer’s Association. In 2018 more than 526,000 people participated in more than 630 walks. And while many other fundraising walks have faltered over the last decade, donations to the Walk to End Alzheimer’s have more than doubled since 2008 to $96.9 million.
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/alzheimers-associations-fundraising-walk-defies-the-odds/
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