We were five for five. The first five legislative aides we visited all had personal connections to Alzheimer’s disease: three grandmothers, one aunt and one best friend’s grandmother. This could work, I thought. We could build support, one aide’s grandma at a time!
“Building support,” also known as “lobbying,” is a word that has acquired a lot of baggage in the last five or fifty or 250 years, depending on how you’re counting.
“Did you lay some sports tickets on the desk when you walked in?” my son asked.
“Yeah, right,” I said. “Doesn’t quite work like that on the nonprofit side of the fence.” But the question did make me wince. Because in truth? The day I spent walking around Olympia with a purple sash tied, beauty-pageant style, from shoulder to waist made me proud to be a volunteer lobbyist. I was one of 105 humble foot soldiers who showed up to help the Alzheimer’s Association make the rounds. Most of us were rookies. Fortunately, we were matched up with experienced staffers who’ve done this before. My team leader was Janet Ceballos, social services manager for the Western and Central Washington chapter. Seven times, I watched her approach a state lawmaker’s reception desk, her face friendly but determined, her palm-sized note card handy in case she needed it.
We weren’t on a hard-sell mission. In 2014, state lawmakers passed a bill establishing an Alzheimer’s Disease Working Group, whose job it is to come up with ways our state can cope with the predicted dramatic increases in the need for dementia care over the next few decades. We may not be Florida, but we have a sizable Baby Boomer cohort that is likely to stay right here in Washington as they age. This will be a nightmare if we don’t plan ahead. So our goal, as we walked from one office to another, was to remind lawmakers of how important it is to continue to support this work.
What you never know, when you bring up Alzheimer’s, is whether the person you’re talking to has any personal connection to the disease. What is increasingly clear is that just about everybody does.
“This feels good,” said one member of my team. “It’s democracy in action.”
Yes it is, and yes it did feel good: to be making personal connections instead of sending emails or “liking” Facebook posts. (Check out these happy pictures on the Chapter blog site: good feelings all around!)
And about those purple sashes: at first, I was hesitant. Weren’t they just a bit too Miss America-esque? But then I noticed how my fellow volunteers stood up a little straighter and walked a little taller once they got their sash on. And there was no mistaking what the sash meant: “Alzheimer’s Association” was written loud and proud across that purple. And as we walked, I thought of my mom, who lived with Alzheimer’s disease for a long time, and the looks people would sometimes give her, if she said something odd or repeated herself or couldn’t add up her change. I thought of how I would feel: first embarrassed, then angry that I was allowing myself to feel embarrassed. So it felt good to wear the sash: for Mom. For all those times when I allowed the stigma of Alzheimer’s to sting.
Just wearing that sash might have been the best message we volunteers could deliver to Olympia. Because what we were saying, to the aides whose grandmothers have the disease and to everybody else, is: we are done with shame. We’re done with stigma. We’re ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work on that state plan, and we hope you are too.
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I feel moved by this post to say thank you. You are my connection to Alzheimer’s. You and your mother.
Thanks for making democracy work!