Paint Dunedin Purple Raises Funds, Awareness About Alzheimer's

DUNEDIN, FLA. — When Steve Olson’s mother died from Alzheimer’s Disease on New Year’s Eve in 2017, he knew immediately that he wanted to do something to honor her life while raising awareness of a disease that took her from him.

For three years now, Olson has seen the Dunedin business community envelop him and others who have lost loved ones to Alzheimer’s. The annual Paint Dunedin Purple event has already raised more than $20,000 and will add more to that after last week’s event included 60 local businesses that took part in the campaign.

The outpouring of support has been amazing to Olson, who never envisioned that so many people that he didn’t know when he started asking business owners for their support have now become friends. And three years after the event first took place in 2018, Olson still finds himself becoming emotional when he realizes just how many people’s families have been affected by Alzheimer’s.

“You can read statistics all day long,” Olson told Patch on Thursday. “But until you are face to face with someone that the minute you mention (Alzheimer’s) starts to tear up and share how that disease impacted them and their entire family, you do develop an incredible bond with people when you share that experience. All of those people have now joined in this fight.”

Olson originally asked local business owners for three things. He asked that their staff wear purple, requested that they promote the day of the event on social media and then ask that their customers wear purple on the day of the event, which has traditionally been held in June. He gave business owners the option of raising money for the Alzheimer’s Association in any manner they wished.

His first stop was to My Favorite Things, where he ran the idea by Christy Hupp, the owner of the shop who told Olson she had lost her mother to Alzheimer’s. The connection she felt toward raising awareness of a disease that impacts so many Floridians and others across the country led her to support the campaign immediately.

The long list of similar stories Olson has heard since then continues to grow.

“It’s become as much a community event as much as anything,” Olson said. “For 60 to 70 percent of the business owners that participate, this is personal. They are impacted….this is their mother, their grandmother.

“It’s been almost therapeutic for me because losing my mother to Alzheimer’s was a very painful process and when I hear people hear how they are impacted by this, we kind of share that bond.”

Olson said that it is still too early to determine how this year’s event raised, but he anticipates it matched or beat the $10,000 that has been raised for the Alzheimer’s Association in each of the past two years. This year’s event was held after Olson wondered if he should cancel in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. But when he asked business owners if they wanted to forego the event in a year in which so many small businesses struggled to survive, they only were more determined to make the Paint Dunedin Purple event a success after it was moved to August.

The Paint Purple event is Dunedin’s local version of the Alzheimer Association’s “Longest Day” fundraising event, which is held around the summer solstice each year. But as many people Olson has met whose family has been affected by the disease, he has watched as the Paint Dunedin Purple campaign has raised awareness among those who don’t know that much about the disease.

While many people associate the disease with memory loss and other effects of the disease, many are not aware that it is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States, Olson said.

Now, nearly four years after his mother, Rita, died after fighting Alzheimer’s for at least six or seven years, Olson knows that his efforts to honor her memory were not in vain. Ever since she was diagnosed, Olson said he was motivated by the courage she displayed in fighting the disease that claimed her life and that is now having a direct impact in different ways on many of his Dunedin friends and neighbors.

“It’s been extremely rewarding,” Olson said. “A lot of us give to charities we are impacted by but when you have people step forward and say, ‘Wow, I had no idea (about Alzheimer’s)’ and say, ‘this is important, I want to be involved,’ that’s incredible.”