Dear Colleague,

I am writing to you to let you know about the Dementia Awareness Week that Age in Spain is running across our website and social media during the week beginning 20 September.

In the course of Age in Spain´s work we often come across people living with dementia in one way or another. They might be people who have dementia themselves, people who are living with and caring for a loved one in Spain or family members who live in a different country and want to know about the support that is available here. Questions around dementia come up through our residency work as well as our Casework service and these have served to emphasise just how the realities of living with dementia can be exacerbated by living in a different country, perhaps with a language barrier and where the cultural perspectives and support systems are different.

We have come to realise that, as part of our information service, Age in Spain needs to develop resources that will help members of the English-speaking community who are living with dementia. The Age in Spain Dementia Awareness Week is a first step in that process. The week coincides with World Alzheimer's Day on 21 September and over the five days from 20 September we will be sharing different perspectives on dementia and stories of how people can and do respond to the condition. It's a vast subject and we are not setting ourselves up as experts in the field but we do feel, given our mission to help English-speaking people in Spain live their later lives to the full, that it's a subject we need to address.

Please check out our website and Facebook page during that week to see a range of information from professionals and people with lived experience and we would be grateful if you could share content with your networks.

As it says on the tin, the purpose of the week is to raise awareness. Part of that is sharing information about partner organisations that offer support. So if your organisation offers dementia-related support and you would like us to share what you do as part of our Dementia Awareness Week then please email  christopher.knighton@ageinspain.org and tell us a little bit about what your organisation does.

The voluntary sector has a vital role to play to help English-speaking people in Spain living with dementia, most of whom don't have access to the same level of informal support that they would have in their home countries. I would welcome any opportunity to hear about your work and, also, to discuss any ways in which we might collaborate in the future.

Yours,
Helen Weir