Mission Home For Rev
Riding For Memory. Sharing Stories. Supporting Understanding. Ride to Remember uses cycling, film, comics and personal stories to help people better understand dementia, support caregivers
Our work grew from two universal languages — the bicycle and the comic book — and one family’s experience with dementia. Today, through rides, films, original comics, essays, educational resources, and creative fundraising, we bring communities together to see the person beyond the diagnosis, better understand the experience of caregiving, and turn compassion into meaningful action.
Guided by dignity, empathy, and purpose, we work toward a world in which people affected by dementia are better understood, caregivers are better supported, and continued research brings greater hope for treatment and care.
Dementia reaches far beyond the person diagnosed. Families become caregivers, familiar relationships change, and behaviors caused by the disease can be misunderstood by people who have never experienced them.
At the same time, our understanding of dementia is changing. Research into risk, earlier detection, diagnosis, treatment, and care continues to advance. Yet families still need practical support, caregivers often carry an unseen burden, and people living with dementia too easily become defined by their diagnosis rather than the lives they have lived.
Ride to Remember approaches that challenge through education, experience, and story.
Sometimes that story is told from a bicycle. Sometimes through a camera, an essay, or the panels of a comic book. Each offers a different way into a difficult subject — and an opportunity to replace fear, stigma, and misunderstanding with knowledge and compassion.
Awareness Through Bicycling
Bicycles create an unusually universal connection across generations. Through fundraising rides, community events, and our signature recreation of a remarkable 1930s North Carolina journey, we use cycling to bring dementia out of private conversation and into public view. We also explore the role of exercise, activity, independence, and shared experience in healthy aging.
Media, Education & Storytelling
We create films, comics, essays, interviews, and educational material that make complex subjects approachable without diminishing them. Some document real experiences, including caregiving, aging, research, and emerging approaches to detection. Others use fiction and perspective to help audiences imagine experiences that can be difficult to explain.
The purpose is consistent: to help people see someone living with dementia as a person first, rather than simply a diagnosis.
Caregiver & Family Resources
Caregivers are central to our work. We share their experiences, direct families toward useful educational and support resources, and develop material intended to make the daily realities of dementia easier to understand and discuss.
Our role is not to replace medical or professional guidance, but to help people find credible information, ask better questions, understand one another, and know that resources exist.
Fundraising & Research
Our rides, media projects, campaigns, partnerships, and charitable fundraising turn attention into tangible support. Funds help sustain Ride to Remember’s educational and creative work while allowing us to support caregiver resources and well-founded research into dementia treatment and care.
The Demented is Ride to Remember’s original comic series, created around a simple idea: most people first encounter dementia as a story of loss. What happens if we give them another way into that story?
Members of “The Demented” belong to a hidden league of time adjusters. What the outside world might see as confusion, silence, repetition, or an outburst becomes, within their imagined world, something with purpose — a micro-correction to a life already lived so that the present still holds.
The stories do not attempt to romanticize dementia or explain away its realities. They challenge something different: our tendency to write off the person experiencing them.
The choice of comics is deeply connected to our origins. Murphy C. Anderson Jr., whose childhood bicycle journey inspired Ride to Remember, spent his career drawing heroes for the comics page. The Demented returns that language to a cause his later life made deeply personal — creating stories a young reader can enter and an adult caregiver can recognize.
In the late 1930s, a boy from Asheville, North Carolina, made a bicycle journey of more than 200 miles across the state. Decades later, after a career drawing heroes for the comics page, that childhood adventure remained among the memories Murphy C. Anderson Jr. retained through dementia.
Ride to Remember recreates that journey: approximately 214 miles over two days, climbing more than 13,000 feet, aboard a restored pre-war Elgin like the bicycles Sears sold around the time of the original ride.
But The Ride is more than a recreation, a physical challenge, or a memorial.
It is the connective thread running through our work — a vehicle for gathering stories, meeting communities, exploring cycling and healthy aging, raising funds, and filming our signature documentary. Along the route, we document not only a remembered journey but the experiences of people living with dementia, caregivers, families, researchers, practitioners, and others whose lives intersect with the disease.
The roads have changed. The purpose has grown.
Contributions to Ride to Remember support work that people can encounter, share, and use:
Producing our documentary and short films, from filming through editing and distribution.
Creating and publishing new installments of The Demented and developing material suitable for families, schools, and community organizations.
Recording the experiences of people living with dementia, caregivers, families, professionals, and researchers.
Developing thoughtful essays, educational material, caregiver information, and accessible resources.
Bringing films, comics, rides, and educational programming into communities.
Supporting dementia caregiver initiatives and well-founded research.
As our work grows, so can its reach: a ride may engage one community for a day, while a film, comic, story, or educational resource can continue traveling long afterward.
Greater Public Understanding
Reduce stigma and encourage a more informed and compassionate understanding of dementia across generations.
Stories That Travel
Create films, comics, essays, and educational material capable of reaching people who may never attend one of our events but can still come away seeing dementia — and the person experiencing it — differently.
Stronger Support for Caregivers
Help caregivers feel seen, connect families with useful resources, and bring greater public attention to the realities of providing care.
Health, Activity & Connection
Use cycling and our own experiences to explore the relationships among physical activity, healthy aging, independence, community, and quality of life without overstating what exercise can promise.
Informed Engagement
Help people move from awareness toward learning, participation, charitable support, advocacy, and meaningful assistance within their own communities.
Advancement of Research
Support and amplify credible work aimed at improving dementia detection, treatment, care, and ultimately prevention.
Ride to Remember began with one family story: a comics artist, a childhood bicycle journey that remained vivid late in life, and a family’s experience with dementia.
That story remains at the heart of the organization, but it is no longer the whole story.
Ride to Remember now exists for every individual and family traveling a similar road — for the caregivers walking beside them, for those working to understand and treat dementia, and for the stories that can help the rest of us respond with greater knowledge, patience, and dignity.
Join us as we ride, film, write, draw, listen, and learn from people living with dementia, caregivers, families, professionals, practitioners, researchers, and communities.
Your story isn’t measured in miles. It’s written in memories.
Ride to Remember Inc. is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Gifts are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Federal Tax Identification Number: 39-4468072.
Supporting dementia understanding, caregiver resources, and research through cycling, comics, film, education, and story.
Riding For Memory. Sharing Stories. Supporting Understanding. Ride to Remember uses cycling, film, comics and personal stories to help people better understand dementia, support caregivers
Pedalling toward dignity for every life touched by dementia. Ride to Remember Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that uses cycling and comics to raise awareness