More than 2,000 people filled Bayfront Park in Mission Bay on Saturday for the annual San Francisco Walk to End Alzheimer's, an event that pulled in more than $1.2 million for research, support and care programs aimed at a disease that touches tens of thousands of Bay Area families.
The crowd size and fundraising total were reported by ABC7 Eyewitness News, which served as a media sponsor of the walk and fielded its own team of participants, the ABC7 Memory Makers. The station's meteorologist Zach Fuentes emceed the event for the second year in a row, continuing a role he first took on the previous year.
Organizers with the Alzheimer's Association say more than 140,000 people across the Bay Area are living with Alzheimer's or another form of dementia, a figure that underscores why the walk draws such a large turnout every fall. That number represents the scale of a disease that often reshapes entire families, not just the people diagnosed.
A Grandmother's Diagnosis Led Her to a Career in Care
For Nannette Wilkinson, the walk was personal before it was professional. She told ABC7 Eyewitness News that her connection to the disease began with her own family. “Well, my grandma had dementia. And that's the first kind of time when I was introduced to this kind of disease,” she said.
Wilkinson now works in care management, and she said the experience shaped her career path in a direct way. According to the same report, many of her clients today live with dementia or Alzheimer's, and she came out to Bayfront Park on Saturday to walk on behalf of her team.
Fundraising Teams Topped Tens of Thousands of Dollars
Official fundraising pages maintained by the Alzheimer's Association show just how competitive the team-based giving became this year. The Alzheimer's/Dementia Rotary Action Group, a chapter of Rotary International, led all teams with $31,987.23 raised, according to act.alz.org. Salesforce followed in second place with $18,217.
Disney ABC7 KGO-TV, the parent company behind ABC7 Eyewitness News, landed in third place among listed teams with $16,955 raised, per the same fundraising page. The station's on-air presence and team participation reflect a sponsorship role that has become a fixture of the annual event.
How This Year's Total Compares to Past Walks
This year's $1.2 million haul marks a jump from the 2024 San Francisco walk, which had raised more than $784,000 as of the Sunday afternoon following that event, and a separate Silicon Valley walk in the Bay Area that raised nearly $2 million to fight Alzheimer's, according to ABC7 San Francisco.
The 2024 Silicon Valley walk took place on September 28 of that year, with more than 2,000 participants choosing between a one-mile and three-mile route around Lake Cunningham Park, the station reported at the time. Saturday's San Francisco event drew a comparable crowd to Bayfront Park in Mission Bay, continuing a pattern of strong turnout across the region's walks.
The scale of participation reflects a disease whose reach in California has drawn ongoing attention from public health researchers, though full state-level prevalence data requires further review beyond what organizers cited at Saturday's event. For now, the Bayfront Park crowd and its $1.2 million total stand as the latest marker of how deeply the disease has touched Bay Area communities.
