Our Story
Memory Matters was built by a teenager who noticed that gap and refused to accept it. This is the story of what happens when young people stop waiting for someone else to act.
The Founder
Arya was 15 years old when they first started paying attention to dementia. Not because of a family tragedy. Not because of a school assignment. But because the more they looked, the more they couldn't look away.
55 million people in the world are living with dementia right now. It is the fastest-growing neurological disease on the planet. And yet, ask a room full of teenagers if they know what dementia actually is, what it does to a brain, what it does to a family, what it does to the person sitting alone in a care home who hasn't had a visitor in three weeks. Most of them will be silent.
Memory Matters launched out of that frustration. No personal loss to justify it. No funding to start it. No blueprint to follow. Just the conviction that the absence of young people from this conversation was itself a crisis, and that conviction was enough to begin.
What followed was something Arya didn't expect. People from Lagos, Singapore, Edinburgh, São Paulo, and 27 other countries showed up. Because it turns out the anger was everywhere. The silence had been mistaken for indifference. It wasn't indifference. It was the absence of a door to walk through. Memory Matters is that door.
“I kept looking for the organisation that was doing something about this. That was bringing young people into the conversation. That was building something real, not just another awareness ribbon. I couldn't find it. So I built it.”
55M
People living with dementia worldwide
More than the population of South Korea. Growing by one new diagnosis every three seconds. Almost none of the global conversation includes a voice under 25.
40%
Of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed
Lifestyle factors (sleep, social connection, physical activity, mental stimulation) directly affect lifetime risk. Young people aren't being told this. They should be.
57M
Unpaid carers globally, most of them invisible
Behind every person with dementia is a carer who is exhausted, isolated, and rarely asked how they're doing. We ask. We show up. We build community around both of them.
0
Major youth-led dementia nonprofits before Memory Matters
That was the number. Zero. A disease affecting tens of millions of families, and not a single global organisation run by young people. That is the gap we exist to fill.
This isn't a charity project. This is young people refusing to be absent from one of the defining health crises of our time.
What We Believe
Not just as volunteers. As founders, as researchers, as advocates, as the people who change what a conversation looks like. Memory Matters exists as proof of that.
Every school that doesn't teach about brain health. Every care home where no young person has ever walked through the door. Every carer who has never been asked if they're okay. We are choosing to notice those silences and do something about them.
Dementia doesn't begin at 70. The habits, the knowledge, the connections you build at 16 shape the brain you have at 76. Memory Matters is a neuroscience organisation as much as it is an advocacy organisation, because understanding your brain is the first act of protecting it.
You don't need a personal connection to dementia to belong here. You need to be the kind of person who, when they see a gap, feels the pull to fill it. If that's you, this is your organisation.