AFTD has been selected as one of three organizations to receive a gift from Mindex, a software-development company in Rochester, N.Y., in honor of the latter’s 30th anniversary charity initiative. The company raised more than $3,300 for AFTD.

Mindex employee Kelsey Kolar nominated AFTD in memory of her late cousin, Billy, who developed FTD in his twenties.

In a blog post published on the Mindex website, Ms. Kolar explained her appreciation for AFTD and talked about how FTD has affected her family.

“We experienced firsthand seeing the health of my 28-year-old cousin, Billy, decline,” she said. “Within two years, we saw a young, athletic, going-to-take-over-the-family-business individual decline to the point where he had no function.

“Billy had been misdiagnosed multiple times prior [to his FTD diagnosis],” she added. “Was he bi-polar? Was it CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy] from playing football? We were thinking of all kinds of things we had known of, but [FTD] was something we never knew existed. We didn’t know dementia could impact someone of such a young, healthy age.”

Ms. Kolar said that her family relied on AFTD for “information about the disease, timelines, symptoms, stories, outreach and more.”

Billy’s family, who own Abandon Brewing Company in New York’s Finger Lakes region, has participated in AFTD’s Food for Thought campaign to raise awareness and funds to support AFTD’s mission.

“It’s easy to think, ‘It’s rare, it probably isn’t that’, but it could be,” Ms. Kolar said. “It is a brutal thing to witness, and we need to help this become more of a common thing to consider and screen for,” she said. “I hope they find a cure, but for now we just need to keep talking about it.”

Mindex develops software for clients in the Rochester area and for New York State K-12 schools. Each year, Mindex employees nominate organizations they would like the company to support, and the company picks one that will receive a donation.

This year, however, in commemoration of its 30th anniversary, Mindex chose to support three nonprofit organizations, in a special initiative called #3for30.