Every September, a stretch of Arthur Hills Drive in Gainesville fills with neighbors in matching shirts, some walking, some jogging, a handful on bikes, all headed toward the same clubhouse lawn. This Saturday, September 19, at 8 a.m., that stretch fills again for the 24th time. The event still carries its original, slightly clunky name: the Heritage Hunt 5K/2K Walk/Run/Bike to Fight Cancer. What most people watching from their driveways don't know is that the walk itself is almost beside the point.
In September 2023, the walk got rained out. No laps, no bikes, no finish line photos. And in June 2024, Heritage Hunt Charity Classic, Inc., the nonprofit that runs the event, still handed over a $20,000 check to the UVA Community Health Foundation to support UVA Health Cancer Care Gainesville. The money for that check didn't come from race-day entry fees. It came from something that had already been built over two decades and didn't need a dry Saturday to keep working.
The Year It Rained and the Money Still Came
That single fact reframes what this event actually is. A 5K that raises money only when the weather cooperates is a nice neighborhood tradition. A nonprofit that raises money whether or not the 5K happens is something closer to permanent local infrastructure, and Heritage Hunt has been quietly running one for over twenty years.
The organization behind the check, Heritage Hunt Charity Classic, Inc., is described in its own press materials as the philanthropic arm of the Heritage Hunt neighborhood. It has a board, a treasurer, standing relationships with UVA Health staff, and a fundraising calendar that doesn't collapse when a single event does. Al Stearns, who served as the group's president in 2024, presented that $20,000 check alongside treasurer Connie Young. The framing from UVA Health at the time was direct: the sum represented money raised in 2023 despite the walk being rained out.
Felicia Blow, executive director of the UVA Community Health Foundation, put it this way when the group delivered a larger check the following year:
"This donation is a powerful reflection of what community-driven philanthropy can achieve."
That's not a line about a road race. It's a line about an institution that happens to hold a road race once a year.
From a Prostate Walk to a Standing Institution
A 2024 news release pegged the event's start at 22 years earlier, putting its founding around 2002, as a 5K Prostate Cancer Walk. Run the clock forward to this year's 24th Annual race and the math lines up. Somewhere along the way it added a run, then a bike leg, then broadened its mission from one cancer to all of them. The name barely kept pace with what the event became.
The dollar figures track that growth in a way that's easy to miss if you only see one year at a time:
- Funds raised in 2023 (delivered June 2024): $20,000
- Funds raised in 2024 (delivered June 2025): $25,000, presented by Ross Kerr, who had become the board's president
- Total given to the Gainesville cancer clinic alone, as of the 2025 presentation: approximately $500,000 over roughly two decades
- Given before that clinic even existed: an additional $965,000 to the American Cancer Foundation and the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown University
Add the two eras together and Heritage Hunt's neighbors have moved more than $1.4 million toward cancer care and research since the early 2000s, almost entirely through one recurring Saturday morning event and the standing nonprofit built around it. Most of that giving happened before the current wave of residents ever toured a model home here.
What the Clinic Down the Road Is Doing With That Money
The 2025 check landed at a specific moment for UVA Health Cancer Care Gainesville, which happens to be mid-expansion. The clinic has taken over a vacated space at the Lake Manassas Professional Center in Gainesville and started a full renovation. The plan unfolds in two phases: new clinical exam rooms opened to patients in October 2025, with infusion services and lab work following in 2026.
When finished, the space is set to include 10 clinic exam rooms, updated lab capabilities, a larger infusion area with 18 infusion bays, an onsite compounding pharmacy, and specialized rooms for brachytherapy and radiopharmaceutical treatment. That's not an abstract cancer center somewhere in the region. It's radiation oncology, infusion care, and lab work expanding a few miles from the clubhouse where residents cross the finish line every September, at a facility that also serves UVA Health's patients in Manassas, Haymarket, Warrenton, and Culpeper.
Amanda Welch, chief operating officer of UVA Health Haymarket Medical Center, made the connection explicit in the 2025 announcement: many of the clinic's patients are also members of the community supporting it. That's the loop closing in real time. A neighborhood walk funds a clinic where some of the same neighbors, or their friends and parents, eventually get treated.
Who's Behind the Table on Race Morning
The names on the check-presentation photos read like a cross-section of the neighborhood and the health system it supports: Frank Maresca, Maurene Kerzner, Wil Washington, Kevin Kelley, Alec Winfrey, alongside UVA Health's Dr. Sanjeev Aggarwal and Erik Shannon. It's not a professional fundraising operation flown in from outside. It's residents who have been showing up at the same table for years, some of them long enough to have handed off the board presidency once already.
For anyone in Heritage Hunt who wants to register, sponsor, or just show up Saturday morning at Heritage Hunt Golf & Country Club, 6901 Arthur Hills Drive, the contacts for this year's run are Willard Scott and Ross Kerr, both longtime organizers of the event. It costs nothing to walk the route and watch what 24 years of the same Saturday has built.
Most neighborhoods have some version of a charity walk. Few of them have turned it into a standing nonprofit with a two-decade balance sheet, one that keeps writing checks even in the years the sky doesn't cooperate. That's worth knowing whether or not you ever lace up for the 2K.
If you're curious what else this neighborhood has quietly built over the years, or you're thinking about where you'd fit into a community with this kind of staying power, the team at Washington Street Realty has spent years working alongside Heritage Hunt residents and would be glad to talk it through.
