Eighteen dollars. That’s roughly what each participant’s registration contributes when you back-calculate the Katie Oppo Research Fund’s fundraising record against the years it’s operated. Over 15 years and one 5K at a time, the Fund has pulled in more than a million dollars for one of the rarest, most underfunded cancers in ovarian oncology research.
The Katie Oppo Memorial 5K Run/Walk takes place June 14, 2026, starting at 9 a.m. at Flower Hill Village Park in Manhasset, Nassau County. It’s not a corporate charity event with a branded tent and a hashtag. It’s a community race that Elizabeth Oppo has organized every year for more than 15 years, growing it from a tight circle of her daughter’s college friends into something that now pulls in competitive runners, stroller-pushing parents, leashed dogs, and a crowd that’s measurably getting younger each year.
The race runs in three waves. Timed runners go first. Walkers follow. Then come the families and the dogs. It’s deliberately built that way, inclusive by design rather than accident, and the format has held up across every edition of the event.
“We consider it a memorial run,” Oppo said. “It’s a legacy for our family to fight, to battle ovarian cancer.”
Katie Oppo was 18 and a pre-med student when she received her diagnosis: small cell carcinoma of the ovary, hypercalcemic type, known clinically as SCCOHT. The disease is rare and aggressive, and it carries a prognosis that leaves almost no margin for optimism. She didn’t stop. She sought out information, connected with other patients, and stayed focused on both surviving and helping whoever came after her. She didn’t survive. The fund her mother built in her name has, as Long Island Press reported, raised more than a million dollars over 15 years, money directed into clinical trials, research partnerships, and a global tumor registry targeted specifically at SCCOHT.
That matters in concrete budget terms. The Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance and the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition both track research funding gaps across ovarian cancer subtypes, and SCCOHT sits at the thin end of that funding distribution. Most SCCOHT research dollars come from individual competitive grants, not coordinated federal budget lines. A Long Island community 5K that clears seven figures over its lifetime isn’t a symbolic gesture. It’s an actual funding source for a disease that doesn’t have many.
Elizabeth Oppo has lived in Manhasset for nearly 30 years. She watched her daughter handle a catastrophic diagnosis with a discipline and composure that, by her own account, changed her.
“She was a very strong person and very courageous,” Oppo said. “She did not give up hope, not until the very last.”
That observation didn’t stay contained to private memory. It became the reason Elizabeth Oppo kept organizing, kept fundraising, kept building the infrastructure around the Katie Oppo Research Fund year after year.
“When I saw how she handled her disease, it made me a stronger, better person,” Oppo said. “I had to live up to the legacy of her strength and her courage.”
The early years of the run drew most of their crowd from Katie’s peer group. Those were the friends who came back from their respective colleges to support her and then stayed involved after she died. Those friends are now adults with children of their own, and some of those children are now showing up at Flower Hill Village Park each June, which is how a 5K acquires a multigenerational dimension.
“I love that the crowd is getting younger,” she said.
The 2026 edition on June 14 at 9 a.m. represents the 20th anniversary of Katie’s diagnosis year and continues work that hasn’t paused since the Fund’s founding. Entry information is available through the Fund’s website. For anyone doing the math on whether a 5K registration check matters to rare disease research, the Fund’s track record across 30 years of Elizabeth Oppo’s life in Manhasset, 15-plus years of organizing, and more than a million dollars raised offers a fairly clear answer.