Community Spotlight: Riding for HOPE

George, Willy, and Rey at the HOPE Rally

Dave Tozer thought his PSA was being checked at every physical.

It wasn’t.

By the time he found out, he had prostate cancer. So did his friend Rey Sotelo. They were two riders who loved the open road, and suddenly they were facing the same diagnosis.

In 2017, Dave walked into Rey’s motorcycle dealership in Hollister, California, with a question: What if we turned our love of the ride into a rally for the cause?

Rey said yes. Together they started the HOPE Motorcycle Rally.

What began with two friends is now hundreds of riders. It runs all year, and every September it rolls into Lake Tahoe for a grand finale. This year that meant three days of engines and music, group rides through the mountains, and a bike competition judged by the crowd and by sponsor Indian Motorcycle.

The center of the weekend was the HOPE Charity Dinner. One by one, riders stood up and told their stories: the diagnosis, the fear, the people they lost, and the people who are still here. Raffles and a signed book auction built toward the biggest drawings of the night, two motorcycles and a two-year lease on a Toyota Tacoma.

Rey knows grief well. Decades ago, cancer took his mother. That’s why the rally supports both PCF and FORCE, which fights ovarian and hereditary cancers. The riders put their creed on everything they do:

Cancer does not care.

This year, those words broke their hearts. Cancer took Dave.

Dave helped build this community, and he wasn’t willing to let it stop with him. He left his own motorcycle in trust, to be raffled as a grand prize, so the ride would keep going after he was gone.

Rey has made sure it does. He talks about screening openly and often, to anyone who will listen, because he never wants another friend to find out too late. And it’s working. More than one rider has gone to the doctor because of a conversation at the rally. Some of those men may never know how close they came.

From 2017 through 2025, the HOPE Rally raised $238,500 for PCF’s mission to prevent, detect, and treat prostate cancer, and to find a cure. This year’s total is still being counted.

To Rey, and to every rider, organizer, sponsor, and volunteer, and everyone who bought a raffle ticket or a dinner seat: thank you for keeping HOPE on the road.

And Dave, we’ve got it from here. We’ll keep riding.

https://hopemotorcyclerally.org/

A Note from Lori

Dear Friend,

I keep thinking about Dave’s motorcycle.

Near the end of his life, he wasn’t thinking about himself. He was thinking about the men who would come after him, the ones who haven’t been diagnosed yet and the ones who don’t know their PSA was never checked. He made sure his bike would keep working for them.

That is what this community does. We refuse to let the story end with loss.

Your support is changing that story right now. This year, PCF-funded researchers showed that a PSMA PET scan may help spare some men an unnecessary biopsy while still catching the cancers that matter. That means fewer reasons to put screening off, for the men Rey is talking to at every rally, and for men like Dave, who deserved to know sooner.

There’s still so much to do, and you can help this week.

This Thursday, October 8, is DAF Day. If you give through a donor-advised fund, the dollars you’ve already set aside can go to work for men and families facing prostate cancer today. It takes just a few minutes.

Please include your name with your grant so I can thank you personally.

Give from a DAF, make a gift online, or gather your own community the way Dave and Rey did. However you give, you’re part of the reason more men will get the answers Dave didn’t get in time. If you’d like to talk about how to get involved, I would love to hear from you.

Cancer does not care. But you do, and that makes all the difference.

With gratitude,

Lori Tessel
Chief Philanthropy Officer