The WAR against Cancer

April 18th, 2011 – Amongst the suburbs and pine barrens, a new wave of awareness comes to light with a new hope and a push forward to find a cure and end a war. Every year colleges and foundations around the United States get alumni and students to ban together to home charity events to help raise funds towards donations for ones given cause. The idea to break clear of the traditional local bake sale and coin drop at high trafficked intersections was the goal several years ago when searching for a new way to raise funds to help find a cure for breast cancer. The outcome came with the collaboration of Trista Henry (a former ZTA) and Ernie Manansala (entrepreneur/car enthusiast) who were the minds behind the first Street Wars event held in … The overview of the event when broken down looks pretty simple. A Car Show, with all funds raised, from gear to burgers, going towards the fight to find a cure, along with marginal donations from all those donating their services and time on the battlefield. The only event that takes car clubs, car builders, classic to import cars, joining them together as one and show their pride to help find a cure for breast cancer. After the success of the first year, raising an impressive $5,000 the team band together to bring back the event year after year, all together raising over 100,000 since its debut.

Now, celebrating its Seventh Annual Year Street Wars is still rooted with tradition, organized by head members of ZTA along with Tribe Agency, owned and operated by Ernie Manansala. The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey has housed the event every early spring and has built accustom to the traffic brought in from all around the tri-state every April. Videos surfacing of the journey to the war are becoming more popular as the event takes on new form online in a vast array of forums and lifestyle blogs year round. Raising awareness and keeping the troops informed of their missions and goals year round. This year brought on a new technological change with the launch of Street Wars On-Line Registration which easily registered over 300 cars prior to event day. Traditional registrations also came to over 200+ on event day, the 3-satellite registration locations setup within the township also made the process smoother, then previous years which unintentionally caused a bit of a jam in traffic.

First to arrive this year were our head lining sponsors, Cooper Tires followed by Sansone MVP (Asbury Park, NJ) displaying numerous high end cars fresh from their stock along with their Nissan GTR which may look familiar from its debut at SEMA 2010. Numerous other vendors and sponsors also joined in shortly after and brought fresh stock of Street Wars gear and other automotive products for purchase. By 10am Stockton College had two filled parking lots housing over 500 perfectly polished cars, other spectators soon followed reportedly reaching 5,000+ by late afternoon, all of which cruising the campus with the local DJ mixing in the background. A clean sweep of the battlefield leaves ever person with their favorite car in mind along with the lingering buzz on who is going to clean shop before the event comes to an end. Street Wars brings together all forms enthusiasts: families, Stockton and ZTA alumni, to car owners and of course car builders as well. The days activities are aimed for the kid at heart and built for all ages including RC car races, jousting competitions, bouncers, break dancing breakdowns. An enticing silent auction was housed inside Big Blue with prizes varying from spa days to a Synchronic Blow-Off Valve thanks to our friends at Vibrant Performance, and lets not forget the judging of the cars and award ceremony. This year we introduced the Street Wars shield medal in which can be hung proudly from any rear view mirror. This year head ZTA Katie Ann along with her fellow ZTA’s was proud to unveil at the close of the event that once again broke our previous years record and raising close to $60,000 to donate to the Susan G. Komen Foundation towards our fight to find a cure for Breast Cancer through research. Many thanks to Vibrant Performance for your amazing support. Ou that provide the support needed to make the event, without the support of our surrounding businesses Street Wars would never have been able to make such an impact as we have today. With the event continually growing, in terms of registration and the amounts raised; all just adds fuel to the flames of all those involved.