Generous Virginians 2024: A heartfelt donation

In philanthropy as in business, Dwight Schar sees the wisdom in doubling down when the stakes — and the impact — of an investment are high.

In May 2023, three decades after their initial donation to the organization, Schar and his wife, Martha, made a $75 million matching gift to Falls Church-based Inova Health System. It was the largest donation the 68-year-old nonprofit health system had ever received, and the largest donation the Schars had ever made. The Schars have donated more than $126 million to Inova since 1993, including $50 million in 2015 to establish the Inova Schar Cancer Institute, the hospital system’s Fairfax County hub for cancer treatment and clinical trials, which opened in 2019.

“Health care is No. 1 in my books; there’s nothing more important you can offer the community,” Schar says. “The metropolitan Washington area has been very good to me and my business, so this is where I feel I can do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”

The Northern Virginia philanthropist founded Reston-based Fortune 500 company NVR, one of the nation’s largest mortgage bankers and homebuilders, which operates under the Ryan Homes, NVHomes and Heartland Homes brands.

Schar, 82, retired as NVR’s chair in 2022, after having previously served also as CEO. Since its founding in 1980, NVR has grown to employ more than 6,000 people, and for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2023, it reported $9.79 billion in revenue. As of 2024, it has built homes in 36 metropolitan areas across 16 states, mainly on the East Coast.   

“There are two issues in health care that affect every family: cancer, and heart and vascular health,” says Schar, whose mother died of cancer at age 58. “My mother raised six children by herself, and health care was not very accessible to us at that point in time.” Martha Schar herself recently had a heart valve replacement surgery, but for her husband, it’s just coincidence and not a surprising one, given that heart disease affects more Americans than any other condition.

“Despite enormous progress in diagnostic techniques and innovative drug, device and procedure treatment options, heart disease remains the No. 1 cause of death in the U.S.,” says Dr. Christopher O’Connor, president of Inova Schar Heart and Vascular. “Because of disparities in care related to the disparities in income and other social drivers of health in Northern Virginia, there is a significant variation in cardiovascular mortality rates that we hope to address with this gift.”

He adds, “It is critical that we transform cardiovascular care to address disparities and strengthen our ability to prevent and combat this deadly disease.”

‘Anywhere your heart beats’

The Schars’ record 2023 donation helps check a lot of boxes on Inova’s long wish list, including financial support for research, outreach, prevention and early diagnosis of cardiovascular ailments, hiring more health care professionals, and expanding specialty services.

“This gift is not about doing big shiny things, but to help us focus on providing the very best patient-centered care and attracting the very best talent to provide that care,” says Sage Bolte, chief philanthropy officer and president of the Inova Health Foundation, the organization’s fundraising arm.

Initially called the Fairfax Hospital Association, Inova was founded in the 1950s to meet a pressing need for local hospital services for Fairfax County residents. Today, it provides more than 4 million patient visits a year and employs more than 24,000 people across five hospitals and dozens of other facilities, including 37 primary care clinics and Northern Virginia’s only state-designated and nationally verified Level 1 trauma center.

“Dwight and Martha’s commitment to ensuring that all individuals in the Northern Virginia region have access to world-class health care shows up in everything they do, even in their partnerships with some of the other organizations around. Their generosity is accelerating our ability to attract world-class physicians, nurses and researchers,” Bolte says.

The Schars’ latest donation will deepen resources for women’s cardiovascular health, Bolte adds. “Women have different symptoms. They show up differently with heart disease or heart failure, and we’ve now hired some experts to create a comprehensive women’s cardiac program that is going to be transformational for the way in which we’re able to care for women, especially premenopausal, menopausal and pregnant women.” Early detection and prevention of heart and vascular disease will also be a top priority, as well as reaching higher-risk communities lacking access to health care, according to Bolte.

Programmatic priorities, O’Connor says, also include advanced heart failure and lung disease care, minimally invasive cardiac surgery and interventions to reduce recovery time and improve quality of life, as well as development of vascular medicine and surgery innovations to reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke, critical blockages of arteries in the lower limbs, and limb amputations. “These novel diagnostic and treatment techniques are having an immediate impact and will continue to be built out in the coming years,” says the physician.

The gift from the Schars has also enabled O’Connor’s team to pursue innovative platforms to predict and prevent disease progression through artificial intelligence and data analytics. “We are continuing to grow our use and understanding of telemedicine, remote monitoring, wearables and other technologies as they continue to evolve. These platforms are improving patient outcomes and resulting in better quality of life,” O’Connor says.

Finally, the donation will help Inova to make important capital investments in new labs, patient rooms and equipment, as the health system’s heart and vascular group expands its footprint at multiple locations, including Inova Alexandria Hospital’s new Landmark Mall location, Inova Fairfax Hospital and ambulatory care locations. “More surgical suites and rooms mean that more patients can be seen in a timely manner,” Bolte says.

The Schars’ May 2023 donation had another important effect for Inova — a seismic increase in gifts large and small. “The Schars’ pledge came with a community challenge to match their gift to ‘anywhere your heart beats,’” explains Bolte. “The Schars said, ‘Our heart has beaten for cancer and for heart and vascular. Your heart might beat for behavioral health. Give where your heart beats and meet that $75 million challenge by next May.’ As of the end of April [2024], we are just $7 million away, nearly double what we would normally raise in a year.”

Inspired giving

As with many business relationships, the Schars’ connection to Inova began with a personal one. Dwight Schar admired the community engagement of J. Knox Singleton, who was then president and CEO of Inova Health System and also was involved in organizations like United Way.

“At that point in my career, I was really broke, but I was drawn to help Inova,” says Schar. In 1990, NVR lost $261 million after interest rates skyrocketed and home sales dropped, and in 1992, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which it emerged from in 1993, the year the Schars made their first major donation to Inova.

In 2015, Schar was there to back Singleton — and Inova — at a critical moment. When rumors began to circulate that oil giant ExxonMobil was contemplating a move from its 117-acre Merrifield campus, Singleton took the opportunity to shop around the concept for a new multidisciplinary cancer and research center, reaching out to Schar and his friend and fellow real estate mogul Milt Peterson for help. 

Schar and Peterson’s combined real estate acumen, political connections and financial backing proved critical in Inova’s $182.5 million purchase of the land from ExxonMobil in 2020, after leasing it in 2015.

Sage Bolte was executive director of Inova’s Life with Cancer and Patient Experience when the Schars made their $50 million gift in 2015. “It was exhilarating that someone saw the value in what we were doing and helped us make it that much better. It really energized staff and put a spotlight on how Inova was doing something different related to cancer care,” says Bolte.

That gift to Inova’s cancer program has paid substantial dividends, she adds. “It helped us build a comprehensive cancer program, where patients are seen by an entire multidisciplinary team, including psychosocial care, and get all their treatment in the same building. That is a very rare experience in community-based cancer care, which is usually very fragmented.”

The endowment also enabled Inova to create a fellowship program, grow its rosters of residents and oncology-certified nurses, and create an arts and healing program within the cancer program, among other outcomes. Another initiative supported by the Schars’ 2015 gift was standing up a molecular tumor board, a team of multi-disciplinary experts who make individualized cancer treatment recommendations for patients not responding to typical treatment regimens.

The eight-figure donation also ushered in an era of larger-than-ever individual donations to Inova’s cancer program, including a $20 million donation in 2019 from Virginia philanthropists Tina and Gary Mather; a $20 million donation in 2022 from Paul and Linda Saville; and, this April, a $20 million donation from the Peterson family.

Though patriarch Milt Peterson passed away in 2021, the Peterson family continues with its legacy of giving to Inova, which has totaled $50 million. Jon Peterson is now CEO and chairman of Peterson Cos., the company founded by his father, Milt, in 1965. Peterson Cos. is responsible for notable developments such as Fairfax Corner, Fair Lakes, National Harbor, Burke Centre and Tysons McLean Office Park, in addition to other major projects in Northern Virginia and Maryland. 

The Petersons’ 2024 donation earmarked $15 million to the Inova Life with Cancer program, which provides support for people with cancer and their families, and $5 million to support the $161 million expansion of Inova Fairfax Hospital’s emergency room to include more beds and a unit for acute behavioral health care, as well as a dedicated entrance for pediatric emergencies.

While the Petersons say the Schars’ landmark $75 million donation and challenge to match it inspired their recent gift, Dwight Schar says that it was Milt Peterson’s own early philanthropy that led him down the path of giving.

“The Petersons are really my idols in philanthropy. Milt was a very good friend and a real leader in the D.C. metropolitan area, and his children are carrying on with the same kind of leadership,” Schar says.

While Schar doesn’t micromanage his donations, he does pay attention to the finer details of the care Inova provides through his funding.

“One thing near and dear to my heart is that when you pull up to the cancer center and to the heart and vascular center, there’s free valet parking for everybody, so no one has to walk three or four blocks or hunt for a parking spot,” Schar says.

“The treatment is obviously the most important thing — you wouldn’t survive without it — but all these other little things make the experience that much more positive for patients. Being delivered to the front door, having ambassadors greet them with smiling faces and direct them where they need to go, it gives them a positive view of treatment.”

Philanthropic highlights

If health care is Schar’s top philanthropic priority, education runs a close second. Schar majored in education at Ashland University in Ohio, and started out as a junior high school teacher, stumbling into his real estate career via a side job selling homes in the mid-1960s, and then joined Ryan Homes to become a homebuilder. In 1980, he started NVR.

In 2006, the Schars donated $5 million to his home-state alma mater to help fund the construction of a new education building. In 2014, the couple went on to make the largest single gift in Elon University history, pledging $12 million to the private North Carolina university attended by their sons, Spencer and Stuart. Two years later, the Schars donated $10 million to what is now George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

“The cost of higher education is ridiculous now; only the affluent can afford to make that kind of an investment,” Schar says. “We have to figure out alternative ways to provide quality, affordable education.”

That also was a motivating force for other philanthropists who made significant donations to higher education institutions across the state over the past year. The University of Virginia, George Mason University and William & Mary all received significant gifts to boost the state institutions’ offerings and fund expansions and scholarships.

In September 2023, The Breeden Co.’s founder and chairman, Ramon W. Breeden Jr., gave U.Va. $50 million to be split between the university’s renovation and expansion of its McIntire School of Commerce and construction of a new athletics complex.

A 1956 McIntire graduate, Breeden almost had to drop out of U.Va. due to family financial hardships. The future Virginia Beach real estate magnate took on three part-time jobs to get through, though it meant the student-athlete had to leave the baseball team.

“The McIntire School broadened my education and gave me confidence in myself. I have many friends who attended Ivy League schools, and I can stand toe to toe with them in business, as I got just as good an education and, in some cases, better,” says Breeden, whose father worked his way up from sweeping floors to operating machines in an envelope factory. “McIntire taught me not to give up and to keep pushing on in life.”

Meanwhile, married U.Va. alums Kathleen and David LaCross added $50 million to their earlier gift of $44 million to the Darden School of Business in October 2023. With matching funds from the university, the total donation is more than $107 million, which will be used to pay for AI tech programming and a residential college at Darden. David LaCross, who founded a small California tech company that he sold in 1997, earned an MBA from Darden in 1978, and Kathleen LaCross graduated in 1976 from U.Va.’s College of Arts and Sciences.

In May 2023, the late Loudoun County businessman Donald G. Costello left George Mason $50 million, its largest individual gift. The donation established the Costello School of Business and created an endowment for undergraduate and graduate scholarships for business students.

In March, an anonymous William & Mary alumna donated $30 million to renovate and rename an out-of-use campus building in honor of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, the university’s chancellor. Gates Hall will house the Global Research Institute, the Institute for Integrative Conservation and the Whole of Government Center of Excellence.

Also, Inova wasn’t the only health care organization to receive a windfall in the past year. In September 2023, the Red Gates Foundation committed $50 million, to be disbursed over five years, to the Roanoke-based Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC in support of cancer and neuroscience research.

The Red Gates Foundation was established by the estate of Richmond philanthropist Bill Goodwin’s late son, Hunter, who died of cancer in 2020 at age 51. Hunter Goodwin’s parents and estate made a $250 million endowment in 2021 to kickstart a national cancer research foundation bringing together five leading cancer research institutes. 

GENEROUS VIRGINIANS 2024

• A heartfelt donation: Schars have donated more than $126 million to Inova since 1993
• The 50 largest Virginia charities
• Total corporate donations
• Donations by companies and corporate foundations
• Donations by independent foundations and groups
• Donations by individuals and family foundations