Meet the Beat Childhood
Cancer Team

The faces behind the fight

Meet the Beat Childhood
Cancer Team

The faces behind the fight

Who We Are

We’re a passionate group of people working vigilantly to create a better reality for kids fighting cancer.

The Beat Childhood Cancer Foundation allegiance was originally spearheaded by parents from across the country with their own nonprofit organizations who united in a shared mission to defeat childhood cancer — not only for their own kids, but for every child and family fighting.

Now led by Patrick (Will’s Dad) and Sarah (Jack’s Mom), more than $15M in collective research support has been invested and is driving change to the childhood cancer story with novel treatments and innovative options. The Foundation works closely with doctors, researchers, families, and advocates across the world to Beat Childhood Cancer for every child, everywhere.

Our Story

BEAT CHILDHOOD CANCER WAS FOUNDED BY AN ALLEGIANCE OF PARENTS; WE WERE A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO KNEW HOW DIRE THIS FIGHT IS BECAUSE WE HAVE FACED IT OURSELVES.
 
We came together because we didn't want to wait for a broken healthcare system to fix itself and don't want another family to face this fight alone. Six parent-founded non-profits joined forces to become what is now the Beat Childhood Cancer Foundation.
 
Along the way, our team found allies, beacons of hope and support who saw the struggles of childhood cancer and believed as strongly as we did in the power of research, progress, determination, and hope. Ever-evolving to meet the greatest needs of children battling cancer, we welcome every person, everywhere to be part of our allegiance so that we may help every child, everywhere survive and thrive. Our shared vision and friendships form a united, powerful, and indomitable force: Beat Childhood Cancer.
 
Patrick Lacey bio photo

Patrick Lacey

Founder

Patrick never set out to build a childhood cancer organization. He was a father trying to find another option for his son.

After 18 months of unimaginably toxic treatment, Patrick's son, Will, was deemed incurable. His family was confronted with a reality no parent should have to face: there simply weren't enough treatment options left.

Patrick decided that wasn't good enough.

In 2010, driven by the belief that children with cancer deserved more options and more reasons to hope, he founded Friends of Will. What began with one father searching for a better way grew into a network of more than 50 children's hospitals working together to make advanced treatment options available to as many children as possible.

In 2020, Friends of Will officially became Beat Childhood Cancer.

Today, Patrick works alongside an expanding community of parents, doctors, researchers, foundations, sponsors and industry leaders to challenge the limitations of the existing system and create new solutions for children with cancer. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the Beat Childhood Cancer Research Consortium, helping strengthen the collaboration that makes this work possible.

The goal is both urgent and deeply personal: make sure the child sitting in the clinic today has options—and a real reason to hold onto hope.

That work has helped lead to more than 25 clinical trials. In 2023, those efforts contributed to the FDA approval of a new drug, only the seventh drug ever approved by the FDA specifically for pediatric cancer.

But for Patrick, progress has never been about numbers alone. Behind every trial, every partnership and every new treatment option is a child and a family searching for one more possibility.

The same question that started this work continues to drive it today: What else can we do for this child?

Sarah Bartosz bio photo

Sarah Bartosz

Executive Director

Sarah's career in cancer philanthropy began in 1996 with the American Cancer Society, driven by a belief in the importance of research and clinical trials. At the time, cancer was deeply important work. She couldn't yet know how personal it would become.
 
In 2005, Sarah was a young mother raising 3-year-old twins, Jack and Annie. Through her work, she had met parents who had lost children to cancer and couldn't imagine the devastation they felt in the wake of losing a child to cancer.

Then, in an instant, she no longer had to imagine.
 
Sarah found herself standing in an emergency room being told that her beautiful 3-year-old son, Jack, had Stage IV neuroblastoma.
 
Throughout Jack’s fight with cancer, her professional experience in the nonprofit world led Sarah and her family to create both the I Back Jack and Gold In September (G9) Foundations, raising awareness and funding research to give children with cancer better options.
Jack endured seven years of harsh treatments before finding his ultimate cure in Heaven in 2012.
 
Cancer would leave another mark on their family four years later. Sarah's husband, John had survived cancer as a young adult after being diagnosed in his early 20s. In 2016, he died from the long-term effects of the toxic treatments that had once helped save his life.
 
Those losses made the need for better treatments impossible to ignore: curing cancer isn't enough if surviving treatment comes at such a high cost.

In 2020, Sarah merged I Back Jack and Gold In September with the families of Beat Nb to become the Beat Childhood Cancer Foundation, carrying forward a mission shaped by both professional experience and profound personal loss.
 
Today, she remains committed to defending hope through advocacy, awareness and research until safer treatments become available to ensure children and young adults don't simply survive cancer, but have the opportunity to live long, healthy lives after it.
 
Through the hardest years, Sarah would ask John a question for which there seemed to be no good answer: "Why us? Why Jack?"

His response was always the same.
"If not us, then who?"

It's a question Sarah still carries with her. And when it comes to finding safer treatments and cures for children with cancer, she continues to ask it: If not us, then who?
Yvette bio headshot

Yvette Pullara

Operations Director

As a mother of two and someone who has cared for her own parents, Yvette knows what it means to love someone through illness: the questions you can't answer, the things you can't fix, and the fear of what comes next.
 
But it was meeting a group of parents whose children were facing cancer that changed the direction of her own work.
 
She saw parents who refused to give up. Parents willing to fight at all costs for their children. And she was deeply moved by their determination, because few people will run through fire quite like a parent fighting for their child's life.
 
Yvette joined Beat Childhood Cancer in 2017, inspired by the parents and families at the heart of the organization and determined to help them create a better future for kids with cancer.
 
Yvette brings more than 20 years of experience in IT, business management and accounting to BeatCC, along with a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems from the University of South Florida. Her expertise helps strengthen the work happening behind the mission so that the people fighting for better treatments and better outcomes for children have the support they need to keep moving forward.
 
She believes change happens when people choose to bring their gifts and add it to the good work already being done. It's the same spirit that first drew Yvette to the BeatCC community: parents, researchers, donors, advocates and families each doing their part to change what childhood cancer can look like for the children of today and tomorrow.
Laura Elder bio photo

Laura Elder

Director of Community and Partnerships

Some work is a job. And some work is rooted in something much deeper.

For Laura, this work has always been personal.
 
Her mother was a pediatric nurse—a woman who spent her life caring for children and families during some of their hardest days. She died of cancer at just 38 years old.
 
Her mother's life—and the way she cared for others—has shaped the work Laura has chosen to do ever since.
 
For more than 11 years, Laura has worked in the nonprofit cancer space, building relationships with families and donors, foundations and partners, people who have been changed by cancer and people determined to change what comes next.
 
As Beat Childhood Cancer's Director of Community and Partnerships, Laura brings that experience to grow and strengthen the community behind the mission. She connects childhood cancer families, donors, foundations, and corporate partners around a shared belief: kids deserve better treatments, better options and the chance to grow up.
 

Research doesn't move forward on its own. It moves forward because people choose to care—and then choose to do something with that care. They give. They tell their stories. They open doors, build relationships and bring the right people together. That's the work Laura believes in: creating connections that turn compassion into action and help move better treatment options closer to the children who need them.

She lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, with her husband, Jim, their two children and rescue dog, Daisy.

Kris Bachman bio photo

Kris Bachman 

26.2 Program Manager

There are people who see a hard thing and wonder if it can be done.
 
And then there are people who start running toward it.

Kris has spent much of her life doing just that.
 
She's a competitive runner, coach and 13-time Boston Marathon qualifier who knows a thing or two about what happens when you keep putting one foot in front of the other, even when the finish line feels impossibly far away.
 
For Kris, endurance has always been about more than crossing finish lines. She co-founded the One Mile Leadership Project, bringing together more than 900 professionals, athletes and leaders around a simple idea: that our miles, our influence and our willingness to show up can be used for something bigger than ourselves.
 
That belief eventually took Team One Mile across the country for Race Across America—a 3,000-mile cycling race that raised significant funds for organizations serving veterans.
 
Childhood cancer has been part of Kris's story, too. In 2019, she used her Boston Marathon training to fundraise for Gold in September's athlete program, turning mile after mile into support for kids facing cancer.
 
Before coaching, Kris was showing up for people in another way. She worked in healthcare, including the Neuro ICU and organ procurement, before earning her master's in nursing and becoming an Advanced Practice Nurse Prescriber.
 
Different chapters. But there's a thread running through all of them: Do the hard thing. Care deeply. Keep showing up. And use what you've been given to help someone else.
 
As Beat Childhood Cancer's 26.2 Program Manager, Kris brings that same spirit to a community of runners turning their miles into something more—raising awareness, funding research and helping create better options for kids with cancer.
 
For Kris, it's a natural extension of what she's believed for years: when people are willing to show up, push a little farther and use what they have for someone else, those efforts can add up to something powerful.
 
Outside of running and coaching, Kris shares her life with her three children and two Aussiedoodles.
 

Board of Directors

Our board is an incredible group of talented people with a passion for seeing all solid-mass childhood cancers cured.

Support the Beat Childhood Cancer Foundation

We know our allegiance will cure childhood cancers. We just don't know how quickly.
The most powerful thing we can do is make it possible for parents, researchers, and doctors to work together without the rigid and limiting structures of the healthcare system.

Your support gives our front line doctors, researchers, and pediatric care specialists the resources they need to give more children access to the right options, at the right time, in the right place - and as fast as humanly possible.