About Us

Our mission

Parents should not have to choose

We believe parents shouldn't have to choose between their children and their careers. Our mission is to create safe, inspiring spaces for kids to learn while enabling parents to connect, network, and thrive at the events that shape their futures.

Zero burden for organizers

We bring the staff, the materials, the equipment, the safety protocols, and the setup and teardown. Organizers approve a plan and then see a finished Kidz Zone. Nothing lands on your operations team.

Enrichment, not supervision

A room with a television in it is not childcare, it is storage. Our stations are built around the industry on the other side of the wall, so children leave having learned something specific about the work their parents do.

Supporting parents is strategy

Family-friendly infrastructure drives registration, retention, and who gets to be in the room. Organizations that build it see the return in attendance and in who stays in the industry. It is not charity and it is not a perk.

Governance

Board of directors

Our board provides governance, financial oversight, and strategic direction, and holds the organization accountable to the families and organizers we serve.

Chelsea Roberts

Board President

Chelsea Roberts founded Conference Kidz after finding no support for working parents at the professional events her own career depended on. She serves as Board President and leads the organization directly, from organizer and funding partnerships to the design of the Learning Lab model. Her conviction is that the gap at professional events is a structural failure of the events themselves, not a private problem for parents to solve quietly. She built Conference Kidz to fix it at the point of failure, giving children an event of their own rather than a room to wait in.

Lisa M. Sherwin Wulf

Director

Lisa is an award-winning marketer with more than 30 years of experience across small, midsize, and large technology companies, and she brings deep government events expertise to our board. She has served as a full-time event manager responsible for everything from intimate executive meetings to thousand-person global sales kickoffs, and has run trade show presences at the largest government technology conferences, negotiating with venues, coordinating speakers, and handling logistics end to end. She is founder and marketing consultant at LSW Marketing LLC, and previously served as Vice President of Americas Marketing at SolarWinds and Director of Marketing at Deltek. She holds a business degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an Executive MBA from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Kyle Roberts

Director

Kyle Roberts serves on the Board of Directors of Conference Kidz, a nonprofit founded by his wife to create supervised, educational children’s spaces inside professional conferences so working parents can fully participate in their careers. With a professional background in retail and logistics, Kyle brings operational and organizational expertise to the mission, one that became personal when his own child inspired the vision behind Conference Kidz.

Open seat

Accepting interest

We are actively building out the board. If your experience fits what we need next, we want to hear from you.

Express interest

Serve with us

Interested in joining our board?

Board service here is working service. Directors provide governance and financial oversight, open doors with event organizers and sponsors, and help us grow without loosening the standards that keep children safe. If you have sat in a room and noticed who was missing because of childcare, you already understand the problem we are solving.

We are building toward a board that can govern this work properly, which means recruiting for what the current board does not already have. We are prioritizing candidates who are independent of the founders and current directors, with experience in one or more of the following.

Nonprofit finance, audit, or treasury. We need a Treasurer and no current director carries this.
Legal, risk management, or insurance. We operate on-site with children across multiple states, which is where our exposure sits.
Early childhood education, child development, or childcare licensing and compliance. We publish supervision ratios for ages 0 to 18 and want a director who can hold us to them.
Corporate CSR, philanthropy, or sponsorship. Our entire funding model runs through corporate and philanthropic partners.
Lived experience as a working parent navigating professional events, which is the problem we exist to solve.

What board service involves

We ask three things of every director.

Attend four board meetings a year, having read the materials beforehand.
Open doors. Introduce us to prospective funders, sponsors, and partners, whether or not you make the ask yourself.
Contribute what you know. Give time and expertise to the organization's growth in the areas where you are strongest.

Beyond that, directors carry the legal duties that come with every nonprofit board seat: care, loyalty, and obedience. In practice that means arriving prepared, reviewing the organization's finances rather than accepting them, disclosing any conflict of interest, and keeping every decision in the organization's interest rather than your own. We would rather say that plainly up front than discover a mismatch later.

Board terms run two years.

Every director makes a personal annual gift at a level that is meaningful to them. There is no minimum and no dollar requirement. We ask for full participation because funders ask whether a board gives, not how much, and because we will not ask anyone else to fund this work before we have.

If a personal gift is not workable in a given year, tell the Board President and it is waived, confidentially and without discussion by the full board. We report participation as a percentage and never share individual amounts. Participation is an expectation of service, not a condition of it.

Express interest in the board

This opens an email to Info@conferencekidz.com with a short prompt already filled in. Nothing is submitted anywhere else.

Support the work

Fund a seat in the Kidz Zone

Every gift underwrites trained, background-checked staff, themed materials, and safe on-site space, so a parent who would otherwise stay home can attend the event that moves their career forward.

Conference Kidz is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Donations are processed securely through Givebutter.

It started with one conference and no options