Wendy Lazarus
Founder, Kids Impact Initiative
- Group:Kids Tech Summit Judges
Wendy Lazarus
Founder, Kids Impact Initiative
Founder, Kids Impact Initiative
Senior Fellow, UCLA Healthier Children Families & Communities
Founder & Senior Advisor, The Children’s Partnership
Ms. Lazarus is a leading advocate and policy expert on a wide range of children’s issues, having spent more than thirty-five years working on the front lines for children throughout the nation. She is the Founder of Kids Impact Initiative, a start-up venture to support and strengthen existing advocacy for children by increasing accountability on issues that affect children’s well-being and helping develop the next generation of advocates.
Her distinguished career includes founding and leading The Children’s Partnership for 22 years, serving as the Children’s Defense Fund’s first Director of Health in Washington DC, serving as founding Vice President for Policy for Children Now, and as a consultant to the Conrad Hilton and Piton Foundations. Throughout the years, she has helped secure improved health care, child support, access to information technologies, and other vital resources for hundreds of thousands of children and families.
Under her leadership at The Children’s Partnership, between 1993 and 2015 Ms. Lazarus helped define children’s interests in the burgeoning digital economy, creating and raising the profile of the first-ever children’s digital opportunity agenda in the United States. Ms. Lazarus helped secure first-in-the-nation technology policy gains in California and has directed the development of an online technology policy resource used across the country and internationally. She has accomplished pioneering work on the content dimension of the Digital Divide, having co-authored the first comprehensive report on internet content from the standpoint of the needs of underserved Americans and produced a widely used Parents’ Guide to the Internet.
Ms. Lazarus has authored more than 25 reports and articles on a wide range of topics affecting children and is frequently turned to as an expert and strategist by policymakers, advocates, grant-makers, and the media. She has been interviewed by dozens of media outlets including: ABC World News Tonight, Tavis Smiley Show, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle of Philanthropy, and CNET.
Ms. Lazarus serves as a board member or advisor to a number of national, state, and community-based organizations and companies. She served on California State Superintendent Delaine Eastin’s Educational Technology Task Force, Governor Schwarzenegger’s Broadband Task Force, and National Institute of Health’s Child Health & Human Development Council, among others. She also developed and taught a graduate-level course in child advocacy at UCLA.
Ms. Lazarus graduated from Yale University in Yale's first class of women graduates, and received her Master's degree in Science in Public Health from the University of North Carolina. She lives in California with her husband and has two adult children.