There are charities that begin with a business plan, and there are charities that begin because a family is suddenly confronted with a reality they never imagined. For Lisa Ward and her family, Tough2gether Foundation grew from the second kind of experience. What began with the devastating diagnosis of her son, Jace Ward, ultimately became a national mission focused on helping children and families confronting some of the most difficult forms of pediatric brain cancer. Today, Lisa serves as President and Co-Founder of Tough2gether, carrying forward a mission shaped by Jace’s determination, the Ward family’s experience and a belief that families facing childhood cancer deserve more than sympathy. They deserve information, collaboration, research, resources and a community prepared to stand beside them.
Lisa’s professional life hardly suggested that she would one day become a prominent advocate in the pediatric cancer community. Based in Wamego, Kansas, she built her career as a business, real estate and estate-planning attorney with decades of experience advising businesses, nonprofit organizations and families on complicated legal and financial matters. That background required organization, persistence and the ability to navigate complex systems, skills that would become unexpectedly valuable when cancer entered her family’s life.
Everything changed on May 17, 2019, when Lisa’s son Jace was diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, commonly known as DIPG. It is the kind of diagnosis that instantly divides a family’s life into two distinct periods: everything that happened before it, and everything that comes afterward. Suddenly, the questions were no longer theoretical. They involved treatments, research, clinical trials, doctors, travel, time and the desperate search for options.
Jace did not respond to that challenge by quietly accepting the limitations placed in front of him. Instead, he became an advocate himself, asking questions, connecting with people and pushing for greater cooperation within the pediatric brain cancer community. Tough2gether identifies Jace, who lived from 1999 to 2021, as the organization’s founder, while Lisa and Roger Ward serve as its co-founders. The organization that bears his influence continues to emphasize several ideas that mattered deeply to him: connecting people, questioning the status quo, encouraging collaboration and pursuing a cure.
A Mother’s Fight Becomes a Larger Mission
For any parent, caring for a child with cancer would be overwhelming enough. Lisa, however, increasingly found herself involved not only in her son’s fight but in the much larger community of families facing similar diagnoses. She began connecting with parents, researchers, advocates and organizations that understood the extraordinary challenges surrounding pediatric brain tumors.
That involvement did not end when Jace passed away in 2021. In many ways, it intensified.
Lisa continued the work that she and Jace had begun, focusing on improving the patient and family experience, strengthening the pediatric brain cancer network and encouraging the type of collaboration that Jace believed could accelerate progress. Tough2gether describes Lisa as someone who continues to remain closely connected to families throughout the childhood cancer community while simultaneously maintaining her professional responsibilities as an attorney.
That combination says a great deal about the philosophy behind Tough2gether. The organization is not simply interested in funding research somewhere in the distant future. Its work also recognizes the needs of families living through these diagnoses right now. Those families may be trying to understand clinical trials, determine whether they can afford travel, manage household expenses while caring for a sick child, find emotional support or simply locate another parent who understands what they are experiencing.
Tough2gether’s stated work encompasses four major areas: research, family support, advocacy and grief support. The organization describes its mission in especially human terms, emphasizing that it walks alongside families during their fight and afterward. That final phrase matters. Cancer’s impact on a family does not disappear when treatment ends, and grief does not follow a predictable timetable. Tough2gether has therefore developed a model that recognizes both the medical battle and the emotional reality surrounding it.
Fighting DIPG and Diffuse Midline Glioma
At the center of Tough2gether’s research mission are some of the most challenging pediatric brain cancers, including DIPG and diffuse midline glioma, or DMG. For families receiving these diagnoses, the need for better treatment options is urgent, and progress depends on scientists, clinicians, foundations, advocates and families sharing information and resources rather than operating in isolation.
Tough2gether participates in the DIPG/DMG Research Funding Alliance, or DDRFA, a collaborative group of foundations and funds that jointly supports research grants, trial access, data integration and other initiatives related to these cancers. According to Tough2gether, the alliance has collectively funded nearly $4 million in research grants since June 2022, supporting DIPG and DMG research, data initiatives, trials and the formation of a national tumor board.
The collaborative approach is particularly important because rare pediatric cancers present unique research challenges. Individual organizations may have limited resources, patient populations can be relatively small, and promising research may require cooperation across institutions. By combining funding, knowledge and networks, organizations can potentially accomplish more together than they could independently.
That philosophy can be summarized in four words prominently associated with Tough2gether: “Connect. Question. Collaborate. Cure.”
Those words also capture something important about Jace Ward’s legacy. Tough2gether is not built around passive hope. Its philosophy encourages families and advocates to ask difficult questions, challenge assumptions and connect people who might otherwise remain separated by institutional or geographic boundaries.
Supporting Families Beyond the Laboratory
Scientific breakthroughs are essential, but a family dealing with childhood cancer cannot put everyday life on hold while waiting for the next breakthrough. Treatments can require extensive travel, missed work and lengthy stays away from home. Bills continue to arrive. Parents still have other children and responsibilities. Even understanding which assistance programs are available can become another exhausting task.
Tough2gether addresses some of those problems through the LiveBrave2gether Network, which helps families battling pediatric brain tumors navigate financial support. Rather than requiring families to independently approach multiple organizations and repeatedly navigate separate processes, the network seeks to streamline access to assistance.
The concept is simple but meaningful: families already facing extraordinary circumstances should not have to spend precious time fighting unnecessary administrative battles as well.
Tough2gether has also created an online community platform for families, friends and supporters affected by pediatric brain cancer. The platform provides access to information about emerging clinical trials, research and community news while creating a place for families to share their own experiences. The organization reports that the community has grown to nearly 300 members.
That sense of connection is an important part of Lisa Ward’s work. A parent sitting in a hospital room in one part of the country may have questions that another parent hundreds of miles away has already confronted. Connecting those families can provide practical knowledge, but it can also provide something more difficult to measure: the reassurance of knowing that someone else genuinely understands.
Tough2gether’s support also extends into grief. Through initiatives such as Tough Mondays 2gether, the organization creates space for people struggling with loss to discuss the confusing and often isolating realities of grief. The message is straightforward but powerful: people experiencing that pain do not have to experience it alone.
Taking the Mission to East Hampton
In September 2026, the mission of Tough2gether reached a very different setting when the organization partnered with Music Beats Cancer for “Thumbs Up for a Cure” at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York. Held on September 5, the gathering brought together children and families affected by cancer with biotechnology innovators, clinicians, biopharmaceutical leaders, healthcare investors, philanthropists, artists, musicians and members of the community.
Founded by scientist and entrepreneur Dr. Mona Jhaveri, Music Beats Cancer approaches the fight against cancer from another critical angle. The nonprofit works to support promising cancer-fighting biotechnology that can become stranded in what the organization describes as the “Valley of Death,” the difficult funding gap between scientific discovery and the clinical development necessary to move an idea toward patients.
This is one of the great challenges in medical innovation. Discovering a promising scientific approach does not automatically mean that it will become an available treatment. Research must be developed, tested, financed and advanced through a complicated process before it can potentially reach patients. Innovative companies can therefore find themselves with promising technology but insufficient resources to reach the next critical milestone.
Music Beats Cancer attempts to help bridge that gap through a peer-to-peer philanthropic platform that allows supporters to direct funding toward cancer-fighting innovations.
The East Hampton event brought this concept to life in a setting that deliberately placed children at the center of the conversation.
When the Kids Ask the Questions
One of the most distinctive elements of Thumbs Up for a Cure was its Kids Q&A. Instead of placing children on the sidelines while scientists and investors discussed pediatric cancer, the event reversed the traditional format. Children with lived experience of cancer were invited to question biotechnology innovators directly about the technologies they were developing.
The concept intentionally stripped away some of the complicated language that often surrounds biotechnology. The children wanted answers to three basic questions: How does the innovation work? How could it help patients? What inspired its development?
They could then evaluate what they heard with a thumbs up or thumbs down.
There was something particularly appropriate about Tough2gether participating in an event built around that concept. Jace Ward’s own approach emphasized asking questions and improving communication between patients, families and the scientific community. Giving young people an active voice in conversations about treatments designed for children reflects many of the same values.
Featured companies at the event included OX2 Therapeutics, SonALAsense, Merlin Biotech and Targepeutics, each pursuing innovative approaches related to difficult-to-treat childhood cancers, including DIPG and other pediatric cancers.
The event therefore became more than a fundraiser. It created a meeting place between the people developing new technologies and the families who urgently need better options.
Music, Science and Community Come Together
The East Hampton setting also demonstrated the unusual model behind Music Beats Cancer. Scientific conferences traditionally happen in convention centers, laboratories and hotel ballrooms. Cancer fundraisers often take place in formal banquet halls. Thumbs Up for a Cure brought those worlds into the gardens of LongHouse Reserve and added music, art and culture to the conversation.
The afternoon featured a live performance from Grammy-nominated Afro-Cuban saxophonist and composer Yosvany Terry and his jazz ensemble. The performance reflected Music Beats Cancer’s broader philosophy that music and culture can be used to connect communities with scientific innovation.
The gathering also included a live auction featuring donated art, garden treasures and experiences from local artists and businesses. United Therapeutics supported the event, while Yachtsman Bourbon participated as the official beverage sponsor.
Against the backdrop of East Hampton, the combination of jazz, art, science, families and philanthropy might initially seem unconventional. Yet that was precisely the point. Solving enormously difficult problems such as childhood cancer requires participation beyond the laboratory. Researchers need resources. Biotechnology entrepreneurs need capital. Families need advocates. Foundations need donors. The public needs to understand why promising science can sometimes struggle to reach patients.
Bringing those groups together creates opportunities for conversations that might never occur otherwise.
The Power of Collaboration
The partnership between Tough2gether and Music Beats Cancer illustrates an increasingly important principle within cancer advocacy: no single organization is going to solve childhood cancer alone.
Tough2gether brings the perspective of families directly affected by pediatric brain cancer, along with its network of advocates and its focus on research, family assistance and collaboration. Music Beats Cancer brings a model designed to help promising biotechnology innovations overcome early-stage funding challenges. Researchers and biotechnology companies bring science. Investors and philanthropists bring capital. Artists and musicians can bring attention and audiences.
Most importantly, children and their families bring the perspective that gives all of that work its purpose.
The challenge is connecting those pieces.
Lisa Ward has spent years doing exactly that. Her role has evolved from mother and caregiver to advocate, nonprofit leader and connector within a national pediatric cancer community. Yet the origins of that work remain intensely personal.
There is a danger when writing about people such as Lisa of reducing their stories to inspirational clichés. Childhood cancer is not inspirational. Losing a child is not inspirational. Families should not have to demonstrate extraordinary strength simply because they have been handed extraordinary circumstances.
What is meaningful is what people choose to build in response.
Lisa and the people surrounding Tough2gether chose to build an organization that could make the road slightly less lonely for the next family. They chose to support research that might create options that were not available before. They chose to connect families with one another. They chose to challenge researchers and organizations to collaborate. They chose to continue asking questions.
And they chose to carry forward Jace’s voice.
Carrying Jace Ward’s Legacy Forward
Jace remains identified by Tough2gether as its founder, even though he passed away in 2021. That designation makes an important statement about the organization. Tough2gether is not simply a foundation created in Jace’s memory. Its philosophy was shaped by Jace while he was alive.
His ideas about improving the patient-family experience, strengthening the pediatric brain cancer network and increasing collaboration continue to influence the organization’s direction.
Lisa’s role has been to help ensure those ideas continue moving forward.
Today, Tough2gether’s work can be seen across research initiatives, family support programs, advocacy efforts, community events and collaborations with other organizations. Its calendar includes memorial tournaments, golf events, childhood cancer awareness initiatives, scientific conferences and gatherings such as the BrainStorm Summit. These activities may look very different from one another, but they share a common purpose: creating a stronger community around families affected by pediatric brain cancer.
The organization has grown into a team that includes parents, patients, friends and advocates, reflecting the collaborative structure that Jace envisioned.
For Lisa, that means balancing the strategic responsibilities of leading a nonprofit with something much more personal. Every newly diagnosed family represents people facing many of the same fears and questions her own family once faced.
That perspective cannot be manufactured in a boardroom.
It comes from experience.
More Than Hope
The word “hope” appears frequently in conversations about cancer, and understandably so. Families need hope. Researchers need hope. Anyone working for years on a scientific idea without knowing whether it will ultimately succeed needs hope.
But organizations such as Tough2gether and Music Beats Cancer demonstrate that hope is most powerful when it is paired with action.
Hope can mean funding another research project. It can mean connecting a family with a clinical trial. It can mean helping parents pay expenses while traveling for treatment. It can mean introducing a biotechnology entrepreneur to a donor willing to believe in an early-stage idea. It can mean bringing scientists and families together in a garden in East Hampton and allowing children to ask the questions adults sometimes make unnecessarily complicated.
Sometimes hope simply means answering the telephone when another parent needs someone who understands.
Lisa Ward has turned one family’s unimaginable experience into thousands of those actions.
She continues to practice law, serve her community and lead Tough2gether while remaining closely involved with families navigating childhood cancer. The organization she helped build now participates in research collaborations, family assistance programs and advocacy initiatives that extend far beyond Kansas.
The journey that began with Jace’s diagnosis on May 17, 2019, has become something neither Lisa nor her family could have anticipated.
It became a movement built around connection.
Tough2gether
The name itself may ultimately provide the clearest explanation of the organization.
No family should have to navigate childhood cancer alone. No researcher should have to work in isolation when collaboration could accelerate progress. No promising scientific idea should disappear simply because it encounters a funding gap. No parent should have to spend precious time searching endlessly for resources another family already knows how to find.
The answer is to become tougher together.
That philosophy traveled from Wamego, Kansas, to East Hampton when Tough2gether joined Music Beats Cancer and an eclectic community of children, scientists, biotechnology leaders, philanthropists, artists and musicians for Thumbs Up for a Cure. In the gardens of LongHouse Reserve, the conversation about childhood cancer was not limited to what medicine can do today. It focused on what could become possible tomorrow.
For Lisa Ward, however, the mission will always lead back to one person.
Jace.
His battle with DIPG changed his family’s life forever, but his determination to question, connect and collaborate created a blueprint that continues to influence families and advocates years after his death. Lisa Ward has made carrying that work forward part of her life’s mission.
Every family Tough2gether helps, every researcher it connects, every collaborative project it supports and every conversation it starts adds another chapter to that legacy.
The ultimate goal is much larger than remembering those who have been lost. It is creating a future in which fewer families experience those losses in the first place.
Until that future arrives, Lisa Ward and Tough2gether will continue doing exactly what their name promises.
They will keep fighting, questioning, connecting and searching for better answers.
And they will do it together.
