For decades, parents have been stuck cobbling together after-school care with spreadsheets, sticky notes, and late-night Google searches. 

Sound familiar? Did you also feel that chill run up your spine?

The result of so much arduous, piecemeal efforts? It causes stress for families and missed opportunities for the local small businesses (camps, studios, coaches) that bring neighborhoods to life.

If recess was your favorite part of the day, wait until you learn about this version by the same name. 

Co-founded by Molly Morse and Amy Kiska, Recess doesn’t “just” help parents find and book after-school programs. 

Recess is designed to rebuild community connections — those between parents who need trusted options, between kids who thrive in safe and enriching spaces, and between local providers who want to serve more families. 

Recess isn’t just fixing logistics. It’s helping families feel anchored to their community again.

No parent wants to imagine their baby being born premature, needing lifelong medical support, or facing a disability that reshapes what you imagined your family to be. 

But for many families, that “what if” scenario becomes reality overnight. When it does, the emotional toll is only one part of the story. There’s also the financial end. 

That’s where Juno, founded by Dr. Snaebjörn (Snae) Gunnsteinsson and Jordan Epstein, comes in. 

Whenever we set out to write a profile like this, we have this next portion of the story that we might as well recycle with a fill-in-the-blanks. This is where we tell you how parents created a solution that (somehow, appallingly) hadn’t existed. Here it goes! 

Juno is the first company in the United States to offer child disability insurance, a protection that didn’t exist here until they built it. 

Their mission is simple but profound: to make sure parents have support when they need it most, and to help children with disabilities or chronic illnesses reach their full potential.

Dirk Doebler didn’t set out to become a parental leave pioneer. 

Like many entrepreneurs, his path to founding Parento began with firsthand experience of a broken system and a bold idea for how to fix it. Does this story sound familiar? Well, the origins are a little different. 

Dirk Doebler’s career began on Wall Street, where he worked at Barclays Capital as a Global Research Analyst focused on consumer and household goods.