b'Welcome to an Event with Action in its NameJanuary 25, 2021Dear Colleagues,On behalf of all of us at Stewards of Change Institute and the Stanford University Center on Population Health Sciences, welcome to the National Action Agenda (NAA) Symposium!SOCI has been organizing thought-leadership events like this for over 15 years, and we have always worked hard to make each one as distinctive, challenging and genuinely useful as possible. We never expected to stage a symposium entirely online, so this one is a bit of an experiment, of course, but the last year has induced all of us to become more creative and flexible. What has not changed is our commitment to provide content thats as substantive, forward-looking and interactive as possible, with the most engaging and knowledgeable presenters we could muster. And what has not changed is our mission to promote fundamen-tal change to improve peoples lives, notably by continuing to grow SOCIs most-extensive initiative to date: our NationalInteroperability Collaborative (NIC), which has provided the organizational structure for carrying out the NAA.Those of you who have been with us since early 2020, when we kicked off the NAA, know we asserted from the start that everyone involved in this ambitious project would need to work in an agile way because the futureactually, even the presentwould beconstantly changing due to the ongoing impact of the pandemic, political volatility and economic devastation. The combination of those crises has had an enormous impact, particularly on the most-underserved and under-represented people in our nation, young and old. While there are now glimmers of hope, much work still lies ahead. We know it will take ingenuity and persistence to build back better, and we hope this symposiumand the continuing NAA initiativewill contribute in tangible ways. Were very glad to say, So far, so good. That is, we have achieved NAAs stated goals to date, thanks to the 100-plus experts from across sectors and across the country who have participated in this unique initiative. Youll learn more about our progress andchallenges, and will have the opportunity to discuss them, throughout the symposium.Most pointedly, we have developed six action recommendations to instigate and accomplish meaningful change at a systems level and, at the same time, have worked with our first implementation sitethe NJ Integrated Care for Kids (InCK)to ensure that all of this effort translates to real advances on the ground. And I have to point out that one truly significant contribution of the NAA is the development of Project Unify, a Proof of Concept technical solution weve devised to accelerate cross-sector interoperability at the InCK site and throughout the U.S.Over the next two days, well take stock of where we are, share what weve learned, and discuss what we could and should do next. The path forward is not entirely obvious, nor will it be easy, but our core belief is that connecting services and systems, through responsible data sharing and collaboration, is key to remediating socioeconomic disparities; advancing racial and health equity; and broadly improving the health and well-being of our nations most-vulnerable populations.We are very grateful to everyone who has helped us get to this point, notably including our partners at Stanford University and at the NJ InCK project,as well as the scores of subject matter experts, scholars, organizational leaders, technologists, developers and other collaborators who have contributed their time, knowledge and determination to make this effort successful. Or, to be precise, to make it successful so far, because the most important work still lies ahead. Daniel Stein2'