Sinsi Hernández-Cancio, JD, is a vice president at the National Partnership for Women & Families, where she leads the Health Justice team. She is a national health and health care equity policy and advocacy thought leader with 25 years of experience advancing equal opportunity for women and families of color, and almost 20 years advocating for increased health care access and improved quality of care for underserved communities. Sinsi is deeply committed to transforming our health care system to meet the needs of our rapidly evolving nation so we can all thrive together. She believes that our future prosperity depends on ensuring our health care system routinely provides excellent, comprehensive, culturally centered and affordable care for every single person, family and community, and that this requires the dismantling of structural inequities including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and religious bigotry.

Sinsi is a recognized leader in the national health equity movement, a sought-after strategic advisor and a dynamic, inspiring speaker. She has presented at national events across the country and served on numerous advisory committees for organizations including the National Academy of Medicine, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs and the American Association of Pediatrics. She has published extensively and has appeared in national and state level English and Spanish television, radio and print media.

Sinsi’s extensive experience in health and health equity policy and advocacy spans the state government, labor and non-profit arenas. Prior to joining the National Partnership’s staff, she was the founding director of Families USA’s Center on Health Equity Action for System Transformation, where she led efforts to advance health equity and reduce disparities in health outcomes and health care access and quality by leveraging health care and delivery system transformation to reduce persistent racial, ethnic and geographic health inequities with an intersectional lens. Prior to that, she advised and represented two governors of Puerto Rico on federal health and human services policies, and she worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) as a senior health policy analyst and national campaign coordinator for their Healthcare Equality Project campaign to enact the Affordable Care Act.

Carol Sakala leads maternal health and maternity care programming at the National Partnership for Women & Families. She is a long-time maternity care advocate, educator, researcher, author and policy analyst, with a continuous focus on meeting the needs and interests of childbearing women and their families. Sakala sits on advisory bodies and work groups focusing on payment reform, performance measurement and other ways to improve the quality of maternity care. She has been an investigator on all national Listening to Mothers surveys (2002-) and was principal investigator of the most recent Listening to Mothers in California survey. She helps create or commission foundational resources for the field on such topics as the cost of having a baby, maternity care and liability, evidence-based maternity care, effectiveness of labor support, hormonal physiology of childbearing and performance of the nation’s maternity care system. She led the National Partnership’s recent convening and collaboration of 17 national leaders resulting in the consensus report, Blueprint for Advancing High-Value Maternity Care Through Physiologic Childbearing. Through her guidance, the National Partnership maintains childbirthconnection.org, which features results of systematic reviews to support childbearing women in informed maternity care decision making and helps them navigate the maternity care system. She was a Pew Health Policy fellow at Boston University, where she received her doctorate in health policy through the University Professors Program, and has master’s degrees from the University of Utah and the University of Chicago.

Nan Strauss is the Senior Policy Analyst for Maternal Health at the National Partnership for Women & Families, where she advocates for policies that center the needs of women and families of color, with the aim of dismantling racism. She previously served as the Managing Director of Policy, Advocacy & Grantmaking for Every Mother Counts, where she led the organization’s efforts to improve access to quality, respectful, and equitable care, both globally and in the U.S. As the Director of Maternal Health Research and Policy at Amnesty International USA, she co-authored the groundbreaking report, Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA. Nan has led extensive federal and state policy work, including the development and implementation of legislation and policy strategies to advance maternal health, human rights, and birth justice. As a staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, Nan litigated cases in federal court, including a successful challenge to the U.S. FDA’s refusal to make emergency contraception available over-the-counter, as well as challenges to abortion bans.