At the 2025 Action Network Summit, The Force for Health Network set up "Out & About" — a roving, unscripted interview series capturing the people behind Arizona's workforce mission while the energy was still in the room. Each quote below is verbatim from the interviews.
A room that felt like family
Layla Bishop, Workforce Development Administrator at UnitedHealthcare Community Plan, has been part of the Action Network "since the beginning" and now sits on the Summit Planning Committee. She watched competing health plans and colleges come together "to have that one voice approach," and lit up over the career-pathway panel — a billing-and-coding student, a second-career nursing student, dental students — "and the invigoration that they have, 'cause that's how we all started out." Her point cut to what the Network's name promises: action, not just intention.
It's more than just saying you're gonna do something. We are an Action Network, and it's nice to see the action following the implementation.
This room is full of solution owners… people connected with one another as if they were family. It wasn't "you're a competitor" — we're all in this together.
A crisis — and an opportunity
Amber Smith, CEO of the nonprofit Pipeline Connects, brought the data and reframed it as opportunity. Her organization powers PipelineAZ.com, a statewide career hub with roughly 290,000 registered users in every county and 8,500+ employers hunting for talent. Healthcare sits in the top five favorited career areas for K–12 students — yet too few see where the in-demand jobs actually are. Her fix is the one the whole Summit kept naming: follow the data, and talk up the full diversity of healthcare careers, "especially in those rural communities."
Not only is it a crisis, it's actually an opportunity.
The key to solving our healthcare crisis is the same solution for all things: collaboration.
You just have to start somewhere
With over 13 years in healthcare, Qua Hopkins came to the Summit as a builder of front doors. She created a 10-week hybrid medical-billing training program — low-cost, with a $100 guarantee fee plus scholarships and grants — designed to get entry-level workers in, so they can move on to nursing, registration, or billing later. She named the barrier plainly: the field runs on who you know, and her whole model exists to hand that connection to people who don't have it.
If you don't know somebody, you're not getting into the medical field.
Once you get in healthcare, there's so many different ways you can go… you just have to start somewhere. And we're giving you the opportunity right here.
Rural Arizona is a different equation
For Ana Roscetti, Director of State Health Policy & Advocacy at Vitalyst Health Foundation, workforce isn't a portfolio line — it's a passion. Representing a nearly-30-year-old public foundation that supports Arizona communities through convenings, capacity building, and systems-level work, she came "to figure out how we can solve the workforce shortages in the state of Arizona." She zeroed in on rural Arizona — praising a rural hospital that pooled resources with partners to fund a specialist, and pressing on the real gap: internships and apprenticeships that let students train and gain the confidence to practice in the field.
Workforce has been my passion… I'm here to figure out how we can solve the workforce shortages in the state of Arizona.
Recruiting and retaining workforce talent in rural Arizona is so much different than in urban areas.
It'll take more than the healthcare folks
A first-time Summit attendee from the Youth Development Institute — a Phoenix residential treatment facility for youth ages 12–18 — Pat Lanin brought the outsider's clear eye. He found the day "enlightening," struck by how many people were genuinely working on Arizona's healthcare needs "from medical to behavioral, to emotional, to social." His takeaway was a call to widen the circle.
This is gonna take more than just the healthcare folks. It's gonna take all the business collaborating together.
All community leaders — regardless of what level they are or what corporation they're in — should get involved.
Radical collaboration
Tara Cosentino works with the Foundation for Community and Health Advancement at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, and her favorite part of the job — connecting with communities, "especially rural Arizona" — is exactly what the Summit is for. She gave the interviews their sharpest phrase: radical collaboration. Her charge: stop working in silos, learn what each other is already doing so no one recreates the wheel, and fill the gaps together.
Radical collaboration — really rethinking how we collaborate across sectors. The "we" is collective in this state, not just our siloed organizations.
We're not recreating the wheel — we're enhancing the work that's already being done, and filling gaps to take it to the next level.
Six voices, one through-line: Arizona gets healthier when its people build together. That's the Action Network in a sentence — and it's exactly what the next Summit is for.