Every year, as the holidays pass and winter turns to spring, we look forward to the Ready by 21 National Meeting as our annual opportunity to be together with you. For the 9th annual convening, to be held April 15-17 in Louisville, Kentucky, we have been pulling together an agenda that is rich in content – with 45 workshops that many of you may be leading and 4 mainstage plenaries – and affords ample opportunities to connect, expand your professional networks, and get to enjoy some of the amazing sites in our incredible host community.

We have received a few queries asking about the global COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak’s impact on the conference. As of today (March 10), we are continuing our planning efforts in hope of making this the best Ready by 21 National Meeting ever.

But since your health and safety are of the utmost importance to us, we want to assure you that we are closely monitoring the rapidly evolving situation. We are keeping a close eye on guidelines and recommendations from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the Kentucky Governor’s and the Louisville Mayor’s offices, and other pertinent agencies and sources.  We are actively working with our convening sites to provide additional safety measures and precautions based on CDC and WHO recommendations so that we can have a safe and healthy environment at the convening.

We plan to provide regular updates on the convening, and will be providing additional information on our logistics page as we finalize precautionary measures with our host hotel and other conference venues.

We know there are many factors to consider when deciding to travel right now. If you’d otherwise be inclined to register for the Ready by 21 National Meeting during this time period and are standing by to see if we’re making adjustments in our plans, we invite you to go ahead and register so we have the most accurate data available to us as we decide how to proceed. We have extended the deadline for providing full refunds (minus EventBrite’s fees, which aren’t under our control) until Wednesday, March 18.

For now, please stay safe and healthy. Young people and their families need us now more than ever.