2026 Conference Hotel Information

Conference Dates: October 13 & 14, 2026
Location: IHotel and Conference Center, Champaign, IL

Due to other events being held at the Illinois Conference Center at the same time as the CQI Conference, IHOTEL is fully booked. Please see the information below for other hotels in the Champaign-Urbana area. Parking at the Illinois Conference Center is free.

Holiday Inn Champaign (0.8 mile; map)
Rate: $119.00/night
101 Trade Center Drive, Champaign
Front Desk: 217-850-0578
Reservations Here

Homewood Suites Champaign (0.9 mile; map)
Rate: $175/night Standard King
1417 South Neil Street, Champaign
Front Desk: 217-352-9960
Hilton Reservations: 1-800-446-6677
Reservations Here

Home2 Suites Champaign (0.7 mile; map)
2013 South Neil Street, Champaign
Rate: $175/night Standard King or Standard Two Queens
Front Desk: 217-355-6468
Hilton Reservations: 1-800-446-6677
Reservations Here

Hotel Royer (2.8 miles; map)
210 South Race Street, Urbana
Rate: $119.00/night Standard King or $129.00/night Standard Two Queens
Front Desk: 217-600-5129
Group Code (if calling in for reservation): 91O ("nine-one-Oscar")
Hilton Reservations: 1-800-446-6677
Reservations Here

2026 Conference Information

Conference Dates: October 13 & 14, 2026
Location: IHotel and Conference Center, Champaign, IL

ABOUT THE 2026 CQI CONFERENCE: "From Surviving to Thriving: The Next Chapter of CQI."
The 2026 Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Conference represents a pivotal moment for our field. As organizations navigate growing complexity, workforce pressures, and evolving community needs, CQI remains an essential framework for moving beyond day-to-day problem solving toward stronger, more resilient systems.

This year’s conference focuses on how CQI helps organizations stabilize what matters most, strengthen relationships and processes, and build the capacity to sustain meaningful improvement over time. Sessions will highlight practical tools, lessons learned from the field, and forward-thinking approaches that help teams move from managing challenges to creating environments where people, services, and systems can truly excel.

Attendees will explore how to:

• Strengthen system reliability and reduce inefficiencies
• Support and sustain the workforce through smarter processes
• Deepen partnerships with families and communities
• Use data as a tool for learning and insight
• Design systems that work in real-world conditions
• Advance equity through improvement efforts
• Grow leadership capacity at all levels
• Turn short-term fixes into sustainable change

PURPOSE OF THE CONFERENCE
The CQI Community Group’s annual conference is a capacity building and networking event that brings together leaders, practitioners, and visionaries from diverse sectors. It is an opportunity for people from a variety of professional backgrounds to come together to explore strategies for developing, managing, and participating in the CQI process that will lead to better outcomes for children, adults, families, and communities. The conference will have sessions for professionals of all levels from basic to advanced CQI knowledge and skills.

CQI IS FOR EVERYONE
When we say CQI is for everyone, we mean everyone. Our audience is primarily CQI staff, but also includes leadership and direct-service staff from community-based, academic, state, behavioral health, medical, and government settings. The CQI Community Group promotes diversity among workshop presenters and is committed to building a vibrant and empowered community.

EVENTSAIR APP
We are excited to announce that we are using a new platform, EventsAir, for this year's conference experience! EventsAir makes it easy to stay connected and organized -- whether you are on your phone, tablet, or laptop. Simply download it from any app store.

Through EventsAir you will be able to register for individual sessions, view the full conference schedule and site map, message fellow attendees and network, complete session and conference evaluations, track CEU attendance and registration, and much more!

Please click here for the 2026 CQI Conference Quick Guide.

• September 22 at 11:00am: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/7CrIvqT8R9uf96Z36u76XQ
• September 24 at 3:30pm: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/ZcdRFh7aT_S7H1DXq0bEeA
• September 30 at 1:00pm: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/RbuVATcLRC-2WhFiv9P1Sw

Sponsor the 2026 CQI Conference

You can help with the conference’s success by becoming a sponsor. Click here for more information.

How your support makes an impact:

• $100 - Kickstarts sustainability with reusable name badges and eco-friendly signage
• $350 - Opens the door for a CQI friend impacted by budget cuts to attend
• $500 - Provides neurodiverse-friendly swag to help everyone thrive
• $750 - Keeps the coffee flowing both days to power continuous improvement
• $1000 - Fuels the afternoon with cookies and snacks to keep energy high
• $1500 - Brings national best-practice speakers to the stage

If you would like to support this year’s conference at one of the sponsorship levels or would like to suggest another way to contribute to the conference (i.e. sponsoring a lunch, special event, giveaways), please contact Amy Hiles in the Business Office of the School of Social Work at University of Illinois at amyhiles@illinois.edu or (217) 244-8464 to process your transaction.

Featured Speakers for the 2026 CQI Conference

[To see all of this year's speakers, visit our EventsAir site.]

Day One

Just Enough Is Not Enough: CQI, Scarcity, and the Leadership Work of Thriving
Dioane Gates, Kansas Leadership Center

Continuous Quality Improvement is designed to help organizations learn, adapt, and improve. Yet many CQI professionals are asked to create quality while operating in systems marked by scarcity: not enough time, not enough staff, not enough trust, not enough clarity, not enough emotional margin, and sometimes not enough permission to grieve what constant change has cost.

This keynote will explore the movement from surviving to complying to thriving. Drawing from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, research on scarcity and decision-making among sugarcane farmers in India, and the Kansas Leadership Center’s adaptive leadership framework, Dioane Gates will invite participants to examine what "lack" signals inside an organization. Scarcity does not simply reduce resources. It narrows attention, distorts interpretation, and limits the imagination needed for improvement.

For CQI professionals, the challenge is not choosing between compliance and quality. Compliance can provide the floor, but it cannot become the ceiling. Thriving requires the ability to hold standards while also tending to capacity, culture, trust, loss, and learning. Through the practice of Observation, Interpretation, and Intervention, participants will consider how quantitative and qualitative data can become more than reporting tools. They can become leadership tools that help organizations see clearly, interpret wisely, and intervene skillfully.

This opening keynote will set the tone for the conference by naming the real pressure CQI professionals carry and offering a practical leadership frame for moving from "just enough" toward "more than enough."

Dioane Gates is a leadership developer, facilitator, and keynote speaker representing the Kansas Leadership Center. His work helps people and organizations make progress on their toughest challenges by applying adaptive leadership to real-world pressures such as scarcity, change, loss, compliance, culture, and organizational learning. With experience spanning law enforcement, ministry leadership, small business ownership, consulting, and executive leadership, Dioane brings a practical and human-centered perspective to leadership development. He is known for helping groups slow down enough to see clearly, interpret wisely, and intervene skillfully. His work invites people to move beyond quick fixes and toward the deeper leadership required to create lasting progress. For the 11th Annual CQI Conference, Dioane will open the gathering with a keynote on the movement from survival to compliance to thriving, challenging CQI professionals to hold standards while also building the capacity, trust, and learning conditions needed for true quality improvement.

Day Two

From Surviving the Review to Thriving in Real Time
Sherry Amelse & Dan McCormick, SafeGenerations

Across sectors, CQI systems were built to strengthen accountability. Yet organizations in healthcare, behavioral health, human services, and child welfare find themselves caught in the same cycle: preparing for reviews, tightening oversight, collecting more data while the same practice challenges persist.

This session examines why and what learning-centered CQI does differently. Accountability is essential. But without learning as an equal partner, improvement doesn’t happen, and most systems were built for one but expected to do both.

When reviews center compliance, people survive them. When they center learning, everyone in the conversation grows - including the person asking the questions. The difference isn’t in the people. It’s in the questions. Compliance asks whether rules were followed; learning asks what it looked like from the inside.

Participants will engage in a brief interactive assessment of their own CQI system, explore how preserving decision context strengthens fairness and defensibility, and examine what it looks like when quality assurance roles evolve from compliance monitors to CQI learning partners.

Attendees leave with practical tools for building a system that learns — and one concrete shift to make when they get back. Ideal for CQI professionals, quality assurance staff, supervisors, and organizational leaders.

Sherry Amelse is Director of Implementations at SafeGenerations and a licensed social worker with 30 years of experience spanning frontline child welfare and multi-state system reform. She specializes in redesigning accountability and CQI systems to preserve decision context, strengthen supervisory coaching, and support adaptive learning in high-stakes environments. As co-architect of the Practice Intelligence model and developer of the CQI Learning Partner framework, Sherry advances a shift from compliance-driven review to intelligence-centered improvement—helping organizations move from surviving to thriving.

Dan McCormick is Executive Officer and Technology Officer at SafeGenerations, whose team partners with human services agencies across 70+ organizations—from county initiatives to statewide implementations—to build CQI systems that turn data into decision support and sustained improvement. With 30+ years in enterprise technology, govtech, and organizational transformation, he brings expertise in measurement systems, implementation strategy, and scaling platforms in complex environments. He previously served as Regional Director for Signs of Safety® in North America and is presenting with Kansas DCF QAPI leadership on building trustworthy feedback loops and meaningful measures that help organizations move from surviving to thriving.

[To see a more detailed agenda, visit our EventsAir site.]

Please click here (or on the images above) to download a PDF schedule for this year's conference.