Conference Dates: October 28 & 29, 2025
Location: IHotel and Conference Center, Champaign, IL
ABOUT THE 2025 CQI CONFERENCE: "Driving Continuous Quality Improvement into the Future."
The 2025 Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Conference marks a decade of progress, innovation, and impact. As we celebrate 10 years of excellence, this year’s conference is dedicated to celebrating and learning from the past, embracing the present, and shaping the future of quality improvement.
Throughout the conference, we will explore cutting-edge strategies, emerging technologies, and best practices that help organizations continuously evolve and improve. The focus of this year’s conference is to teach valuable lessons and equip attendees with practical tools and forward thinking approaches to:
- Set clear and visionary goals for their organizations
- Adapt to change with flexibility and resilience
- Embrace innovation and take calculated risks to drive progress
- Understand the ripple effects of decisions in quality improvement
- Collaborate effectively to build strong, future-ready teams
- Apply future-back thinking—envisioning the ideal future and mapping a path to achieve it
- Authentically engage lived experience and community members in all aspects of the CQI process
- Use new technology and techniques to turn data into the evidence needed to understand performance and make informed decisions
PURPOSE OF THE CONFERENCE AND TARGET AUDIENCE
The CQI Community Group’s annual conference is a capacity building and networking event. This milestone event will bring together leaders, practitioners, and visionaries from diverse sectors, including healthcare, social services, education, and business. Through dynamic featured speakers, interactive workshops, and thought-provoking discussions, attendees will gain valuable insights into how continuous improvement principles are shaping the future of work, service delivery, and community impact.
Our audience is primarily CQI staff, but also includes leadership and direct-service staff from community-based, academic, state, and government settings. 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 be geared toward attendees with basic to advanced CQI knowledge and skills.
CQI IS FOR EVERYONE
When we say CQI is for everyone, we mean everyone. The CQI Community group promotes diversity among workshop presenters and is committed to building a vibrant and empowered community. We encourage submissions from a variety of professional affiliations (government, academic, corporate, non-profit, or community-based providers), organization sizes (small, medium, or large), experience levels (whether you are a subject matter expert with a research team or a quality improvement peer with a great idea), and geography (both inside and outside Illinois). Collaborative sessions representing multiple organizations are also encouraged. We want to hear from you!
Join us as we reflect on a decade of achievements, share success stories, and set the course for the next era of transformation and innovation to ignite the future of quality improvement.
DCFS promotes the well-being of children, youth, and families by responding to reports of potential abuse and neglect and, when needed providing family-centered care and connection to resources. Our vision is that every child and youth can grow and thrive in family.
From helping more than 5,374 Illinois children achieve permanency in FY24 through reunification, adoption or guardianship; to the licensing of nearly 8,000 day care facilities; answering of more than 234,500 calls to the Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline and provision of services to 60,000 families annually; the department and its more than 3,800 employees are dedicated to providing unrivaled professional service to ensure safe, loving homes and brighter futures for every child in Illinois.
