Interested in Presenting at the 2025 CQI Conference?

Thank you for your interest in presenting at the 8th annual Continuous Quality Improvement Conference for Child Welfare and Probation! 

What You Need to Know as a Presenter

• This year's theme and focus is, Building a CQI Culture: Empowering Everyone Through Continuous Improvement.
• The conference will be held in Sacramento from March 25-27, 2025.
• Presenters must complete a Workshop Proposal Form on or before Nov. 24, 2024, to have their proposal considered for the upcoming conference.
• Conference audience: This conference will bring together child welfare and probation county teams, including social workers, probation officers, case reviewers, CQI staff, analysts, agency leadership and those working to support their county's CQI system.
• Conference format: This 2.5-day, in-person event will feature plenary sessions, workshop blocks and daily county/agency brainstorming sessions.
• Workshop support will be provided before and during the event.

Workshop Threads

During the 2025 conference, workshop threads will be built around the "Cycle of CQI Fundamentals" to help conference attendees consider their CQI needs and select workshops that would most support their learning and regional system improvement. We welcome your innovative, creative ideas and examples for utilizing CQI processes to improve practice in both child welfare and probation. We are especially looking for proposals that may fit within the following threads:

• Ongoing Collaboration and Ownership
• Organizational Commitment and Leadership
• Data Collection, Analysis and Reporting
• Strategic Priorities
• Improvement and Taking Action
• Probation-focused Workshops

Learn more about each thread:

Please check out our 2024 CQI Conference working agenda for examples of each thread. 

You can also browse general information about each thread below:

• Ongoing Collaboration and Ownership
• This foundational thread gets at the heart of “what is CQI” – specifically moving from a place where data reports may be generated without purpose to one where analytic insights are acted upon and systems improve. This thread also includes workshops that focus on the values of your agency (e.g., racial equity), how to develop and evaluate evidence about whether those values are supported and thriving in your organization, and how to authentically engage and collaborate with stakeholders.
• Organizational Commitment & Leadership
• This leadership thread includes workshops that focus on building a positive data culture in your agency.  A positive data culture is one that is open to feedback and one where data are used early and often to learn about system performance issues (at all levels) instead of punishing particular individuals.  Topics within this thread may range from creating psychological safety within organizations, how to imbue data at key decision points, and finding ways to ensure adequate resources, time, and space to conduct CQI.
• Data Collection, Analysis, & Reporting
• This technical thread contains a number of skill-building workshops that will help you more effectively identify data needs, as well as procure, analyze, and present data to support CQI in your agency.   
• Strategic Priorities
• Strategic priorities are the outcomes and performance measures that define and describe organizational goals.  In California, a number of federal and state policies guide the selection of system improvement targets for child welfare.  This thread includes workshops that focus on such state and federal policies, as well as individual agency processes that support the identification and tracking of strategic priorities, and ensuring staff at all levels clearly understand agency priorities (e.g., Line of Sight).
• Improvement & Taking Action
• Once an agency has identified their system improvement priorities, it must then implement reforms and strategies to achieve its goals. This thread focuses on using intentional methods like the CQI Cycle of Improvement (i.e., Plan-Do-Study-Act) to monitor progress toward goal achievement and inform decision-making and includes workshops that address program implementation, fidelity tracking, quality improvement planning, and scaling from pilots to full-scale system change.
• Probation-focused Workshops

• Some probation-focused workshop ideas could focus on CQI as it impacts and relates to:

  • Reunification or permanency within 12 months of youth entering a STRTP

  • Family finding and building lifelong connections

  • Building a Child Family Team and documenting in CWS/CMS

  • Family Finding, using the tool kit, and building lifelong connections

  • Reunification or permanency within 12 months of youth entering an STRTP

  • Supporting youth in Extended Foster Care

  • Supporting youth and families in family reunification

  • Individual Rehabilitation Programs for youth in Secure Youth Treatment Facilities stepping down to a less restrictive program

We also welcome workshops that involve multi-systems collaboration!

All Ideas Welcome

If you have a conference workshop idea and would like to collaborate with staff from other counties, agencies, or the California Department of Social Services (CDSS), please let us know and we can help connect you! Have you started a project but haven’t finished it yet? That is okay, we want to hear what is working well and lessons learned through any stage of the implementation/CQI process. Proposals do not have to be well-defined, so please submit a proposal if you have an idea. Once you submit your proposal form, we will follow up with you to help solidify your ideas, connect you to resources and answer questions.

Questions?

If you are new to workshop presenting or have any questions, please call (530) 757-8725 or email cqiconference@ucdavis.edu.