Newsroom

CQL's Community Life Conference Offers Unprecedented Experience

On November 9-10, 2006, in Charleston, South Carolina, The Council on Quality and Leadership (CQL) offered a new and unprecedented conference experience to introduce its Community Life ^SM initiatives. CQL brought together a unique blend of national leaders and experiential exercises to explore quality of life within a community context.

What made this conference unparalleled in its approach is that participants were part of a new and unique community learning experience. An exploration of community took conference participants outside the ballroom of the Charleston Renaissance Hotel Historic District into downtown Charleston to learn about quality of life, community data, Community Life ^SM, and how to make collective decisions from different perspectives. Under the guidance of expert facilitators and community representatives, participant teams discovered how to extend the information gathering process to their own lives and the lives of people in their organizations.

Conference participants included an array of human service providers for people with disabilities and people with mental illness. Participants included Executive Directors from private providers and associations, Directors from the state level, people that work for large provider networks, and people from small private providers. Participants came from all across the United States and also Canada and Ireland.

Community Life ^SM is one segment of CQL’s Quality Measures 2005 ^®, representing a major break-through in how organizations can evaluate their own effectiveness at providing quality supports for people with disabilities and people with mental illness. Quality Measures 2005 ^® combine many of CQL’s existing innovative quality management practices into one core document that provides a blueprint for moving an organization forward. They call for service providers to integrate the assets of the social environment where they are based – an approach CQL calls Community Life ^SM.

“The community is the place where quality can happen,“ explained James Gardner, Ph.D, President and CEO of CQL. “Every organization needs to become an integrated part of the world around it in order to provide the optimum setting for
facilitating personal quality of life.”

Click here to view the entire story and a summary of the Community Life ^SM Exercise