A Recap of Our 2025 Midwest Conference

Nicole Jarvis, LMSW on April 4, 2025

This past Friday, March 28th, we hosted our 12th annual Midwest Conference on Work & Cancer virtually. With over 250 individual attendees, the day was full of connections, guidance, and support! Attendees included patients, survivors, caregivers, HR professionals, nonprofit and healthcare workers, along with managers, coworkers, advocates, friends and family members from around the country.

Three sessions were presented, ‘Navigating Work & Cancer: Effective Strategies’, ‘Navigating Work & Cancer: Career Change’ and ‘Navigating Work & Cancer: Nutrition Considerations’. The audience heard from two CAC staff members, longtime friend to CAC, career coach Julie Jansen, and knowledgeable dietitian Karla Giboyeaux, MA, RDN, CDN. Attendees received information and guidance on disclosure, effective job searching techniques, career change strategies, approaches to eating well while balancing work, and much more!

While attendees are still in the process of submitting post-event evaluations, the feedback thus far has been positive with many respondents pointing to the approachability, inclusiveness, and comprehensive nature of the conference. One attendee stated:

“I felt this was a great conference that both patients and health care workers were able to attend and gain the knowledge, you don’t see too many of these conferences available”

Though our Technology Assistance Program, we provided laptops to cancer patients and survivors who don’t have access to a reliable device and would be otherwise unable to attend the Conference. (If you are interested in being notified about future Technology Assistance Programs, click here.) To further our commitment to accessibility, we also provided real-time closed captioning throughout the day for all attendees.

If you were unable to join us for the Conference, please check out the remaining webinars in our 2025 Balancing Work & Cancer Webinar Series, where you’ll find deep dives on many of the issues explored during the day. We also offer these sessions on our video archive to replay at your convenience. In addition registration is currently open for our virtual National Conference in June, as well as our virtual West Coast Conference in October. We hope you can join us!

And of course, none of this would be possible without our generous sponsors, whose generous support ensures we are able to provide this conference free of charge!