Pathways to Cook County Summit

The 4th Annual Pathways to Cook County Summit is Cook County’s daytime room for small businesses that want a real path into county procurement—not another open networking hour with no buyer on the other side of the table. Hosted by the Office of the Chief Procurement Officer through its Center for Business Enterprise Development, the summit packs agency meetups, certification workshops, contractor networking, and grant/procurement guidance into one free day at UIC’s Dorin Forum. If your firm is chasing MBE, WBE, or other Cook County certifications, or you already hold them and need live agency conversations, this is the densest public calendar slot in the window.

Asian American Chamber of Commerce of Illinois (AACCIL) has been promoting the summit to AAPI owners as a practical follow-on to its supplier-diversity programming: vendors, workshops, and civic engagement in the same building rather than a chamber mixer with no RFPs in the room. Treat AACCIL’s post as a corridor signal, not a co-host badge—the official host and registration path remain Cook County. The county’s live pages still say registration is open and point to a Microsoft Forms RSVP; re-check that form and the Pathways service page before you clear August 12.

Wednesday, August 12, 2026, 9:00 AM–3:00 PM CDT at the UIC Dorin Forum, 725 West Roosevelt Road. Free admission with required registration. Bring a one-page capability statement, your current certification status (or the documents you still need), and specific agency or commodity codes you care about. Near West Side / UIC parking and CTA access are workable; leave buffer for check-in lines at a county-hosted day.

This summit is right if you sell, or want to sell, to Cook County and allied public buyers, including AAPI firms using AACCIL and peer chambers as a home base. Advisors who walk clients through certification paperwork belong too. It is a procurement day, not investor pitch practice, a private CISO room, or a Loop tech Meetup. Stay for the workshops that match your bottleneck, then use the agency floor for compounding introductions rather than collecting every booth sticker.