H. SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability initiatives will support NWC‘s strategic directions toward a High-Performance Organization by effectively managing resources and risk. To ensure the quality of programs and services, the College has invested in staffing and will maintain continuous improvement strategies in all its operations, review, and revise program offerings to continue to meet the needs of students, employers, and the labour market. In addition, the College will be managing discretionary spending, vacancies and costs while increasing applications for third party resources.

This year is the second year of the multi-funding model that provided the College with certainty regarding the operating funding that will be received from the Ministry of Advanced Education over the remaining 2 years. With a 5% increase to the base-operating grant in 2022-23, the College had the ability to invest in developing a strategy for international education and infrastructure to expand business and foundation development. This infrastructure is critical to the long-term success and sustainability of NWC.

While current and ongoing sustainability measures include whenever possible vacancy management strategies to reduce salary and benefit costs, the College has restructured and invested in staffing compliments and activities to better align with the goals and strategies of the College going forward. These investments will focus on building partnerships and growing our foundation/development activities for investment in programs, services and capital, to position ourselves to be less reliant on government funding.

Even with these continued sustainability measures, Saskatchewan’s regional colleges remain the most cost effective institutions governed by the Ministry of Advanced Education. Through this multi-year business plan, one will notice increases to projections in revenues garnered outside the Ministry funding; however even with these increased revenues, the College will be challenged to be self-sustaining by year three of this plan without the utilization of reserves.