F. SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability initiatives will support NWC‘s strategic directions toward a High-Performance Organization by effectively managing resources and risk in this time of uncertainty. To ensure the quality of programs and services, the College 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 Ministry of Advanced Education introduced a new multi-year funding model. This new model provides the College with certainty regarding the operating funding that will be received from the Ministry of Advanced Education over the next 4 years. With a 5% increase to the baseoperating grant in 2021/22, the College has the ability to invest in developing a strategy for international education and build an infrastructure to expand business and foundation development. Determination and finalization of the investment strategies for the funds will be recommended and approved through the College’s Board of Governors. 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 modified external development and corporate services activities to better align with the goals and strategies of the College going forward. This unit 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, Saskatchewan Colleges are provided with less than 8% of the total provincial post-secondary education budget, while approximately 26% of the province’s post-secondary students. Through this multi-year business plan, one will notice significant 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.