Financial Sustainability
The Strategic Exercise to Restore Financial Sustainability (SERFS) project was undertaken over six months in 2020-21 to develop a strategy to enhance the College’s financial health.
“The SERFS project will serve to establish a financial sustainability roadmap that will guide our decision-making and support the future development of strategic plans, business plans and College initiatives,” Brulé added. “The success of this project will be driven by input from the entire community. Through collaboration, we can navigate Algonquin’s challenges together and ensure the College’s sustainability for many years to come.”
Engagement and consultation with employees, learners and other stakeholders was key to this process as we identified how we can increase value for our learners while improving our long-term fiscal stability and counter the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the College’s finances.
The College researched best practices at other institutions, consulted with Algonquin leadership on incorporating financial sustainability within our planning processes, and reached out across the College community for your support in designing our path forward.
The Financial Sustainability Roadmap (FSR) enables a fluid and flexible approach to achieving greater sustainability over the coming years and is available to you here. In order to track the progress of initiatives over a multi year period, initiatives identified in the FSR have been mapped in a roadmap format using third party software available here.
The Finance and Administration Area will be responsible for monitoring and reporting on progress toward the targets set in the Roadmap. To support this, a Governance Model was developed to identify responsibility and accountability for progress on the Financial Sustainability Roadmap which was endorsed by the College Budget Committee and the Algonquin College Executive Team. As noted in the Governance Model, the Finance and Administrative Services Department is required to report to the Algonquin College Executive Team (ACET) on the overall performance of the Financial Sustainability Roadmap, the performance of individual initiatives, and on the financial sustainability metrics. In accordance with this requirement, Annual Reports are developed each year and can be found here.
Making this vision a reality will require concerted and collaborative effort within a culture that recognizes and values long term, strategic change. These efforts will drive lower costs and the ability to identify sustainable, revenue generating options.