Photo: Curtis Galbraith / EverythingGP staff

By Shane Clausing

GPRC strategic plan

GPRC unveils new five-year strategic plan

Nov 4, 2020 | 5:30 AM

Grande Prairie Regional College has unveiled their new five-year administrative strategic plan.

GPRC says that this new plan, which is titled 5GPRC, is designed to provide a clear path for the College to strengthen and expand its vision to become the northern centre of post-secondary excellence in Alberta.

President of GPRC, Dr. Robert Murray spoke to EverythingGP about how important it is to have a strategic plan like this.

“5GPRC is meant to provide a very clear, transparent vision for the college to move forward and really what the future of GPRC is going to look like. We focused on five priorities for five years and we felt that these were five core areas that the college needs to be invested in and working on to be able to make GPRC the northern centre of post-secondary excellence in Alberta.”

The plan was made in consultation with the GPRC community and various other administrations across Alberta.

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The new plan will focus on the following items:

1. Modernization and Efficiency: GPRC will be a resilient academic institution with a modern, lean, and agile business platform to support academic activities, and adapt to new economic realities.

2. Academic Excellence and Degree-Granting: GPRC will sustain and increase academic excellence, become a degree-granting institution, and grow its trades and apprenticeship programming.

3. Economic and Community Development: GPRC will align programming and educational objectives to meet regional and provincial economic needs and build sustainable communities in the College’s stewardship region.

4. Inclusion and Student Experience: GPRC will provide an unparalleled student experience for learners. The College will advance the indigenization of its programming, and expand its mental health and wellness supports to the GPRC community.

5. Innovation and Partnership: GPRC will create a robust research and innovation ecosystem, expand research and applied research capacity, and leverage partnerships to enhance student and College opportunities.

Of the items that stand out in the plan is GPRC’s continued focus on mental health and supports for students.

Dr. Murray says that programs like this are critical for students and staff at the college, especially now during what is a stressful time.

“This past budget that we implemented in May of this year saw a continued investment in mental health supports. With the on-set of COVID-19, GPRC was heavily involved in the creation of it’s GPRC Cares initiative, which had some mental health supports for the community and our internal stake holders as well as external.”

“Whether it’s their educational journeys, their life journeys or their employment journeys. Knowing that we are going to have to invest in those areas, we wanted to be very clear in letting our community know that this is something we are going to take and we will continue to invest in regardless of the budget reductions that we are receiving.”

Over the next five years, the college will also focus specifically on innovation and partnerships for how they can continue to expand research and enhance opportunities for students and faculty at the school.

“This is really a declaration to say that we are interested in working with not only our faculty and the other research community, but also industry, to partner and try to find innovative solutions for problems facing industry or research questions that we might be able to invest in and explore.”

“It’s further integration into the provincial and federal innovation research ecosystems where we think its integral to be a part of that innovation community to make sure that we are all striving to using our resources for that collective innovation good.”

Dr. Murray mentioned that the plan was developed with COVID-19 implications in mind.

“The plan was built specifically with that in mind and our current reality in mind to be able to focus to college’s efforts to mitigating COVID, mitigating the budget impact, mitigating the Alberta 2030 system review, so the current landscape weigh heavily into how it was constructed.”

You can find the full details of the plan at GPRC’s website.