Dear Colleagues,
Like with all organizations of similar complexity, GW’s budget allows us to maintain control over our finances, achieve financial goals, and ensure we can meet our needs and wants while avoiding debt and preparing for the unexpected. In 2024, the university launched an initiative to evolve our current budget model to better align our financial resource allocations with our academic and research aspirations and strategic priorities. Our budget model is the combination of policies, processes, tools, and decisions for allocating financial resources to the colleges and units across campus.
We last updated our budget model in 2016 with a plan to revisit in 2020; unfortunately, the pandemic disrupted those plans. Our priorities and needs have changed dramatically in the past nine years, largely driven by significant shifts in the higher education landscape, so we are committed to designing and implementing a new model that will enable GW to enhance our planning and investments as we continue in our third century.
Through the fall and winter, we engaged key campus stakeholders to help create the guiding principles that reflect the university’s expectations for the budget redesign process and serve as guideposts for designing the new budget model. We engaged over 60 academic and administrative stakeholders through intentional conversations to understand their priorities, then incorporated the stakeholder feedback into the draft guiding principles. After the deans and president’s cabinet reviewed and provided input, the president, provost, CFO, and chief of staff approved the final guiding principles, which can be found below and on the budget model redesign website here.
GW’s Budget Redesign Guiding Principles:
- Support “One GW” by balancing the needs of the university with those of its individual academic and non-academic units.
- Uphold the university's mission, vision, and values through investment in innovation and decision-making designed to achieve institutional excellence.
- Promote collaboration across units and facilitate discussions that support the growth and long-term success of strategic priorities.
- Advance institutional excellence by incentivizing positive student outcomes, research growth, responsible stewardship, and accountability of resources within units and across the university.
- Support multi-year financial management of all funding sources that is flexible, enables future forecasting, and adapts to changing conditions while strengthening the university’s financial health and resiliency.
- Allocate financial resources transparently and predictably across academic and administrative units, fostering trust and confidence amongst university stakeholders.
Now we want your collaboration in shaping GW’s future together. We welcome your engagement in this process and feedback on the guiding principles and ongoing work to reshape our budgeting practices. You can share your thoughts through multiple channels:
- Visit the budget model website: To promote continuous engagement, we have launched a website that shares the guiding principles, a budget model FAQ, and our timeline for developing, confirming, and implementing the new budget model.
- Submit feedback: The budget model website features a feedback form where you can share thoughts on the budget redesign guiding principles. We will actively monitor submissions and incorporate feedback as themes emerge.
- Join a community conversation: As we have committed to you with other campus-wide initiatives, we will host community conversations to offer all faculty and staff the opportunity to learn more about the budget model redesign, guiding principles, and the road ahead. These community conversations will be conducted virtually on Thursday, May 8 and Friday, May 9. Please be on the lookout for details about these sessions in the coming days.
We are excited about our progress to date and the collaborative efforts of our engaged and dedicated campus stakeholders. As we move forward, we will continue to provide updates as we reach critical milestones. Thank you for your continued support of and participation in this important process.
Sincerely,
Christopher Alan Bracey
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Professor of Law
Bruno Fernandes
Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Treasurer
Scott M. Mory
Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff