Bulletin No. 24
Date/Time sent: 10/26/2020 8:20 amE ala! E alu! E kuilima!
Awaken! Come together! Join hands!
As forecasted at our fall convocation (August 19, 2020), we have gathered a team of faculty, staff, and students with union representation to collectively work on a set of campus reframing and budgeting recommendations. This is the UH West Oʻahu Pueo Stewardship Task Force: Reframing and Budgeting FY21 – FY 25. Their task will be to present a cogent, forward looking set of recommendations that responds to two balanced questions:
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Part I: What is UH West Oʻahu willing to do to meet our projected deficits in FY 21, 22, 23, and 24?
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Part II: What must UH West Oʻahu do to increase our enrollment, to grow programs that will significantly impact a healthy post-pandemic Hawaiʻi, and to invest in entrepreneurial initiatives that nurture our distinctiveness?
The process is co-facilitated by Dr. Walter Kahumoku (who facilitated our strategic planning process in 2017-2018) and Interim VCSA Jan Javinar, with note-taking/management support from Chris Neves. A support team has been assembled to include: Budget & Finance, Human Resources, Facilities & Grounds, Institutional Research, Communications, UH System offices/if needed, and support teams from each unit.
Task force zoom meetings begin this week (week of October 26), through early December 2020. Everything that the task force does (minutes, data used, reports, presentations, etc.) will be archived on our UH West Oʻahu Task Force site. You can access our planning process by going to our homepage and clicking on “Pueo Planning Process”. When you land you have access to the process, task force archive, resources and information, communications, and calendar of activities. There’s a link if you’d like to leave a query or provide feedback. Here is the direct link: https://westoahu.hawaii.edu/
Shared governance is an important principle of our work. So, a draft report prepared by the task force will be provided to our campus community in mid-November. A survey will accompany the report to collect feedback from faculty, staff, and students. A revised draft report will be presented to UH West Oʻahu campus leadership in late November/early December.
Yes, UH West Oʻahu is lean but even with limited resources we are on a growth trajectory! The immediate challenge is to select cost efficient tactics that keep us stable and enable us to invest in those programs and actions that will have an immediate high return. If we can capitalize on these opportunities we will be able to reinvest in a next tier of growth and support opportunities, and so on. To help inform both/and cost efficiencies and first tier investments, campus leadership has been looking at a variety of data points and frameworks, reading and attending webinars specific to higher education and other like sectors. This is complicated because there isnʻt anything we can compare this experience to. Our resources are ambiguous, people are changing, community needs are changing – all of what is happening around us has an impact on our costs.
An important resource for us has been the information shared via the UH Mānoa UHERO Site. I recommend reviewing the following posted on October 15, 2020
https://uhero.hawaii.edu/
Per this website: As illustrated by the weekly UHERO Economic Pulse index and the underlying series on the UHERO Data Portal, both data collected by government agencies and firm-specific data are useful for estimating the economic conditions in the state. The UHERO Economic Pulse is an experimental measure of economic conditions. It summarizes information from a variety of indicators, whose number may change as more data sources become available. The index is currently based on “hard” data available at a weekly frequency, such as unemployment insurance claims and airline passenger counts. “Soft” data, such as surveys about individuals’ expectations to be laid off or willingness to travel, are potentially also useful indicators of economic conditions, and we will explore ways to incorporate such information in the index. The index appears to predict changes in Hawaii nonfarm payrolls, and we will continue to analyze its usefulness, particularly for predicting the overall economy once GDP for the third quarter is released in December.
Please take care of yourself and your ʻohana! E mālama pono!
Maenette Benham, Chancellor