A view from 2025 – Board Chair Hugh Lindo
C hrist’s College’s current strategic plan, Change and Continuity, is now firmly focused on the 175th anniversary of College’s founding. The anniversary celebration will be held from Friday 5 to Sunday 7 September 2025. In last year’s magazine, I wrote about the steps we were taking as the College continues its progression to a sustainable future. As this article accompanies a summary of the College’s financial performance for the year ending 31 January 2023, it is appropriate, with that context, to expand on the Board’s strategy for financial freedom. By 2025, the Board has an expectation that College will have implemented a number of material changes to its financial model. The financial outcome for 2023 was an operating deficit of $200,000. Whilst this result reflects a continued improvement in the normalised financial performance of the College in recent years (i.e. taking out the impact of a one- off property transaction such as the sale of the Cranmer Square site in 2022 that skewed last year’s financial result), it is not, despite the best efforts of College management, delivering the
financial outcomes that we need to achieve. We need the financial freedom to continue to invest in the programmes that we offer our students, to attract the best staff, and to maintain and enhance our iconic heritage campus. Our objective for 2025 is to have delivered a $2 million improvement in the College’s overall financial performance. If we achieve that outcome or better, the Board is confident that we will achieve the financial freedom that we need. The Board initiated two key projects to help research and plan for this outcome. Towards the end of last year we asked advisory firm Jarden to model the longer-term sustainability of the College Foundation based on the current distribution policy. The current policy results in an annual distribution from the Foundation to the College of $3m. You can see this amount being received by College in the financial summary. The funds received from the Foundation pay for all the scholarships offered by College, among other specified purposes aligned with the wishes of those who originally endowed the funds on the Foundation.
The question for Jarden to answer was the impact that this level of distribution was having on the real value of the Foundation capital, allowing for inflation and administrative costs. The answer was that if the Foundation continued to distribute $3m each year to the College, then, assuming there are no material additions to the capital of the Foundation, the real value of the Foundation would erode. The advice from Jarden was that the annual distribution should be reduced over time from $3m to $2m. At this lower level of distribution, the amount is still enough to cover the cost of our scholarships. The Board has established a Foundation sub-committee comprised of two Board members and two external experts, that is solely focused on the performance of the Foundation with a mandate to review the Foundation’s investment strategy as the distribution to College is reduced from $3m to $2m. If the real value of the Foundation capital can be increased over time, then this will create greater financial leverage for the future. The capital of the Foundation is represented by an investment
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