Strategic Plan
Final Word
Shawnigan launched a shorter term strategic plan, Project Future 1.0, in 2021, and met the challenges of a global pandemic with resilience, imagination, and courage.
The School emerged stronger than before.
As part of our efforts to formulate a new iteration of Shawnigan’s strategic plan, we have consulted widely. Shawnigan has used the feedback to catalyze progress, accelerate innovation and initiatives, develop a distinct and unique Shawnigan value proposition in the form of the Shawnigan Journey – and to provide a clear strategic path forward, with priorities identified, for our School.
People, place, and programs will continue to be at the heart of Shawnigan.
Our action plan will make the strategic priorities a reality for Shawnigan students. Together, we have discussed our strategic imperatives at great length and can distill them into five clear ambitions for the next five years and beyond:
- Refine and implement a compelling, inspiring, and supportive Shawnigan Journey for students and alumni.
- Develop access to the Shawnigan Journey for a diverse community by building a significant endowment for financial aid – and through building financial resilience, secure Shawnigan’s future.
- Steward and develop our campus through the design of a Campus Master Plan to support Shawnigan’s educational mission.
- Deliver the Shawnigan Journey and seek to create a designed space on campus, the Ideas & Innovation Centre, which embodies our educational philosophy and thereby provides further interdisciplinary and future-shaping skills for students and staff on our campus.
- Develop our reputation as the best co-educational full boarding school in Canada and the Pacific Coast – and to be recognized globally for this.
It is important that we teach our students to test themselves in order that they acquire the skills necessary to navigate through life. In a prayer by explorer Sir Francis Drake (an inspirational figure for our founder, C.W. Lonsdale), he guides us that, “where losing sight of land, / We shall find the stars.”
Here at Shawnigan, we aim not just to teach our students the names of the stars, but how to read and navigate by them. We invite our students to be map-makers, to sound the waters, to voyage away from the trade routes and discover new frontiers – equipped with a moral compass, a logbook of experience, and a sense of adventure.
We encourage you to dream of the world we would like to inhabit and then engage with Project Future 2.0: The Shawnigan Journey to ensure that each student and your School will flourish in this new and dramatically changing world.
Project Future 2.0: The Shawnigan Journey is an invitation to us all as members of the Shawnigan community, in the words of Drake’s Prayer, “to push back / the horizons of our hopes,” “to push into the future,” and “to dare more boldly.”
Palmam Qui Meruit Ferat.
 Richard 'Larry' Lamont, Head of School |  Jacqueline Flett ’97 (Groves’), Chair of the Board |
We acknowledge with respect the Coast Salish Peoples on whose traditional lands and waterways we live, learn and play. We are grateful for the opportunity to share in this beautiful region, and we aspire to healthy and respectful relationships with those who have lived on and cared for these lands for millennia.
Shawnigan Lake School is an independent co-educational boarding school for ages 13 –18 on Canada’s beautiful Pacific Coast. Our diverse, interdisciplinary and innovative programming helps shape the next generation of global leaders.
