College unveils $22.6M REACH facility

It was four years and $22.6 million in the making, but Confederation College’s Regional Education Alliance for Community Health Building is a few finishing touches away from welcoming its first class of students.

On Tuesday college past president Pat Lang took centre stage to unveil the nearly completed building, which will house, among others, the dental and nursing programs.

Lang said the three-storey, 47,000 square foot facility will bring the community health program to state-of-the-art status, the envy of colleges across the country.

“We’ve always had the best faculty in the world, and now we have the best facility to go with the best faculty,” said Lang, who stepped down in June after a decade at the helm of the Thunder Bay school.

“I thought it was really important that if our students were going to be the practitioners in health and in community services, that they needed to have the best learning environment.”
It should allows students to emerge from their post-secondary schooling and transfer seamlessly into the professional working world, she added.

The changes are system-wide too, and not just centred in Thunder Bay, with new equipment added to satellite campuses throughout the region.

But it’s more than just a building, Lang said. It’s a place students are going to want to be, a home-away-from home that draws on the school’s surroundings for inspiration.

“You’ll notice at the end of every corridor there are windows and there are windows all around the perimeter of the building, so that we’re inside the building, even in the night, in the dead of winter when it’s really cold outside, we can look outside and see how truly beautiful it is in Northwestern Ontario.”

Jim Madder, who took over from Lang in June, called the wood-accented REACH building a remarkable platform to build futures from.

The excitement in the faculty and staff is matched only by that of the college’s students, he said. But what he liked best, he joked, was the turnkey nature of the project.

“Boy do I feel spoiled. It’s just remarkable to come into this. I am so thrilled that Pat could be here and be honoured for her phenomenal work,” Madder said.

“She spoke about the idea starting in 2007, I think, and a building like this, the idea doesn’t develop in two seconds. It is nice to come when they’re putting the sod down outside and having it all built.”

All kidding aside, Madder said it puts Confederation College on the leading edge of what it can offer students in the community health field.

“When I came here one of the unique features of this college is the massive area it provides stewardship for. The area the college delivers in is larger than the size of France. So in terms of that ability to deliver across that area, nothing comes close to what we have here,” Madder said.

That can only mean good things for the region, he added.

“I think one of the critical pieces that I’ve seen is that if you can keep students in their own communities, they have a greater chance of being successful and they have a greater chance of going back to that community and being health care professionals in that community,” Madder said.

The vast majority, $20.4 million, of the funding came from the federal Knowledge Infrastructure program and a portion of the $981 million the province set aside for capital funding for Ontario’s colleges and universities.

An additional $500,000 came from the student union, with $1.5 million coming from various fundraising projects.

The facility was designed by Kuch Stephenson Gibson and Malo and built by Man-Shield.