Bow Valley College has two more people to its Regional Stewardship department.

June Diment, former Business Development Lead for the Foothills region takes over as Director of Regional Stewardship while Cara Dore joins Bow Valley as Business Development Lead in the Airdrie and Strathmore region.

Diment says she's looking forward to the new role.

"I'm effectively in charge of the regional stewardship mandate for our campuses in all of our regions that surround Calgary," she says. "We currently have seven campuses across the region."

She says instead of looking after the needs of rural learners just in High River and Okotoks, she's looking to grow campuses in size and capacity to allow a wider range of people to pursue post secondary education all around Calgary.

"I think when you look at High River and Okotoks and the surrounding communities, increasingly we find a lot of people that don't want to take on the added cost of commuting to the city of Calgary or they don't want to have the residential costs associated with travelling or having to live away from home Diment says. "A lot of our learners are people that want to learn in a traditional classroom or using technology or on line, but if they want to get a campus experience, they want to do it close to home because post secondary education can be a major investment."

She says they're continuing to add programs that reflect the demands and needs of local employers and are planning to start what they're calling "Creative Technology" programs, including software and digital marketing.

At last week's High River branding meeting there was a lot of discussion about bring entrepreneurs to the community and smaller tech companies, something that fits in nicely with what Bow Valley College is looking to do.

"We work very closely with other organizations like Community Futures and Chambers of Commerce and the municipalities to help entrepreneurs," Diment says. "We do a number of entrepreneur competitions and we're also helping those organizations and supporting them in putting on local workshops in the communities."

She says in Strathmore they're looking at moving into a brand new expanded building later this year.

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