Many public and private higher education institutions continue to experience flat or reduced state budget allocations, coupled with tuition and fees that continue to exceed inflation. Finding proactive and innovative approaches to reduce costs without sacrificing quality of instruction and service is truly the challenge facing facility and business officers. In November 2008, the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC) was awarded an $800,000 grant from Lumina Foundation for Education to implement regional initiatives to improve higher education productivity for colleges and universities that face increasing costs for energy and utilities and for employee and student healthcare. The goal of this initiative is for institutions to realize financial savings in these two areas where costs continue to rise at a significant rate. By bringing together the resources of national higher education associations, MHEC has tremendous opportunities to develop programs which, when initiated will bring additional savings to MHEC member institutions, and provide cost savings models for the benefit of all of higher education.