Columbia College cut the ribbon Thursday on a newly renovated home for its nursing program — and gave the program a new name to go with it: the Barbara J. Bilger Family Nursing Program, after a gift the college is calling one of the most significant philanthropic investments in its history.
Bilger, a 1962 graduate of the college now living in Texas, joined the dedication ceremony at Federal Hall virtually rather than in person. Her donation creates an endowed fund meant to keep the program running strong for the long haul, plus scholarships aimed at students who need the help most — first-generation students, out-of-state students, and anyone facing real financial need, according to the Columbia Missourian.
The program has a new building to match its new name. Nursing classes have relocated out of the old Brouder Science Center into a renovated, 34,000-square-foot space with a modern simulation lab, more classroom room, and updated technology meant to get students ready for the floor before they ever clock in for a real shift.
College officials framed the gift as reaching well past campus. “There is a ripple effect on health care in mid-Missouri from the opportunities her gift brings to open doors to our nursing students,” Kevin Graeler said at the ceremony.
That ripple runs straight through Rocheport, New Franklin, and the rest of Howard, Boone, and Cooper counties. The nurses staffing the hospitals and clinics closest to us — University Hospital and Boone Hospital Center in Columbia, the smaller clinics scattered around our own towns — draw heavily on programs exactly like this one, twenty-some minutes up the road. Money that makes nursing school more affordable for a first-generation or financially stretched student is, in effect, money aimed at keeping the region’s health care workforce staffed for the next generation.
It’s a reminder, too, of how much of our region’s health care depends on programs most of us never think about until we need them — the hospital bed after a bad fall, the home-health nurse checking in on an aging parent, the clinic visit that catches something early. Every one of those moments traces back to someone who went through a nursing program somewhere, and increasingly, in mid-Missouri, that somewhere is right up the road in Columbia.
Columbia College hasn’t announced the dollar figure behind Bilger’s gift. What’s public so far is the shape of it: an endowment, scholarships targeted at the students who most need the door held open, and a renovated building built to match the ambition.
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