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Like many young men in Eugene, Oregon, Travis Moffett was tied to timber. He grew up as the son of a millworker in a “very low” middle-class family. His father, his two brothers, and his sister’s husband all labored long and hard in the local lumberyards and mills to support their wives and children.

“It was one of the few jobs in the area that paid a living wage,” says Moffett, who enlisted in the U.S. Army after high school and spent six and a half years in the service. “When I returned home, I wanted to find a way out of the forest-products industry.  But there were no jobs for an ex-Army helicopter mechanic, so I ended up at the same plywood mill where my dad worked. I stayed there for 10 years.”

Moffett, who is 40 years old and married with two children, might still be employed at the mill, if it weren’t for Lane Community College.  Last fall, the college accepted his application to enroll in its nursing program. Now Moffett is well on his way to earning a nursing degree and embarking on a new career as a cardiac nurse in the region’s burgeoning health-care industry.

Lane’s high marks for delivering high-quality nursing education at an affordable price and its outreach to nontraditional, low-income, and minority students, particularly Native Americans living in outlying communities, weighed favorably in his decision.

“Lane has become a springboard to a better economic situation and has broken up my familial pattern of following a dying industry,” says Moffett, who is the first in his family to earn a college degree.

The Kresge Foundation has awarded Lane Community College an $800,000 challenge grant to support the school’s first-ever comprehensive capital campaign to build a new health and wellness educational center. The two-story, 40,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art facility will allow Lane to double the number of nursing graduates and house its respiratory therapy, physical therapy assistant, and other health-care services programs. Lane graduates will help the community meet the critical need for nurses and health-care workers. They also will play a pivotal role in driving the region’s economic transition from timber to health care.

Lane’s campus-wide commitment to green building made it an excellent choice for a Kresge challenge grant.  The college’s building plans for its new educational center are targeted to meet requirements at the LEED Silver-rated level. The school hopes to achieve a higher rating once the new building is completed.

“Health care and energy are the careers of the future, and Lane Community College is seeing strong demand in both areas,” says Lane President Mary Spilde, a national leader in community college education and a signatory of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment.  “We look forward to all of our graduates having a sense of sustainability and what each of us must do to protect and promote the economy, social justice, and the environment.”

The college has adopted a policy that all new campus construction must be a minimum of LEED Silver-rated. It also has pioneered innovative recycling programs, including a cooking-oil-to-biodiesel venture that powered the campus for an entire month.  In 2006, Lane received the Campus Sustainability Leadership Award from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

“By integrating environmental sustainability into its mission, Lane is already ahead of the curve,” says Caroline Altman Smith, Kresge program officer in Education. “Other colleges will move toward this direction as they seek greater cost savings through energy efficiency, and face pressure from students and regulators to build green and create carbon-neutral campuses.”

By Claudia Capos