Couple makes $1M donation to FVCC's College Center

Flathead Valley Community College is $1 million closer to fully funding its College Center following a donation made by Rollins residents Jim and Wanda Hollensteiner. The donation will go toward the development of an art and exhibition gallery inside the new building on the Kalispell campus.

“Education has always been an important part of our family activities,” Jim Hollensteiner said in a media release. “We have followed the evolution of Flathead Valley Community College from year one.”

Upon completion, the Wanda Hollensteiner Gallery will reside inside the 50,000-square-foot College Center, which will also include a large performance and lecture hall, a multipurpose activity complex and an outdoor amphitheater.

The Wanda Hollensteiner Gallery is the second art gallery to be named in honor of Wanda Hollensteiner, a longtime pianist and patron of the arts, the first of which is located at her alma mater, Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin.

“We are very pleased to do this,” Wanda Hollensteiner said. “Our family has always been close to Kalispell.”

Jim Hollensteiner’s great-grandparents arrived in the Flathead Valley in the 1880s as one of the valley’s pioneer families. His grandmother’s brothers were the first brick masons in the valley and made and laid the bricks for a number of historic downtown Kalispell buildings, including Central School.

In 60 years of marriage, the Hollensteiners have grown their family to include five children and eight grandchildren, and the couple now spends part of the year on the Flathead Lake property that has been in their family for six decades.

Construction of the College Center will begin in the spring of 2019 with plans to open the facility in the fall of 2020.

In addition to the College Center, FVCC’s ONE Campaign includes the construction of a new Library and Learning Commons adjacent to the existing Rebecca Chaney Broussard Center for Nursing and Health Science, which began this summer with plans to open the facility in the spring of 2019.

The Hollensteiners’ gift comes as the latest in a series of large gifts pledged to the ONE Campaign from families and individuals connected to FVCC and the community, including $2.5 million from the Broussard family, $4 million from Paul Wachholz, $2 million from Al and Lisa Stinson and $2.5 million from an anonymous donor.

To date, approximately $16 million has been raised toward the campaign’s $18 million goal.

For more information about the ONE Campaign or to make a donation, visit www.fvcc.edu/one or contact FVCC Foundation Executive Director Colleen Unterreiner at (406)756-3914 or colleenu@fvcc.edu.

Reporter Mary Cloud Taylor can be reached at 758-4459 or mtaylor@dailyinterlake.com.