“Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain,” Matt Scogin, President of Hope College read, quoting Psalm 127 to a crowd of donors, students, and city leaders gathered to break ground on the college’s new home for Economics and Business. “This is not just a construction project,” he said. “This is an active surrender.”

For Matt Scogin, a former business executive turned college president, the groundbreaking marked more than the start of a new building. It was a declaration of intent—to teach future business leaders that profit alone cannot be the measure of success, and that faith and finance need not exist in separate worlds.

“Business can be a force for good,” he said. “It’s about stewardship. It’s about service. And ultimately, it’s about bringing hope to the world.”

The new facility, expected to rise just steps from the heart of Holland’s downtown, will serve as both an academic hub and a symbolic gateway between the college and the city it helped shape.

The building will consolidate classrooms and offices currently scattered across 11 sites, giving business and economics students a permanent home and a place to connect with local companies that have long recruited Hope graduates.

“This is an investment in the people who will lead our local business community,” said Holland Mayor Nathan Bocks, himself a Hope alumnus. “Holland and Hope have always grown together, and this project strengthens that partnership.”
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The $50 million project is the first new academic building on Hope’s campus in more than a decade. Its early funding came from a small circle of influential local families, among them the families of Dave & Carol Van Andel, Rick & Barb Van Andel-Gaby, J.C. & Tammy Huizenga, Heidi Huizenga, PJ & Abby Huizenga, and Cheri DeVos, whose philanthropic fingerprints are visible across West Michigan. Their gifts, along with hundreds of others, helped push the college past the halfway mark in its campaign to fund the project.

“If You Build It, They Will Come”

Standing at the podium, Carol Van Andel, co-chair of the “Hope Means Business” campaign, invoked a line from the film Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.”

She said the phrase captured the campaign’s conviction that excellence rooted in faith will draw the people and resources needed to make the dream real.

“Hope College has built an outstanding business program,” Van Andel said. “Now it deserves a home worthy of it, a place that will prepare the next generation of Christian business leaders to go out and impact the world.”

Van Andel, a Hope alumna and longtime civic leader, recalled how the idea for a business building first surfaced more than a decade ago. Back then, Department Chair Stacy Jackson told administrators that Hope needed to focus on substance before space. The department overhauled its curriculum, expanded its faculty, and redefined how students discerned their calling.

“College is where you go to discover who you are, not just what you’ll do,” Jackson said. “We want our students to become people of substance, to see business not as an ATM, but as a vocation.”