Mercy College of Health Sciences is nearing its goal of raising $15 million to build a new nursing school and to make the college the “school of choice” for people pursuing a career in medicine.

Officials with the college said this week that they have raised $13.8 million (92% of the goal) through a capital campaign that was announced earlier this year. Recent donations include $1 million from the Deb and Bob Pulver Foundation, $650,000 from Prairie Meadows and a $250,000 allocation from Polk County.

College officials said they hope to wrap up the campaign in spring 2026 with construction set to begin in February or March, weather permitting.

The college announced in February that it would build a new 24,000-square-foot building on its campus along Seventh Street, just south of Interstate 235 near downtown Des Moines. The building will replace a current 12,000-square-foot building on the Mercy Campus that has remained vacant since 2018 when it was decommissioned after it was deemed unfit for classes.

That building will be razed to make room for the new building, which will be named after Joyce Lillis, who spent nearly 40 years as a nurse, most of them in the MercyOne system.

Lillis and her husband, Terry, contributed $2.5 million to the project, saying it was an easy decision to make because it’s important to get more nurses trained to fill the shortage in the state, which according to the Iowa Workforce Development website tops 3,500.

That shortage causes stress, resulting in burnout and more nurses leaving the profession, Joyce Lillis said.

“For example, you’re working, somebody calls in sick and they don’t have anyone to fill in, so you are working two people’s jobs and you get that done and the hospital thinks if you did it yesterday you can do it today and there is a lot of burnout,” she said at the time the campaign was announced.

Dr. Adreain Henry, the college’s president, said the new building will include the latest technology and equipment to enhance the college’s ability to graduate top students.

To do that, the college needed to reinvent itself and change the perception among some hospitals that the school’s quality of education had declined.

“When people say I want to be a nurse, the first thing we want to roll off their tongue is ‘I’m going to look into Mercy College,’” Henry said when the campaign was announced. “We want to be that first choice.”