The MCN Staff Excellence Award was created by Janeen and Matt Mollenhauer in 2017 to recognize and honor outstanding employees, and to provide professional development opportunities and support for the Mennonite College of Nursing (MCN) staff. It has since been awarded to five distinguished staff members.
“When I think about when my husband and I established it, we really moved the concept forward to support our incredible staff infrastructure, one that is necessary to support the student experience,” said Mollenhauer. “When faculty provide outstanding instruction and staff provide excellent service, then our students are best positioned to have the tools they need to be successful.”
After 25 years at Illinois State, Mollenhauer’s last day on campus was earlier this year on July 29. The following Monday, she began her new position as a school counselor. Mollenhauer received her master’s degree in clinical psychology from Illinois State in 1991, and at the time of her retirement, she served as the associate dean of Mennonite College of Nursing.
“I am really grateful for the quality of education I received in my master’s program in clinical and counseling psychology from ISU,” said Mollenhauer. “So, to continue my journey as an employee was kind of serendipitous.”
In spring 2022, Ashley Bollhorst M.S. ’19 was named the recipient of the MCN Staff Excellence Award. She received her master’s from Illinois State in creative technologies.
“To me, this award is really a testament to Janeen and how much she values her team,” said Bollhorst. “Before she created the MCN Staff Excellence Award, our college really didn’t have something solid that acknowledged MCN staff. Janeen saw all the good work her team was doing at the College and wanted to bring attention to that in a meaningful way.”
Bollhorst has been with MCN for more than five years. She started as a graduate assistant doing design work for the College in fall 2017 while pursuing her master’s degree with a focus on user interface design, user experience design, and front-end design. Upon graduation in 2019, the college created a full-time position that encompassed the duties of her graduate assistant role. She applied and became the full-time assistant director of marketing and recruitment in June 2019.
One reason Bollhorst was chosen for this award was for her work in creating Collaborate, an educational card game for nursing students. Bollhorst, alongside faculty member Dr. Valerie Wright, DNP, and staff member Matt Rutherford, co-invented the game, which teaches players to assemble three-person teams of various health care professionals to optimize patient care for a given scenario. Bollhorst designed the playable prototypes, refined them based on user testing, and finalized the design for the finished game this spring. Now, it’s a tool that helps teach collaborative care to nursing students at ISU.
Wright and Bollhorst presented their work at the FSI: At the Intersection of Teaching, Learning, and Technology conference in May at the University of Illinois. The conference convenes educators and instructional technology professionals, annually. Their game, Collaborate, was met with strong reviews.
Awards like Mollenhauer’s encourage staff innovation, collaboration, and excellence, something Mollenhauer’s career has taught her to appreciate.
“Each role I’ve had has really taught me something new about not only the student experience but really about the educational system as a whole,” said Mollenhauer. “There are different hoops and different rewards in each of those roles that interface with different offices and systems. I am really looking forward to watching from the sidelines now as the college grows and meets the needs of our nursing workforce.”
Awards like the MCN Staff Excellence Award attract and retain talented faculty and staff. To learn more and make your contribution today, visit Giving.IllinoisState.edu.
