A bright, new future was ushered in for business students at Salt Lake Community College with the breaking of ground for what is to be the latest and most modern addition to Taylorsville Redwood Campus yet: the Larry H. and Gail Miller Business Building.
The groundbreaking ceremony took place Friday, Nov. 8, merely feet away from where the new building will stand come fall semester 2026. But just south of the 1980s-era building that currently houses SLCC’s business school sits a four-foot-high concrete wall, painted white with hopeful messages spread out in crisp, Bruin blue letters.
Over 100 people attended the event, including SLCC students, faculty and staff; executive cabinet leaders including President Gregory Peterson and Provost Jason Pickavance; several representatives from state government; and family members representing the Larry H. Miller Company, including the company’s co-founder and owner, Gail Miller.
Gail Miller
Friday’s revelry centered around the contributions that Miller has made to SLCC through her leadership of the Larry H. and Gail Miller Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Larry H. Miller Company that was established in 2007 to give back to the Salt Lake City community.
The name of the new structure, and the renamed business school at SLCC, now called the Gail Miller School of Business, was chosen to honor Miller and her organization’s generous donation of $10 million, which was given to SLCC in October 2023. It is the first business school to be named after a woman in Utah and one of only a handful in the nation.
Miller’s donation was the largest single donation SLCC has ever received, and she provided it with a purpose in mind. The newly appointed dean of the Gail Miller School of Business, Dr. Trish Gorman, said Miller gave the monumental donation with the clear goal of helping SLCC not only build new facilities, but to enhance and improve the school’s potential for high-impact learning.
“This was a very intentional donation,” Gorman explained. “Miller worked very closely with [former president] Deneece Huftalin on the focus of where her generosity would serve the school best. It was very intentional and very much in-line with her own career and her own insights and values.”
Miller, who is a graduate of Salt Lake City’s West High School, has also coordinated with the executive team from the Larry H. Miller Company to offer a $10,000 scholarship to one West graduate and first-generation college student to attend the new business school.
“Supporting every student who walks through the doors of Salt Lake Community College’s business school is an investment in their potential and their future,” Miller said while giving a speech to attendees of Friday’s ceremony.
“The vision of this building is to create a space where future business leaders can build essential skills, innovate and connect with the community,” she continued. “It is my hope that this building becomes a place where dreams take root and possibilities become reality.”
High-impact spaces
The new business building, to be completed midway through 2026, will add around 18,000 square feet to the existing structure, which is currently 50,000 square feet in size.
Plans for the state-of-the-art facility feature several important spaces for experiential and collaborative learning. A 2,320 square-foot auditorium will be used for both lectures and conferences. An area known as Market Street will function as a space for young entrepreneurs to operate their own “kickstarter” businesses that will serve the immediate campus community of SLCC students, faculty and staff.
But this is not meant to be a challenge. Rather, the start-up experience at Market Street will teach students concepts like relevancy and knowing your target audience, all while they experience the ins and outs of running a business and are still enrolled in classes at the school.
“We do have some incubator spaces at the Mill on Miller Campus, but that’s not for [class] credit,” Gorman said. “These [new spaces] would be for students who are pursuing business degrees, who are interested in entrepreneurial ventures and are taking classes in entrepreneurship and marketing … and would give them a chance to actually have a storefront.”
Additionally, a new rooftop event room, complete with expansive mountain views and the ability to accommodate over 300 people, will be yet another space for wider and more seamless collaboration, networking and community-building among business students, outside organizations and business school faculty.
“The new facilities will allow a lot more flexible programming and a lot more group work and teamwork … and students [will be able to] interact with faculty more seamlessly,” Gorman said. “Right now, a lot of our students are taking online classes as sort of a hangover from Covid, so we’ll be bringing more of our classes to campus and having more in-person classroom experiences as well as extracurricular activities.”
Regarding the ways in which the new building may increase retention and degree completion at the Gail Miller School of Business, Gorman said: “We have found that when students just take classes, it’s easy for them to opt-out and opt-in. When they feel part of a community and a cohort and they’re moving towards a program, participating in clubs and working maybe with someone whose starting an entrepreneurial venture, then there’s more of a feeling of ‘this is where [I] belong,’ and they have more of a drive towards completion and retention.”
A promising beginning
Along with Miller, Gorman and Peterson also gave speeches at the event, along with several students from the Gail Miller School of Business.
The business students’ speeches provided heartfelt recountings of how their learning experiences at the school have translated into real-world opportunities – and how such experiences will be made available to future students, who will benefit even more from the additional resources that Miller’s donation will bring.
To officially launch the Larry H. and Gail Miller Business Building project, the dignitaries in attendance stood in a row, with their Bruin blue ceremonial shovels, in front of the commemorative wall. Cheers and applause went up from the crowd as the shovels broke dirt for the first time.
With Sharpies provided by event organizers, attendees were asked to write encouraging messages of their own on the wall. In doing so, they lent their support to the soon-to-be revitalized Gail Miller School of Business, which is expected to transform business students’ experiences while they’re enrolled at SLCC.
