PCC Employee Turns $1,000 World Cup Ticket Into A Global Wave Of Kindness (Photo) - 07/22/26

SOUTHEAST PORTLAND, Ore. – A Portland Community College employee turned a $1,000 World Cup ticket into an international act of generosity: giving the coveted seat to a young Scotland supporter who had been scammed, then directing the unexpected wave of donations toward mental health services.

John MacLean, a Southeast Portland resident and longtime Timbers season-ticket holder, made the gift before Scotland’s first World Cup match in 28 years. What began as a split-second decision in a Boston pub soon spread across social media, reached broadcast audiences in the United Kingdom and helped carry the generosity forward through a Scottish mental health fundraiser.

MacLean, a lifelong Scotland supporter and a PCC employee for 12 years, traveled to Boston with his wife, Jodie, for Scotland’s opening match against Haiti. The national team was returning to the World Cup for the first time in 28 years, and the tournament was being played on U.S. soil. The Scots were bounced from the World Cup after a 3-0 loss to Brazil in group play on June 24, finishing third in Group C.

“We weren’t about to miss it,” he said.

MacLean had an extra ticket worth more than $1,000 that he planned to sell. Then he learned that a young Scotland supporter had paid a scammer for a ticket that never arrived.

He and Jodie gave the young fan called “Jack” a ticket for free with only a brief moment to do what felt right through his friends whom they met in a Boston pub. The gift allowed the supporter to experience Scotland’s return to the World Cup and stand alongside the Tartan Army, the passionate supporters of Scotland’s national team.

At PCC, MacLean is the finance and procurement manager in the Office of Planning and Capital Construction. A Scot who has lived in the United States for 27 years, he grew up playing and following soccer and has held Portland Timbers season tickets since the club began MLS play in 2011. He and Jodie, married 29 years, live in the Woodstock neighborhood. The couple met in Scotland while Jodie, an American, was studying at the Edinburgh College of Art.

The ticket giveaway might have ended there. Instead, the fan’s friends shared the story on social media, and messages soon flooded Jodie’s Instagram account.

“We were gobsmacked,” MacLean said. “We had no idea it would explode. There were no haters. It’s all been nice.”

Supporters then launched a GoFundMe campaign to reimburse the MacLeans. As donations surpassed the cost of the ticket, the couple decided the additional money should keep the cycle of generosity going. In total, they raised $3,000 after being reimbursed for the ticket.

They directed it to Craig Ferguson’s Tartan Trek, a fundraiser benefiting Scottish Action for Mental Health, known as SAMH. Ferguson, a Scottish soccer supporter and mental health advocate, walked more than 3,300 miles from the Los Angeles area to Boston in time for Scotland’s opening World Cup match. His campaign raised more than $1 million for mental health services in Scotland.

For MacLean, the story became about much more than soccer. One decision kept a stranger’s World Cup dream from being ruined by a scam; the response helped support people facing mental health challenges. The unexpected attention, including broadcast interviews in the United Kingdom, took some adjustment and provided an important lesson.

“It’s just so different talking about yourself,” MacLean said. “(But) if you are good to people and do the right thing, it grows.”

About Portland Community College: Founded in 1961, Portland Community College is the largest post-secondary institution in Oregon and provides training, degree and certificate completion, and lifelong learning to more than 57,000 full- and part-time students in Multnomah, Washington, Yamhill, Clackamas, and Columbia counties. PCC has four comprehensive campuses, 10 education centers or areas served, and approximately 200 community locations in the Portland metropolitan area. The PCC district encompasses a 1,500-square-mile area in northwest Oregon and offers two-year degrees, one-year certificate programs, short-term training, alternative education, pre-college courses and life-long learning.

Visit PCC news on the web at http://news.pcc.edu/

For B-ROLL footage, visit PCC campus and student life highlight reel.

The Next Food Startup Could Begin In High School — If Teachers Get The Training (Photo) - 07/07/26

PORTLAND, Ore. – At first, it looked like a cooking class. Then the teachers pulled out calculators.

Inside Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center in Portland, 14 high school educators spent a Thursday turning marinara sauce from a kitchen recipe into a production formula. They weighed ingredients, calculated yield, tested flavor and learned the food science behind what makes a product shelf-ready. The lesson was about more than sauce: Portland Community College and Portland Area Career Technical Education Consortium (PACTEC) are trying to make sure career and technical education keeps up with the industries students may enter after graduation.

It was part of a new session of the Career and Technical Education Summer Skills Summit, a paid professional development series. For Melissa Buechler, a culinary arts teacher at Liberty High School in Hillsboro, the value was both practical and personal.

“These professional development classes allow me to not only learn new skills to take back to my students, but the cross-curricular relationships between teachers across districts are invaluable,” Buechler said. “We get to collaborate in small groups in ways that wouldn’t likely happen otherwise.”

The free-for-educators session, held at Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center in Portland’s Pearl District, focused on culinary arts and food product development. It was the second of nine summit sessions offered individually this summer across programs of study, including culinary arts, AutoCAD and surveying, irrigation systems, cybersecurity, project management, multimedia, project-based learning for career and technical education, a welding workshop (now full), and STEAM Lab design process and mass prototyping (now completed).

The need for teachers to keep up is growing.

Oregon is expanding CTE: the Oregon Department of Education said CTE concentrators, students completing two or more credits in an approved CTE program, graduated at a record 97.8%, and the number of Oregon CTE programs grew from 1,038 in 2021-22 to 1,125 in 2025-26. And Business Oregon identifies food and beverages as a target industry, with nearly 1,700 Oregon businesses and about 40,000 workers statewide; it also notes the industry’s importance to rural Oregon and its diverse workforce.

An estimated 125 area teachers will participate in nine workshops in the PACTEC series through the summer, when it concludes with an irrigation systems session at the Rock Creek Campus on Aug. 14, and enrollment is still open. PACTEC supports rural, suburban and urban high schools throughout the Portland region, including Washington and Columbia counties. The consortium helps expand career and technical education and brings state grant support beyond what any single district could provide.

Katrina Stein, PACTEC Industry Liaison at PCC, said the summit also strengthens the educator community.

“This session is for teachers to take skills back to their schools and classrooms,” Stein said. “(For this session) we had 14 instructors learning industry-level food skills like scaling up recipes, seeing the latest equipment and technology, and the marketability of food. We believe that bringing together our teaching community with experts in the food industry is powerful for such a foodie city like Portland."

The culinary workshop was led by Sarah Masoni, director of the Product and Process Development Program at the OSU Food Innovation Center, a collaboration between OSU and the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

Her experience in the food industry includes quality control and assurance, research and development, and product scale-up. She also helped pioneer PCC’s “Get Your Recipe to Market” course, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary.

“Culinary is about intuition. Food is art. It’s color on the palate: Does it taste and look good? It’s about quality elements, as chefs are like directors of a movie,” said Masoni, who has been teaching culinary mastery for more than 30 years.

For the morning exercise, teachers gathered in a focus group room where blind studies were conducted as part of bringing new food products to market. Then they moved into a food preparation area, where they converted a kitchen recipe into a production formula before scaling and preparing marinara sauce in four versions: regular, sweet, spicy and garlicky.

“The teachers were divided into four teams representing versions of marinara,” Masoni said. “They had to do the math calculations and accurately weigh and measure ingredients to work on their unique batch and prevent yield loss. That consistency is to optimize quality and maximize a product’s profitability.”

For food safety and food engineering, attendees learned how OSU conducts pH, Brix and water activity testing. Instruction also included a flavor science presentation, demonstrations and a sensory activity.

Melissa Buechler – the Liberty culinary arts teacher – worked on the sweet marinara team. She said the math was intense, especially when scaling up ingredients and tasting for appropriate saltiness and sweetness. Summer professional development, she added, is part of her annual routine.

“We have more than 200 students in Liberty’s culinary program, and I look forward to introducing new knowledge and career possibilities to them,” Buechler said. “Our students are talented and focused. Some are entrepreneurial, and I’m here to get them excited and lead them.

“One such Liberty student is a pre-nuclear engineering major headed to OSU," she added. "He’s put his knowledge of chemistry into making tasty, high-protein, low-sugar cookies. I’m helping with his commercial pitch to get it market-ready."

For more information about PCC PACTEC professional development opportunities, visit pcc.edu/pactec.

About Portland Community College: Founded in 1961, Portland Community College is the largest post-secondary institution in Oregon and provides training, degree and certificate completion, and lifelong learning to more than 57,000 full- and part-time students in Multnomah, Washington, Yamhill, Clackamas, and Columbia counties. PCC has four comprehensive campuses, 10 education centers or areas served, and approximately 200 community locations in the Portland metropolitan area. The PCC district encompasses a 1,500-square-mile area in northwest Oregon and offers two-year degrees, one-year certificate programs, short-term training, alternative education, pre-college courses and life-long learning.

Visit PCC news on the web at http://news.pcc.edu/

For B-ROLL footage, visit PCC campus and student life highlight reel.