TRANSCRIPT:

Mack Burke: I'm Mack Burke, host of We Are Land Grant, and I'm joined today by first cowgirl, Angela Hess, wife of OSU President, Jim Hess, an avid mental health advocate. Angela, welcome.

Angela Hess: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Mack Burke: When Jim Hess was named OSU's 20th President this spring, that meant a new role for you as well.

What's your first cowgirl experience been like so far?

Angela Hess: The blessing side of it is that I get to see with my husband, his dream lived out. He has worked so hard for 44 years for the university. He has loved this university, and as a wife, being able to see your partner's dream come to fruition in your lifetime is probably one of the greatest gifts that you can get.

But the biggest, the biggest blessing is meeting these students and finding opportunities. Every single day to engage with them, learn about them, hear their histories, talk to them about where they wanna go in life, and hopefully be a little part of that with them.

Mack Burke: Since taking on this new role, you've put mental health support front and center with the Cowboys Care campaign.

What inspired you to shine a light on this topic?

Angela Hess: The reason I really wanted to bring this to light, especially on this campus, is we are living in a different day and time. Mental health is something that is affecting more and more people. It's also something that has carried a, just a, a stigma with it.

There's a veil of silence around mental health and so. Because of my own experiences growing up, dealing with my own things that I struggled with, with anxiety or depression, and then seeing this in my own home and passing it on generationally, I wanted to do something. I wanted to make an impact. I didn't expect it to be this big.

But it has really taken off and seeing the students embrace this and come and say, how can I be a part of it, has been such an incredible experience for me.

Mack Burke: What are your goals for the campaign?

Angela Hess: For students across campus, faculty, administrators, and families to understand and know that Oklahoma State University wants to invest in each one of them.

We wanna provide the best mental health services that we can possibly provide, and we want it to be a broad range because not everybody is suffering from the same thing. So, it's very important that we have different services across all of our campuses. We need to take this out as we're growing to Oklahoma City and to Tulsa and Okmulgee.

All of our campuses need to have these options available to them for help.

Mack Burke: What kinds of new resources or programs will students see because of Cowboys Care?

Angela Hess: Well, we already have great resources, but right now our goal is to unify these resources across campus, including the University Counseling Services, University Health Services, Timely care, Better Help, Family and Children's Services.

But the most exciting program that is about to be launched is our Cowboy Cares Ambassador program. This program is aimed to train volunteers across our campus to be good mental health ambassadors for students and getting them directed to the resources that they need. We wanna be a friendly face that can help point these individuals in the right direction.

The amazing thing is they are seeking us out. We we're not having to seek people. They're coming to us. Every day I get someone reaching out to me, whether it might be a student, it might be a faculty member, it could be somebody even outside of Oklahoma State that has heard about this program and asked me how can we help? How can we participate? So I know it's a needed initiative and I think it's going to be incredibly impactful.

Mack Burke: And it sounds like sort of combining these resources to make them more accessible, easier to find. That's really at the heart of what you guys are doing there

Angela Hess: It is. And we're even looking at a centralized scheduling system, which would be great because what we don't have are systems that talk with each other.

We have many, many different systems across the university, but they don't all talk to one another. That's a big issue. So, a huge goal of ours is to be able to have systems that talk to one another. That will be a long-range goal, but it is absolutely achievable if we all work together.

Mack Burke: Angela, thanks again for joining us.

Angela Hess: Well, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.