Stephanie Hanenberg is a proud double alum of UCCS who has been an integral part of the campus community for over 19 years. She earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees at UCCS—first at Beth-El, before it joined the UCCS campus, and later a Masters in Nursing as a Family Nurse Practitioner in 2003.
Hanenberg was born and raised in Colorado Springs and wanted to be at a university where she could “stay here and do it all.”
“I knew I wanted to help people, and so nursing seemed like a good choice, and then nurse practitioner would allow me to be autonomous and do things on my own, and broadened my scope of what I could do for students,” she explained.
Hanenberg spent one year working at a community-facing clinic at a high school in Pueblo, while also teaching at schools along the way.
However, she wanted to be closer to home. And fortunately, that desire coincided with an opening at the health center. She had no idea the legacy she would be building at the university.
“I thought I’d be the health services director and that would be it, the end,” Hanenberg laughed. “I mean, I loved it. I loved being the director, and pretty much the only provider as well, so I saw all the patients and was managing the clinic, and I loved it. And I thought that’s what I would do, but I started spending more time with counseling and disability services and advocating for them, because of my passion in those areas.”
Hanenberg’s professional journey at UCCS began in August 2005 with her role as the Director of Health Services. From there, she became the Executive Director of Health, overseeing Disability Services and Counseling, before eventually taking on the role of Associate Vice Chancellor
During her tenure, Hanenberg has overseen a wide range of departments, including health, mental health, campus recreation, disability services, wellness promotion, nutrition, residence life and housing, dining and hospitality services, the campus store, the farm, and vending.
“Areas have come and gone based on whatever I needed to do to help,” Hanenberg explained.
On top of that, Hanenberg also participated in the Executive Leadership Program (ELP), which further expanded her responsibilities. She recalled how closely the departments she oversaw worked together, especially health, mental health and disability services.
“We were all so reliant on each other that we really had to learn each other’s areas, and I felt that, when I was advocating for health, it didn’t make sense to not also advocate for mental health and students with disabilities, and so in every platform I had I just talked about all three departments, because they’re completely tied together.”
Hanenberg pointed out that the three departments work so closely together that their patients often overlapped, with each team sending students across campus to the other departments.
“That’s what sparked the whole design of the recreation and wellness center,” Hanenberg said. “We designed the entire recreation and wellness center based on what we dealt with before that. Just knowing how intertwined everything was, it made sense.”
“We were one of the first integrated wellness centers that is co-located with campus recreation,” Hanenberg said. “We haven’t found anybody else that’s quite like us, and we did it because it all ties together – you need the prevention piece from Wellness Promotion, you need the health and mental health piece and be able to refer back and forth to each other, they go so closely together.”
Hanenberg and her team also added nutrition to the mix, something she considers a key component to health, as well as the physical and social benefits from campus recreation.
She shared a poignant example of how campus recreation played a vital role in a student’s life:
“Benek and I had a patient who was suicidal, they had been hospitalized, and I was providing meds and she was providing counseling, but campus rec is what saved their life,” Hanenberg said. “I finally convinced them to go on a hike and they started making friends, began working at campus rec and they were no longer suicidal. So, maybe Benek and I kept them stable, but campus rec is what saved their life.”
“Just seeing how much that all ties together, that’s why we built what we built over there.”
During Hanenberg’s tenure, utilization of services has increased, and she’s also seen more students who are willing to come in and seek help.
“I love seeing more students coming in seeking services,” she said. “Students are much more willing to come in, while before I don’t think as many students knew about them, or maybe they were a little intimidated to come in, but now they love using the services, so they keep coming back, which is great.”
Hanenberg also highlighted the growth in prevention services.
“We’ve expanded tremendously and we have the staff to work on it now,” she said. “We have to shift our lens, especially around mental health, and the biggest thing is that students who may never have come to college, or even lived to be college age, are now about to be successful thanks to advances in healthcare.”
The health team’s integrated model allows the team to keep a close eye on students, which has been extremely helpful in the effort to keep them in school.
Hanenberg’s influence has extended far beyond UCCS as she also became president of the American College Health Association (ACHA), a role that allowed her to build on her work nationally.
She has also served as president of the staff association and chair for the University of Colorado Staff Council.
Despite her many responsibilities, Hanenberg continued to see patients until taking on the interim role. “That reminds me why I do everything else. It was always the best part of my week,” she said.
Given the amount of work on her plate, balancing her professional life with her personal passions is essential for Hanenberg.
“I have to play as hard as I work,” she said. “I go to a ton of concerts, sporting events, I snowmobile, camp, hike. I’m very close with my family and friends, and I spend a lot of time socializing, going out dancing. If I don’t play hard, I can’t survive working hard.”
Hanenberg encourages her patients – and staff – to find that same balance. And, though she still tries to keep the students at the forefront of every decision she makes, as she has come further in her career, she also bases decisions around staff.
“Because if we don’t support our staff, we can’t support our students,” she said. “So my leadership style is to make sure that I build really cohesive teams that support each other and are all centered on the same mission, which is the student experience, but also make sure we’re all taking care of each other as colleagues. I think that’s so important.”
Hanenberg flatly refuses to micromanage, but makes it a point to understand everyone’s job so she can advocate for them and help problem-solve when needed.
“I want to empower people and give everyone an opportunity to grow in their position,” she said. “I constantly ask people what they want and try to help them achieve it.”
In her interim role, Hanenberg hopes to provide stability for the two divisions that are coming together to form Enrollment Management and Student Affairs (EMSA) and build cohesive teams while also exploring new opportunities.
“We have to be innovative and try new things,” she said, “so I want to push myself and my areas to think outside the box, to come up with other things that we should be trying.”
Hanenberg is also focused on enhancing the student experience and their well-being to help with retention.
“How do we get students to be able to stay, to the best of our ability? How can we engage students that may have been missed, like graduate students or commuter students? I want to provide them more of an experience on campus,” she said.
She also aims to improve staff satisfaction, support and morale.
“I want to build trust and improve job satisfaction and make everyone love coming to work every day. Well, maybe not every day, but most days,” she laughed.
Despite how far she’s come since her own undergraduate days, Hanenberg fondly remembers her time as a student.
“UCCS had parking issue then, too, and it was tiny, so we’d race here from Beth-El and one of us would stand in an open space to hold it for someone else that was driving here so we could all make it to class on time,” she shared.
In a permanent reminder of her student days, there is a portrait of Hanenberg from 1993 hanging on the wall of the nursing building. “It’s a horrid photo,” she laughed. “Absolutely horrific. It’s bad. Perms were in…there was a lot happening.”
Over the years, watching UCCS grow as a university – and being able to have a hand in that growth – has been incredibly rewarding for Hanenberg.
“It’s exciting,” she said. “I mean, there are so many new opportunities for students, and now we’re serving students we might not have been able to serve before. I don’t know of any other institution that has grown as much as we have in that timeframe, so it’s been great to be a part of it, at every level.”