On Thursday, January 19, 2023, Cobweb Express announced a new change for the Holistic Health Center. The change is a brand new position set to help improve Concordia College’s overall health and wellbeing.
Heather Simonich is now the director of the Center of Holistic Health.
Before Simonich stepped into the position, the Center of Holistic Health was divided into different departments. Now, the Office of Disability, Counseling office, and Health Services are under one department spearheaded by Simonich. Despite this change, these services are still located in the basement of Old Main.
Lisa Sethre-Hofstede has worked at Concordia College for the past 26 years. She is currently serving as the Vice President for Student Development and Campus Life and a professor of Psychology on campus. In her position, Sethre-Hofstede oversees departments that students encounter outside of their regular class time. Sethre-Hofsetde was in charge of putting together this new role. She noted that this idea for this emergence of departments has been around for the last two years, but now has adapted a new approach in the last month or so. Part of the reason for forming the Center of Holistic Health was to help guide support and encourage students to take responsibility for every part of their lives.
“The vision was really intended to bring a lot of pieces together to help students think about and see their whole health lives a holistic enterprise,” said Sethre-Hofstede. “It is designed to really think about how to promote programming and education around all of those kinds of needs that students have.”
Sethre-Hofstede is looking forward to what Heather Simonich will bring to the rebranded Holistic Health center in her new role as director. She said, “Heather brings a lot of very relevant professional experience to this role and is really going to help us elevate the work that the center does.”
She might be new to the position, but this is not her first time being within the Concordia College community. Simonich started her educational journey as a Cobber. She graduated from Wilmar High School and then moved up to the Moorhead community. She was a double major in sociology and psychology and graduated in 1999. From there she went straight to graduate school at Ball State to study counseling psychology. Right after finishing her graduate degree, she moved back to Moorhead and was an adjunct professor at Concordia in the psychology department. Her three children even attended Cobber Kids. Then, she started a job at the Neuropsychiatric Research Institute in Fargo where she spent time working with adult eating disorders and childhood trauma.
After that, she spent eight years at Nexus Path Family Healing. She was the Operational Director overseeing community based services and school based services. “Much of my career has been spent advocating for children who have experienced traumatic life events,” said Simonich.
Finally, Simonich felt it time to return to higher education. She felt like she was still actively engaged in the Concordia College community. She and her husband still live close to campus.
Simonich said, “I felt called to come back to campus at a time where we know the mental health needs of students, in particularly young adults, are really off the charts comparatively.”
A couple of her goals for this position is to expand on the services currently available, increase the impact within students when they’re navigating campus resources and find ways to support faculty and staff seeing as student needs also impact their jobs on campus.
“There has been a reference to the Center of Holistic Health in name only, and a lot of the work that we are doing is really integrating counseling, disability, and health services,” said Simonich.
Some of her goals for this semester to getting to know her new team, meeting with on-campus leaders and finding ways to meet the needs of students. Officially, Simonich started as the director of Holistic Health services on December 20, 2022.
