Richard and Mary Hardy sat outside Alumni Hall in the Indiana Memorial Union Tuesday greeting IU students and staff as they entered the IU Health Center’s 43rd annual Health Fair. Two framed photos of the couple sat on a table as students passed by; one of the couple in high school and one of the couple 20 years ago.
After meeting in elementary school, Richard, a retired professor of applied health science, and Mary have been married for 61 years. They spoke to students Tuesday about how to build their own positive relationships in college.
“Balance in your life, that’s what it is,” Richard said. “A well-balanced life — physical, emotional, social, spiritual even.”
Richard and Mary’s daughter Cathlene Hardy Hansen, director of Health and Wellness at the IU Health Center, helped organize the Health Fair. She said she hoped her parents’ relationship would help students think about how their own relationships affect health.
“Often we think of health as just preventing illness, but we want to promote a greater sense of well-being and a vision for creating healthy relationships,” Hansen said.
College can be a pivotal time for relationship building, as many students are leaving their family and friends at home to live on their own, Hansen said. She said she hopes the IU Health Center can become the “wellness home” for these students, where physical and psychological health needs can be met through community connections.
Planning for the Health Fair — an event more than 1,000 students attended — began almost a year in advance. New this year was an omega-3 testing station, where participants were alerted to different types of health issues like heart disease. An aromatherapy booth and free massages were also onsite to give students a small taste of the stress management services the IU Health Center offers.
On-campus resources like OASIS and IU MoneySmarts were at the fair to draw connections between their own services and those of the IU Health Center.
“All of the booths in here bring together this community,” Richard said. “It’s a community of helping other people. Bloomington is a service-oriented community.”
Other Bloomington-area organizations like Planned Parenthood, Relay for Life and American Red Cross offered information to students. Each booth at the fair was required to have an interactive element to engage passersby.
Health Now, a student organization focusing on preventative health, partnered with the IU Health Center to provide a mobile functional body age station. Through a series of physical tests, including blood pressure and heart rate screenings, participants were given a physical age to compare to their chronological age.
Alex Floyd, the president of Health Now, said from these results he has been able to direct people to the Health Center’s fitness specialist to improve the results of individual tests.
“We’ve been really busy,” Floyd said. “I think people have liked it and enjoyed it, and we can tell that people are concerned about their health.”
The Health Fair also featured free food and recipes, such as Green Groovy Smoothies and barbecue salmon sandwiches. It also offered flu shots and vision and hearing screenings in an effort to promote a well-rounded perspective of health.
“We really try to touch on the holistic picture of health,” Hardy Hansen said. “Including healthy relationships, healthy sexual relationships, nutrition, tobacco cessation, stress management in so modalities that we really really love to keep people healthy.”
