SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AND BEYOND

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No Audio: Debra Martin, Communications Manager OKDHS

Debra Martin: My name is Debra Martin and I'm a Communications Manager for the Oklahoma Department of Human Services and I help support the OKDHS mission by producing video projects for both internal and external use, writing press releases and writing stories for internal use on our infonet. 

This project is not a minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow account of the agency. It's really my intention on this video, our intention on this video, is to provide a more broad view of who we are as an agency, where we've been, how we were born, if you will, and where we are today - the services that we offer and how we got from our beginnings to coming out of the Dustbowl and the Great Depression to 75 plus years later. 

The process I went through in researching this video and trying to come up with an idea of what to include and what not to include, I just had to go through a ton of archival material: printed material, photographs, that kind of thing. Then, try to figure out what I wanted to include and what I was going to have to leave out. 

I think one of the really big highlights about the agency and about this project and finding all of this archival material is that the agency has done such a great job in documenting its history, and I had access to that and it made it so much easier - a lot of stuff to got through but so much easier. 

I got tremendous assistance from Mary Gale Foster, the Administrator of Records Management at OKDHS. She allowed me to bother her on numerous occasions and just rifle through all kinds of files and photographs. She was a great resource. Sheree Powell was also a great resource in this. Sheree just fed me a lot of archival videos, archival pamphlets, archival books that had been done on the agency in the past. So, they were a great help in putting this together. 

I would not have been able to complete this project without my partner in this and that is Ray Leyva. He's my editor at the University of Oklahoma, and the rest of the staff down there - they have been awesome, they have been accommodating, they've been encouraging, and I couldn't be happier and more proud to work with those people. I think the unifying element in putting this video together is discovering the commitment of OKDHS staff - past, present and future - from our very beginnings to now, three quarters of a century later, the commitment that the staff has to doing their job day-in and day-out and serving the people of the state of Oklahoma. 

I hope that down the road, years from now, people who may view this video project, what they may take away from OKDHS is the passion of the people, the resiliency of the staff, the resiliency of Oklahomans as a whole, coming through the Depression, coming through the Dustbowl and how this agency was birthed out of that. We've been rocked by criticism along the way at various stages in our agency history. I hope that the people, say 50 or 75 years from now, will view this video in some kind of format and say, "Yeah, those folks were committed just like us." 

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