A WAY OF LIFE: KEVIN’S STORY
Ask Kevin Kuteesa what living the Cowboy Code means to her, and she won't point to a banner or a plaque. She'll point to her mother.
“The first time I learned about the Cowboy Code,” Kevin says, “the line that was perfect for me was ‘We know challenges come with pain, but pain will not win.’” Kuteesa’s tone is warm but full of the conviction that comes with truth as she speaks. “There was a lot of pain, a lot of loss, my mother endured...despite the pain, despite the loss, she kept moving.”
Though Kuteesa’s mother herself has no obvious ties to the Cowboy Code, she’s lived it nonetheless: persisting, resiliently, as she built a future for her children, and refused to let pain have the final word. That same strength is clear in Kuteesa as she recalls how she learned about the Cowboy Code when she first came to Oklahoma State, now several years ago. “These aren’t just statements. This is our way of life. It's not in our clothes, it's in our character.”
Opportunity to own your future
For Kuteesa, the development of this character starts years beforehand, when her mother received an unusual gift named Sandra. “Sandra is a cow,” she laughs, “that’s a name given by my siblings. She was my family’s lifeline.”
Sandra, Kuteesa goes on to explain with clear fondness, came from a nonprofit called Send a Cow when she was young. The seemingly small gift had an enormous impact on Kuteesa’s family, and the milk Sandra produced gave Kuteesa’s widowed mother a measure of empowerment and self-reliance she hadn't had before. It's a lesson Kuteesa says has stayed with her in everything since: real opportunity isn't a handout, but a tool that lets someone control their own future.
It's that same conviction that carried Kuteesa across an ocean, into a global studies program she hadn't originally planned to pursue, and eventually into the Spears School of Business where a chance introduction to the Riata Center for Innovation reshaped what she thought her future could hold.
"Coming here was a dream. i was dreaming as big as the sky"
Today, she's an entrepreneur and co-founder of ProGrid Capital Ventures, an organization supporting women entrepreneurs in underserved communities in Uganda. These women, who like her mother once did, have big ideas and nowhere near enough access to get them off the ground.
To Kuteesa, that gap is exactly where the Cowboy Code lives. "We dream as big as the sky," she says is one of her favorite tenets, and certainly not a throwaway line. "Coming here was all a dream. I was dreaming as big as the sky, being thousands of miles away from home."
But the dreaming, she's quick to add, is only half the Code. "We actually have the responsibility to build systems that bring those dreams to life," she says. "If I dream of women empowerment, if I dream of access for the women we support, then it is my responsibility to create the systems that can grant them that access, that opportunity, and bring that dream to life."
It's a responsibility she extends past her own work and straight to the students walking OSU's campus right now. "Have the confidence in [your] ability to learn," she says with enthusiasm. "Do not underestimate the power of your story." Kutessa reiterates that the opportunities that stretch you are the ones that shape you the most, even if you don’t feel perfectly prepared. "Take up responsibility before you actually even feel ready for it," she says. "That is where true service lies. That is where true leadership lies."
The honor of responsibility
For Kuteesa, leadership was never about a title. "It's about the responsibility that comes with it," she says, the act of showing up, of being generous, of building something sustainable rather than simply well-intentioned. It's a lesson she says OSU handed her again and again, through mentors, through a community that invested in her not because they needed to, but because they chose to. "It's a strong reaffirmation," she says. "We see you, we believe in what you're doing, and we want to be part of what you're building."
That, in the end, is Kuteesa's version of the Cowboy Code, distilled down for anyone willing to hear it: dream big, take up the responsibility that comes with it, and never underestimate what your own story might set into motion.
