LINKED lifestyle: Instilling healthy living practices in CSC recruits
When he began working as a Correctional Officer at Collins Bay Institution in 2009, Andriy Tyshkevych found that the realities of correctional work made it challenging for staff to maintain healthy habits and lifestyle.
“When I first started as a Correctional Officer, I realized how challenging it can be to stay healthy in a setting with midnight shifts, long hours, quick turnarounds, and—in some cases—sedentary posts,” he says. “It made me think about how easily anyone, myself included, can fall into less healthy patterns over time.”
Andriy found that shiftwork and the stress of the correctional environment often led to frustration and other mental health and emotional issues. This would create a spiral where healthy habits would slip further, leading to more issues.
For Andriy, a healthy lifestyle is at the core of everything he does. This is something that was instilled in him from a young age, growing up in Ukraine.
“We had a little cottage “dacha” by the woods, so I would spend a lot of time outside in the nature,” Andriy recalls fondly. “We gardened a lot, you know, we take care of our bodies and minds through these lifestyles.”
Andriy Tyshkevych uses his knowledge of healthy living to promote good habits through the Correctional Training Program.
Given the importance he placed on healthy habits in his own life, he felt he could make a meaningful, positive impact on CSC. Andriy became a Correctional Staff Training Officer in 2018 and worked to instill these practices into the new recruits he trained. Andriy says many of the new recruits come to the Correctional Training Program (CTP) with a “January 1st mindset,” where they’re committed to following a healthy lifestyle. However, like with many New Year’s resolutions, the realities of work, life and other factors tend to dampen that resolve as the days go by.
The idea for the LINKED wellness integration program was inspired by his childhood experience attending an overnight summer camp on the shores of the Black Sea in Odesa.
“All the kids had different tasks, and my task was pulling grass from between the bricks in the patio,” he recalls. “I was just sitting there and I'm pulling the weeds and, over time, I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
For all the weeds he pulled, though, he was accumulating points. These points could be traded for small activities, which made the hours spent sitting in the hot sun feel worthwhile. That reward system stuck with him all these years later.
Andriy developed LINKED to track the progress of the recruits he trains to keep track of their healthy habits while encouraging exploration of a range of wellness activities and challenges thought-out the program. These activities include practicing mindful eating, deep breathing exercises, getting a good night’s sleep, and more.
“One of the daily challenges in the program is completing a mindfulness pulse check,” he says. “Recruits work towards meeting that goal, and over time it becomes a habit. When they begin their careers as Correctional Officers, they’re more likely to continue practicing pulse checks.”
As participants practice, they earn points called “grats” — short for “gratitudes”. While not exchangeable for tangible rewards like at Andriy’s summer camp, he says the points system quickly created a healthy competition between recruits to accumulate as many grats as they could, developing a healthy lifestyle routine in the process.
Last month, LINKED has expanded across the entire CTP. Andriy envisions it spreading across all of CSC one day.
These healthy habits, Andriy says, have benefits both within the walls of an institution and beyond.
“For me, it's simple: If I had a good night's sleep, I'm going to be more patient at home with my family, with my kids, and I'm going to be more patient with my co-workers and inmates inside the institution.”;
From there, he says, it snowballs to having a positive impact on friends, neighbours and the community. Since launching the initiative, Andriy himself has made a renewed commitment to practicing what he preaches, and he has noticed he’s able to give more back to his community, including volunteering as a coach in different sports for kids in his neighbourhood.
Andriy stresses that positive change comes from within and starts by simply finding the time to work healthy habits into the daily routine.
“People are too busy scrolling. They're too busy worrying about their bills. They're too busy studying. They're too busy doing whatever. But we're getting further away—we're getting too distracted from what the foundation is,” he says.
Last month, the LINKED wellness integration program launched and will be promoted to all CSC recruits in CTP going forward. For Andriy, though, this is just the beginning. He’s already looking beyond the CTP, exploring how to get LINKED into institutions, parole offices, regional and national headquarters and anywhere CSC staff may be.
“Let's continue doing this every single day, continue changing, developing habits and a healthy lifestyle, and that leads to, hopefully, a culture change down the line.”