The connector: How Kim Ezzard turned a correctional career into a launchpad for change
Kim Ezzard has built a career around one idea: give people practical tools, and they’ll find a way forward. Over three decades, that’s meant developing programs that teach everything from growing food and managing shared projects to building discipline through structured group activities.
As a longtime Social Programs Officer with Correctional Service Canada, she’s seen how hands-on work, routine, and accountability can shift trajectories, often in ways that aren’t obvious at first, but matter long after someone leaves the institution.
Kim never set out with a lifelong plan to work as a correctional officer, or to become one of the system’s most inventive program builders. Growing up in East Selkirk, Manitoba, she earned a scholarship to play volleyball and studied criminal justice at Lethbridge College. At the time, she was working in natural resources, where seasonal layoffs meant constant uncertainty. “I got tired of waiting to see what would happen every fall,” she recalls. So, she applied to corrections — and the opportunity arrived faster than she expected.
After more than three decades with Correctional Service Canada, Kim Ezzard has learned that meaningful change often starts with something simple.
In November 1995, she walked through the doors of Stony Mountain Institution, beginning a career that would grow far beyond the role she first imagined. Over the years, she worked stints at Grande Cache Institution, Bowden Institution, and the former Rockwood Institution, now known as the minimum-security unit at Stony Mountain. There she gained a front-row view of the system and the people inside it, but it was during her time at Rockwood that she discovered the role that would define her career.
“I saw the creativity in what social programs could do,” she says. “I knew that’s where I wanted to be.” She transferred back to Stony Mountain in 2004 and has been building initiatives from the ground up ever since.
Her instinct for practical, hands-on programming shows up everywhere. About a decade ago, she launched the Minimum Unit Garden Project — a one-acre plot where offenders grow vegetables, learn skills, and donate surplus produce to community organizations including Siloam Mission, Quixote House, and Eagle Women’s Lodge. With the funding she later purchased two greenhouses, which allow participants to grow culturally diverse crops like bok choy and Chinese eggplant.
The project draws on her own upbringing.
“I grew up in a family of food producers,” she says. “Every summer we had a market garden and sold vegetables, so that hard work came back to me. Teaching offenders how to grow food is something I really enjoy.”
Then there are the doghouses. After noticing small training structures being built in a vocational carpentry shop, Kim suggested pivoting to something with a direct community impact. The result: sturdy doghouses constructed by offenders and donated to northern communities through Manitoba Animal Alliance, the province’s largest animal rescue organization. Many are packed flat and shipped north, then assembled for families who bring pets to spay-and-neuter clinics.
The work teaches practical skills while connecting participants to communities beyond the institution. “It’s something tangible,” she says. “You can see the pride in their faces.”
Sports and recreation have been another cornerstone of her work. Kim has organized countless hockey, baseball, badminton, and volleyball tournaments, complete with hand-built rinks. Volunteers from the community join in, sharing meals, conversation, and sometimes prayer.
For inmates, the games offer a rare sense of normalcy: a conversation, a shared activity, and the chance to have a mental break from the intensity of prison life.
“For a few hours, they can just be themselves,” she says. “They’re just teammates.”
That spirit of connection extends also to self-help programming. Kim has coordinated guest speakers from across Canada and around the world for offenders in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous groups, often creating welcoming, informal settings that draw in participants who might otherwise stay away. She has seen many inmates go on to maintain sobriety after release — moments she calls among the most rewarding of her career.
Ask her what stands out after 30 years, and she doesn’t point to a single program or milestone. Instead, she talks about relationships: the volunteers who show up week after week, the former offenders who stay in touch, and the quiet breakthroughs that happen in ordinary moments. “I’m the connector,” she says simply. “You never know which simple conversation might change someone’s path.”
Outside work, that same energy carries into her personal life. A competitive athlete, Kim has represented corrections at two World Police and Fire Games events, winning gold medals in pickleball and continuing to compete while planning for retirement in the next few years. Teaching the sport may be her next chapter — but whatever the future holds, she expects to stay busy.
Even after more than 30 years, Kim still walks into work with the same mindset: build something, bring people together, and leave the door open for change.
Looking back, she sees a career defined less by routine than by possibility. “You don’t know what project will come next,” she says. “If something might help people grow, we’ll try it.”