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PDRMA Profiles |
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PDRMA Profiles |
How do you stay motivated to achieve your health and wellness goals? We’d like your ideas and tips about eating right and exercising. Please email HealthinAction@pdrma.org with your story or suggest another PDRMA Health Program participant who has inspired you for us to feature in a profile. Help us to stay focused on health and wellness! A great way for agencies to help keep PATH participants engaged with their wellness journey — and have them earn points toward the Points and Level game — is to offer a quarterly agency-sponsored activity. Not only does it allow flexibility for agencies to create customized activities that work for them, but it means 100 points for anyone who completes it! Throughout 2022, the following nine agencies offered one or more quarterly activities that turned out to be healthy, fun and rewarding for everyone. To learn more about some of these agency-sponsored activities, see the descriptions of three of them, below.
The agency offered employees “a challenge to join a challenge” by participating in the Parks and Rec Trek 2022, a step challenge among 11 different agencies — including Park Ridge — that Corrie Guynn, Superintendent of Parks and Planning at Skokie Park District organized. Everyone who joined the challenge received a t-shirt and 100 PATH points. The event helped out the community as well, since participants had to donate a nonperishable food item. The winning agency claimed all the donations and brought them to a local food pantry. Special Recreation Association of Central Lake County (SRACLC) If you can make your message personal, people are much more likely to take it to heart. And that’s what SRACLC did for its agency-sponsored activities. Organizer Cassie Wodrich, Superintendent of Administration, split up the agency’s full-time staff into teams of two and assigned the teams a month of staff meetings for which they were responsible. With two meetings per month, they made the focus of one meeting on improving mental health and devoted the second meeting to exploring healthy snacks and their benefits. Some of the mental health topics included positive affirmations, laughing yoga and meditations. Samples of healthy snacks included dark chocolate (an antioxidant that can help raise high-density lipoprotein, your “good” cholesterol) paired with a trail mix high in protein (helps build muscle, repair tissue and improve immunity). Other snacks included homemade chocolate hummus and rice cakes as well as a protein spread with rice cakes. Both the mental health and snacking topics led to great conversations among the staff along with discussions about how individuals cope with stress and anxiety.
When life gives you a lemon, make lemonade — and offer PATH participants the chance to earn 100 points! The agency’s full-time custodian was on a well-deserved 10-day vacation, and without a part-time custodian to cover for him, there would be seven times during his vacation without custodial coverage. Coincidentally, there just happens to be seven employees at the agency that participate in PATH. Superintendent Theresa Tevsh measured out how many steps it would take to sweep the gym floor and three-lane track and challenged all seven employees to sign up for one of the available spots to clean one or the other while their custodian was away. Tevsh estimated it would take approximately 30 minutes or 2,200 steps to clean the gym and slightly fewer steps and less time to clean the track. It was a creative way to get the job done and reward staff for lending a hand! If these kinds of challenges sound like fun, talk with your Wellness Committee about developing your own agency-sponsored activity in 2023! |
Park Ridge Park District 
Sycamore Park District