DHS Summer Challenge

By Lisa Schauerhamer

The Department of Human Services Administrative Office’ Wellness Council gave their employees a summer challenge and dubbed it the “Big Summer Event” which started on June 7th with registration and a brown bag on the “Benefits of Walking” by Brett McIff.

During registration drawings for water bottles, tee shirts, and a lunch from Subway were given away Teams registered their members and every team chose a name.. The challenge began on June 11th and ended on July 31st. All teams were to track their miles on utahwalks.org. The first place team won a place on a perpetual plague that will be placed in the executive directors office, and the top two teams WON a healthy lunch with Lisa –Michele Church our Executive Director.

We had 22 teams register and 121 people involved. This was great for bringing staff together in the different divisions. It was friendly competition for the building and even within divisions. What a great thing to compete over “Our Health”!
DHS

Miles were counted for walking, running dancing, vacuuming, swimming gardening etc. It was easy to use the mileage convention chart that was part of the “walk tracker” to convert activities into miles. It was a great way to help people realize what they were doing in their lives already was healthy and to look at ways to improve. 19,014.9 miles were walked. Wow! The utahwalks.org web site made it a fun simple way to track miles and to be able to see how other teams were doing.

The committee put together maps of places within or near the office that could be done on a break or lunch hour. It included the directions as well as miles. This encouraged people to walk to lunch, eat more healthy, and then walk back.

This was so successful that we are thinking of making it an annual event. We learned a lot. In fact there are a couple of divisions that are going to initiate another challenge Statewide for their divisions in the fall..

It was fun to hear people in the hall and on the elevators talking about the “Challenge”. The staff was delighted to have a lunch with Lisa-Michele, and in addition, our Deputy Directors, Mark Ward and Marie Christman. They have an extremely busy schedule, it was very apparent to the Wellness Council and the DHS staff that our Executive and Deputy Directors support their efforts, and that they support fitness and exercise.