Moose Lake's Chrissy Gamst Recognized for Transforming Lives Award
By Ian Heaslip
Chrissy Gamst, Corrections Security Caseworker Career at MCF- Moose Lake, is the winner of the Transforming Lives Award of the month in the category of Above and Beyond Call of Duty. The following narrative illustrates the great work that Chrissy does here at the facility!
Case Manager Chrissy Gamst has gone above and beyond the call of duty with regards to her job duties as a Case Worker-Career. At the beginning of the summer, she volunteered to take the lead in rebuilding the Restorative Justice committee at MCF-ML. The committee had lost some momentum during COVID and lost about half of its members. She dedicated herself to rebuilding the committee based on RJ principles while taking a person-centered approach. She facilitated several meetings with the remaining RJ committee members focused initially on finding new members. She listened to what the current members wanted with regards to criteria for new members. She then facilitated a welcome circle for the new members and allowed the members to set the standards for their participation and their accountability to one another.
As the work was being done in rebuilding the RJ Committee, she was able to work with the committee to provide RJ programming at MCF-ML. She had a presentation given to the committee by Laura Anderson, an intern for The Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking at UMD via Teams, which led to several incarcerated individuals at MCF-ML participating in a call for papers about their story. Ms. Gamst facilitated Inside/Out presentations during the summer and early fall. Finally, thanks in large part to the work she did to rebuild the RJ Committee, MCF-ML had a very successful RJ week, offering several different programing options through the shortened week.
MCF-ML is currently running 2 weekly sessions of RJ 101 where incarcerated people learn the principles of RJ and learn to apply those principles to their life. This is a direct result of the work Ms. Gamst has done with the RJ Committee. It should also be noted, Ms. Gamst was doing all of this work despite a large caseload of her own while covering the case load of one of her co-workers who was out on a medical. She accomplished all of this while presenting a great “can do” attitude even though it was a lot of detail orientated work. She certainly went above and beyond the call of duty.
L to R: Brian Collins, Warden; Chrissy Gamst, Corrections Security Caseworker Career; Kevin Szczyrbak, Corrections Program Director
