People of the CBSA: Andrew Wychnenka's story - Video transcript

Transcript

Images of Andrew delivering workshops and meeting with clients.

Andrew Wychnenka, Informal Conflict Management Systems Practitioner (Prairie Region)

I’ve been working at the CBSA now for about three-and-a-half years. My role is to help people navigate conflict situations, and I also provide training and workshops. What I find is that people really just want their situation to be better. Regardless of what side they’re on, they want to be able to come to work and be happy coming to work. They want to have good morale and be excited to go to work. My job is really to help people be able to have those difficult conversations to try and better themselves and the workplace, so that they can go to a place where they really enjoy working.

Images of Andrew participating in street hockey tournament.

As a Wellness Committee, one of the things that we created was this idea of having a three-on-three hockey tournament in the back lane just outside of our building, and we got a lot of great uptake for that, and it kind of evolved to something bigger and now the committee that puts on the GCWCC campaign here has incorporated that into their campaign.

Images of Andrew from his military deployment to Afghanistan.

Outside of the CBSA I’ve actually been involved with the Military Police Reserves for the last 15 years. The highlight of that time was my deployment to Afghanistan in 2008. My role there was actually as a police mentor for the Afghan National Police. You’re inspired by the passion of these individuals who want to make Afghanistan a better place. Being able to work with them to do that was just very rewarding for me, and really fit with my idea of building capacity and helping people make their situation better. Whether it’s conflict resolution or if it’s building capacity in Afghanistan, that’s my MO and what I like to do in just helping people make their world a slightly better place.

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