Anya Piotrowski, a 2023 graduate of the PHD Program in Leadership and Change, published her dissertation titled, Landscaping Wellness at Work: A Participatory Model for Worker-Centered Health.
Through a participatory process, Piotrowski’s work was researched by using a team of employees within a start-up of remote work in order to implement wellness within their organization. The outcomes would emerge from the group where employees identified opportunities for wellness. This brought focus to their core ideas: organizational, personal, and cross-boundary initiatives.
Collaboratively, employees were able to generate ideas in order to develop and address employee-identified priorities ensuring wellness within their organization. This process brought a model called the Landscaping Wellness model which allows future practitioners and scholars to utilize in order to practice storytelling, idea generation, and planning for work-defined wellness. This allowed participants to grapple with the complex nature of wellness within the workplace.
As a cisgender white woman of settler colonizer identity and ancestry in both Brazil and the U.S., Piotrowski values her practice of centering relationships, as well as unlearning the internalized and oppressive behaviors that come with it. With nearly fifteen years of higher education experience, Piotrowski has prioritized nearly a decade of her work in community and campus relationships for student and community partner-focused programs. Living across from one of the lakes in Madison, WI, Piotrowski is an online adjunct teacher for World and U.S. History at an East Tennessee university.
Read more about Piotrowski and her dissertation, Landscaping Wellness at Work: A Participatory Model for Work-Centered Health, here.
