Student Contributor -S. Shier
This organization is a huge staple to life in Cheney, Washington and their purpose is to meet the needs of the community as best as they can whether that be with utilities in the home or giving the city alerts to emergencies in the area. The City of Cheney as an organization is there to be the glue that holds everything together covering many different departments from parks and recreation all the way up to the mayor. This large organization aims to keep citizens informed about what is going on in their community and help keep Cheney a place where people want to live.
Keeping Cheney a place where people want to live can be a big task and this large organization does many things to ensure this. One of the ways The City of Cheney makes a difference in the community is by putting on a “Cheney Clean Sweep” where the community can come together and volunteer to help clean up the streets and neighborhoods of the area. Many community members including EWU students, working citizens, and even families with children come together for this annual event in the spring. The City of Cheney also provides employment opportunities and ways to use parks and recreation facilities in the area for class trips and after school activities for students. These are only some of the benefits of teaming up with this organization as well many other opportunities to try and teach students what it means to make up a city and the different roles there are through the police department, fire department, or even local government.
From these ideas of how this organization could benefit teachers and students, some opportunities to make a difference through the City of Cheney for elementary classes could be to encourage students to participate in the Cheney Clean Sweep with their families, partnering with the recycling services to teach students about the benefits of recycling and how they could participate more actively in recycling, or connecting with the Cheney Community Library where students could go to hang fliers or posters they make in class on an important community topic that would line up with their classroom civic engagement project. The City of Cheney also covers utilities and water consumption could become a topic that would greatly benefit students to be informed in depth about. The ways to partner with this organization are countless with the many different departments to get in contact with and I think that teachers and their students can greatly benefit from partnering with them.
