EMPORIA (KSNT) — Students at Emporia State University are turning classroom lessons into real-world impact by raising money and awareness for a local nonprofit through a community pickleball tournament.
What started as a semester-long assignment in a small group communications course has grown into a full-scale event benefiting the Street Cats Club, an Emporia-based organization focused on reducing the stray cat population across the Flint Hills.
“As part of the assignment, we wanted to raise awareness for something to help the community, and we noticed, hey, theres is a problem with feral cats on the streets here in Emporia,” said student organizer Jagger Jacobs.
To bring attention to the issue, students organized a pickleball tournament — choosing the sport for its accessibility and growing popularity.
“We have like these courts, and we’re like ‘Oh, there’s like courts that are readily available’ and a lot of people like to play it, it’s on the rise, and there’s just a lot of courts available to use it,” said student organizer Haley Hetrick.
The Street Cats Club work to reduce the area’s stray cat population through trap-neuter-return, a process that includes trapping, vaccinating and sterilizing cats before returning them to their colonies.
“And that’s when we go out into the community, and we humanely trap stray cats, get them vaccinated, spayed or neutered, ear tip them, and then we return them to their colonies so that they can continue to live the lives that they already know, without contributing to the population that is already super overcrowded,” said Victoria Partridge, executive director of the Street Cats Club.
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Organizers said the event took weeks of planning and has already raised more than $1,000 for the organization.
“It allows us to continue doing what we’re doing without having to have so much stress on the fundraising aspect of it, knowing that we have the funds that are coming in from this tournament to help us,” Partridge said.
Partridge, who graduated from Emporia State’s Communications program, said seeing students use their skills to give back is meaningful.
“To see these students take those skills and apply them towards a social service is just absolutely everything I stand for,” she said.
Even though the tournament has wrapped up, organizers said the community can still support the Street Cats Club by donating and learning more about its work.
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