College of Business Administration

GROUP MEMBERS:

Denise Gallagher
Gada Shaikli
Scott E. Seyler
Ernie Hudson
Shyla Winter

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

The opportunity for success and financial gain in Southern California is as diverse as its’ people. Today’s economic environment allows everyone the chance of financial freedom. As hard as an individual may try, realizing those freedoms can be a daily struggle. Too large of a percentage of fellow-San Diegans go through the day without their basic needs being met. Basic necessities such as adequate food or clothing and access to public facilities are too often missing from the less fortunate’s daily life. The burden of their economic hardships can be shared and made less of a challenge with organizations such as Inter-Faith.

Interfaith Community Services is a non-profit organization which partners with over 258 congregations in the North County area. It owes a lot of its success to its ability to network with these diverse faith communities. Our initial contact with Interfaith led the group to believe that is an organization that recognizes and takes seriously the moral worth of caring for all people, regardless of one’s faith. That success is founded on a very basic level, a food program. This food program has allowed many homeless, the under or non-employed, physically and mentally challenged individuals access to food, comfort items and money donations. It is the vision of Interfaith to provide this assistance as a hand up not a hand out.

Our Community Services project goal was designed to work side by side with the people at Interfaith and sponsor a food and clothing drive. Through our complete cost benefit analysis it was our goal to show that the financial cost to benefit the community will be minimal in comparison to the assistance provided too many of the members of our community. In addition to food and clothing stations set up at each of our respective places of employment, we were assisted by additional outside corporations. Those corporations include First American Appraisal, City of San Diego Water Division, San Diego Family Superior Court, and the Super-Stores of America. We selected a number of areas within the San Diego community to increase our exposure for the food and clothing drive.

It was also our goal to obtain a total of $2000.00 in donations from corporate sponsors. Each team member solicited members of the corporate community and requested financial donations for the Adopt-a-Family Christmas program. We successfully achieved our goal and raised $2160.00 in cash donations. Those donations will be passed onto Inter-Faith Community Services to purchase Christmas presents for at least 15 families in the greater San Diego area.

The food and clothing drive we held on November 16th and 23rd did not produce as many donations as we had originally anticipated. We were successful however in collecting a total of four truckloads of food and other material donations from our co-workers, friends, and family members. All in all we feel as a group we had a successful project.