College of Business Administration

GROUP MEMBERS:

Jocelyn Jung
Mel Orellana
Stephanie Sapak
Jawon Yoon

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Overview on the Beneficiaries:

Child Protective Services (CPS) is a San Diego County Organization that is sometimes viewed as the “Child Police”. This organization aims to secure the welfare of the Children in the East Region of San Diego County. The areas covered by this region are: El Cajon, La Mesa, Spring Valley, Lakeside, Santee, and Alpine, including neighboring areas. They concern themselves with reinforcing a child’s right to live a happy, safe, and healthy life. CPS has many different departments that are classified under front end and back end categories.

The department our group worked with is in the back end of the organization called the Department of Family Preservation. This department focuses on keeping the family together and doing all that is possible to help keep children from being removed from the household. This includes designating a specified number of hours per week, usually eight or more, to spend time with the family and concentrate on their needs. An interview and investigation assesses the family’s needs and helps develop a case plan. The family must follow this individually, specialized plan in order to continue receiving services from Family Preservation. This program is known to reap positive results.

Family Preservation offers services such as counseling on various issues (such as molestation, anger, drug use, budgeting, etc.), helping to find adequate housing, delivering food, buying furniture (and other household items that maintain the safety of the child’s life), helps the parents find employment, assists with transportation needs, and also helps with many other daily rituals. Family Preservation has a motto of “only helping those who are willing to help themselves” and will work harder and more extensively with families who make a serious effort to work with the program. The workers in the Department of Family Preservation are in essence “family helpers” with the goal of doing everything possible to keep the family together.

Mission:

Because of state-wide budget cuts and union strikes, it has become increasingly difficult for CPS to find foodstuffs and donations. The goal of our project was to help the County during the holiday season by providing additional means of resources in order feed the many families they service. Our group decided that helping children was a good cause and something we were all concerned with, so we chose CPS as our beneficiaries. The main specification of our project was to obtain a minimum of 200 food items to donate and deliver them to CPS before the holidays arrive.

Our project was to be executed in 4 steps: 1) Each group member was to pick a desired location, such as their workplace, to hold a drive 2) They would set up our group flier and a receptacle in that designated area and document all activity 3) They would collect at least a minimum of 50 items during the week of November 14th to November 21st 4) When the drive was over we would collect all items and deliver them to CPS the following day.

Results and Recommendations:

Any amount of food we can donate for a cause, such as Child Protective Services, is considered a success in itself. Our group had great results considering the setbacks and difficulties we encountered along the way. We originally planned to host a food drive in front of a grocery store or a convenience store, such as Wal-Mart. Due to constraining factors such as: schedule dilemmas, lack of available information required from both the beneficiary and the host location, union strikes, and the California State Fires we were forced to rethink our project plans. Once our new plan (as stated in our Mission Statement) was established and implemented we were well on our way to success.

Initially, we were skeptical that circumstances regarding the fires would cause people not be receptive to our cause and would result in a low turn out. Since our change in project plans altered the dates of our drive, there was time for the buzz of the fire to die down and people returned to their normal activities. Because of these circumstances, people were more receptive to our cause, which was an important factor to our success. There were a lot of charities going around helping the fire victims as well as the usual holiday associations. Fortunately our timing was right and people were able to help our cause donating more than our targeted amount.

The most successful turn out, in terms of donations, was received from the Comanche Hills apartment community. Towards the deadline for our food drive, our group member found that the level of donations was too low to call a success and decided to make a few changes. A couple of fliers had been posted by the mailroom but people were not getting the message. After changing the flier to create a sense of urgency, the flier was handed out to each residence. We found that going door to door and actually speaking to the residents was a lot more productive though a little time consuming. The personal contact created a sense of security for the donators and ensured us that they received the message. A future recommendation would be to personally collect the donations instead of having people bring it to a centralized location. Though the latter is more efficient, in a time-constrained situation it worked out better to save people the trouble. The instructions were to leave the donations by their door, making it easier for donators and creating fewer excuses to not contribute. Thanks to this approach, we were able to successfully collect more than our goal of 200 items for donation.

Cost and Benefit Analysis:

Weighing the costs and benefits of this project is difficult because we are comparing the value of time to the intrinsic worth of our project. In reviewing our scheduled plans, there were an overall of ninety days for us to establish, implement, and complete our project. The first seventy days are marked by group formations, poor development plans, lack of participation, difficulties with our sponsor and outside influences beyond our control that resulted in the initial cancellation of our project and ultimately a large waste of time and energy. With only twenty days left, failure to keep our promise of donations to CPS was not an option. It took one day to develop a new donation plan, two days to complete and distribute materials, twelve days to execute, and one day to deliver the donations to CPS. These sixteen days were all it took to fully complete our project leaving our team with four days to reflect and one day to plan our presentation. Had we exhibited the amount of effort we showed in the last twenty days for the entire ninety-day project, our success could have been far beyond our expectations.

Although we failed to effectively utilize our time, we surpassed our donation goal, received the gratitude of CPS, and found individual intrinsic values. Our initial plans aimed to donate a minimum of 200 items, of which our final donations surpassed (see photos). Considering CPS’s recent lack of donations, our contributions will be able to assist CPS in helping many San Diego families. It is in this act of volunteering that each group member was able to benefit from the intrinsic values of helping those that are less fortunate than us. In the end, it is not that wasted time the will be remembered, but the teams donations to CPS and the families that will benefit from these goods that count. These values are what allow our benefits to outweigh out cost of time.

Ethical Frameworks:

Social Contract Theory states that morality consists in the set of rules, governing how people are to treat one another, which rational people will agree to accept, for their mutual benefit, on the condition that others follow those rules as well. It is moral to ensure that the children of our future are growing up in a safe environment; however, in some situations this is not the case. CPS is reaches out to needy children and their families to help ensure that the governing rules of how people should treat one another, especially children, are being enforced. Our group donated time and efforts to make a contribution to their wonderful service.

Ethic of Care asks us to recognize and take seriously the moral worth of relationships, particularly those characterized by caring. Every child has a right to grow up in a caring and safe family environment. Our group recognizes the importance of children and their moral relationships, especially at such a young age and is willing to help CPS ensure this.

Deontology is an ethical theory which holds that actions are morally right or wrong independent of their consequences. Our group stands by our decision to support CPS’s cause and activity, because we believe that CPS is a beneficial organization to our society. The main focus of our project is not how much we can donate, but lies more in the thought of how our donations and efforts to help their cause. We take pride, knowing that every little bit helps contribute to CPS’s enforcing what is morally right.

Moral rights are based on legal rights and the principle of duty. My moral right implies that you have certain duties toward aiding my rights (Weiss text, p83)

Our group believes that every child has the right to grow up in the safe and healthy environment. Also, we feel that we have a duty toward helping unfortunate children.

Distributive justice refers to the fair distribution of benefits. It is very unfortunate that some children and family do not have safe and healthy home. Our group values children’s welfare, safety, health, and happiness and hopes that although our efforts will not solve all issues, they will help to provide the distributions of special benefits to families.