College of Business Administration

GROUP MEMBERS:

David Brown
Francesco Caruso
Kathleen Collins
Florian Goetz
Andy Gold
Lindsay Kistner
Kim Lieu
Rudy Rodriguez
Lance Schaeffer
Rachel Trillanes
Ben Vosberg

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

A social change project consists of gathering a group of individuals who share similar interests in going out into the community and altering things in a positive way. The social change project that we decided to organize was a beach clean-up. The goal of our social change project was to gather as many individuals as possible to assist in the beach clean-up. We also focused attention on acquiring support from local businesses as well as environmental organizations willing to help.

The first step we took to get our social change project off the ground was contacting the Surfrider Foundation. The Surfrider Foundation is a non-profit organization whose focus is creating a cleaner environment. Our contact at the Surfrider foundation, Stephanie Sekich, was very cooperative and agreed to support our clean-up. Surfrider offered us all the equipment for the clean-up which included trash bags, safety gloves, disinfectant, trash claws, and most importantly they gave us an experienced voice.

Once we contacted Surfrider we took it upon ourselves to individually make efforts to recruit local businesses for clean-up support. Upon our next meeting there was an influx of new contacts willing to support our social change project. It was at this time that we created our social contracts. These contracts ensured that willing supporters would remain intact through the conclusion of the clean-up. Now that we were armed with our social contracts we found that the more professional we presented ourselves the better reception we tended to enjoy. The group decided to focus attention on creating a flyer that would not only allow for the time and date of the event but also leave a portion of space for advertisement of the supporting organizations. Luckily enough we had a few individuals with some skill in web design and made a quality flyer.

Upon our next meeting some of the group members expressed a few of the difficulties they had in obtaining signature for the social contracts. One of the main difficulties was getting in touch with businesses that had been previously contacted. We also found that many people were more willing to donate their time and supplies rather than a monetary donation. The group realized that donation of time would be a good selling point when we set up our booths on campus.

The next step we took was advertising on campus. We decided to set up an advertisement booth on campus regarding our social change project. The group agreed that the beach clean-up was a quality choice after we received a warm reception from San Diego State students. The reception made a viable argument that many San Diegan’s show some conformity when it comes to the beaches. Many students claimed that they identified with the ocean and would gladly assist our efforts to clean the beaches. The beach clean-up definitely related to the issue of land ethic in which many students felt some obligation to help clean the beaches in which they treasured.

The day preceding the event was a dismal excuse for an afternoon in the so-called sunny San Diego. It was raining and very windy, but luckily enough we advertised in our flyers that the event would take place “Rain or Shine”. The morning of the event turned out to be quite nice and we received quite a crowd. The clean-up ran very smoothly with every participant receiving a nice lunch and new t-shirt compliments of Discover Pacific Beach. Our efforts brought many smiles and thanks but more importantly we collected over one hundred pounds of trash. All in all our social change project was a success. We succeeded in cleaning up Pacific Beach with the help of our group members as well as citizens of our community.