College of Business Administration

GROUP MEMBERS:

Angulo
Garcia
Villagran

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Our mission was to implement a social change project in Tijuana with the participation of CETYS University. The fundamental objective was to provide business development services, including information and guidance, to small businesses that currently cannot afford these types of services.

We thought of Mexico because first of all, our group is comprised of Mexicans and we are really interested in helping people in our home country. In Mexico the majority of businesses, around 98%, are categorized as small business. Access to business-developing services is limited. Local chambers of commerce usually require a fee too large for the small businesses we are targeting. Government programs are not well funded or not easily available in certain areas. In essence, there are not enough services available for small businesses in Mexico to help them grow and develop more successful business practices. We were interested in finding a way to make a successful and realistic program for those who need help in the Mexican community. Tijuana was an excellent place to start with because of its close proximity to San Diego.

Our key players will be SDSU, CETYS, and small businesses in Mexico. CETYS University’s business program requires ethics education for all its students. In addition, Mexican law requires that all students who pursue a bachelor’s degree must fulfil several hundred hours of community service. We approached CETYS with these facts in mind. We proposed what seems as a win/win deal: they provide a service to the community while at the same time projecting a favorable community image. At the same time, their students enroll in this program which allows them to fulfill their graduation requirements.

We had several goals with this project. Among them, we were to provide small businesses with the organizational skills that direct and assign work for specific personnel in the business. This will improve the efficiency of the business and at the same time provide a cohesive organization that meets the financial goals. This basic business training is oriented toward achieving efficiencies.

Our contact with CETYS in the city of Mexicali, Baja California, is Marco Antonio Carrillo, Ph.D. As chief coordinator of programs for the university’s Extension and External Liaison Department and professor of ethics courses, he was the perfect man for our project. He could very well link the institution’s public image aspects to some of his classes. This is when we decided that it would be more feasible to initiate this project in Mexicali, a city approximately 100 miles west of Tijuana, but also on the border with California.

We feel that this project has a big potential for success. We have worked with students from CETYS to start developing handbooks for the project coordinators. These guidebooks will be used during workshops and consulting by students. We are also exploring ways to fund additional support for this project. This is necessary in order to generate awareness for the project. Fortunately, we developed a very good relationship with CETYS. The administration posed a great interest in this program and plans to implement it starting next semester. We are still hoping that this program work out, because we feel that we will be satisfying a necessary element in developing Mexico’s economy.

Because this program has not been fully implemented yet, we fear that if it does not have a certain continuity and improvements, our work might end here and all of our work and efforts in this project will be in vane. We are sure that if this program is well implemented it will bring a lot of success and good results to the businesses and also to the students who are part of this development.