College of Business Administration

GROUP MEMBERS:

Kristin Tornincasa
John Gangitano
Allen Ishibashi
Perla Pucillo

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Our Social Change Project allowed our group to work with two great organizations, NCR Corporation and the San Diego Food Bank. There were many reasons why we chose NCR as our company of choice to work with. Firstly, NCR is a very large company with over 1200 hundred employees in their San Diego location. Secondly, Kristin Tornincasa works as a part-time employee there, and knows a lot of the managers and decision-makers in the company. Thirdly, NCR is a socially responsible organization that contributes to society in many ways. Therefore, with all of these wonderful characteristics, we believed NCR would be an ideal business to work with for our social change project. In addition, the reason we chose the San Diego Food Bank as our non-profit organization was because of the urgency of need for food in San Diego County. Food is a need and not a want, and currently there are people in San Diego County that are homeless and in need of our help.

The project entailed a Food Drive at NCR, where our hopes were to inform NCR employees that a food drive was going on and try to maximize the success of the event by getting a large number of food donated. Therefore, on February 14th, 2003, after getting the San Diego Food Bank and NCR Corporation’s blessing to put on a Food Drive, our team started to strategies how we were going to put on a successful event. Our goals were to maximize the amount of food donated as well as provide quality donations that would benefit the San Diego Food Bank the most.

One important step our group took was looking at the possible challenges and obstacles of our project. We were able to come up with some difficulties that we would need to address in order to ensure the success of the project; finding our biggest challenge to be the possible laziness and forgetfulness of the employees. This was a major concern for our group, considering the fact that the success of the project relies solely on the participation of the employees. Therefore, we spent a majority of our time thinking of ways to get everyone aware of the food drive, as well as participate in it.

Once the strategy was in place, we decided to have our food drive start on Monday, March 31st and go till Thursday, April 10th, because, we wanted to give employees enough time to participate in the event. We really wanted the food drive to be successful because for one, it is for a really great cause; and two, during non-holiday months is when the Food Bank needs donations the most.

In order to publicize the event, we created posters, which were displayed at both entrances at NCR, so employees could see them when they arrived at work, as well as when they left. We also created flyers and posted them up all around the building a week before the event started. In addition, we decorated boxes where the cans would be donated, created a mass email to be sent out to all NCR employees, and created a PowerPoint slide to be displayed on the monitors. Finally, we created “Most Needed Items” lists to encourage employees to participate, as well as remind them that the event was starting and give them some insight into what items were desired by the San Diego Food Bank.

In conclusion, the results of the food drive were overwhelming. The generosity of the employees was unbelievable, making this food drive a huge success. After loading all of the food into our cars, we had one of the San Diego Food Bank drivers pick up the food and weigh the total amount donated. The ending result was 378 pounds of food donated, the equivalent of 302 meals that the Sand Diego Food Bank would be able to serve.