College of Business Administration

GROUP MEMBERS:

Adam Stratton
Holly Erickson
Guillermo Salgado
Leland Dang
Regina Huynh

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

The goal of our social change project was to enrich the lives of the homeless and at risk youth who attend Monarch High School. Monarch High School was established in 1988 to serve the academic needs of youths with barriers such as dysfunctional families, physical abuse, substance abuse, mental illness, gang culture, lack of education, and chronic poverty. Due to these barriers, it is almost impossible for these children to enroll in traditional schools. Along with proper education, Monarch High School also provides clothing, meals, health care, transportation and family assistance. The San Diego County Office of Education provides about half of Monarch High School’s funding. The rest is supported by The Monarch School Project, a non-profit organization. The Monarch School Project is solely supported by donations from individuals and businesses and by volunteers.

Since these children’s realities are extremely challenging, most of them haven’t had a chance to consider ethics when making decisions. Our group developed an hour-long ethics lecture to present to the Entrepreneurship students at Monarch High School. We explained the concepts of social contract theory, justice, deontology, and utilitarianism. We then gave the students three different business scenarios in which to apply these ethical concepts. To our surprise, these children were extremely bright, creative and ethical. After living lives where they had acted in questionable ways just to survive, these children still knew right from wrong.

In order to demonstrate how business ethics is applied in the real world, our group has arranged a field trip to Qualcomm Stadium on May 7th. The tour guide will discuss issues such as the Charger ticket guarantee and the controversy surrounding the new Padre Stadium. We chose Qualcomm Stadium for the field trip for two reasons. First, the stadium has been at the center of many ethical decisions in recent years; and second, because a behind the scenes tour of the stadium will be a new and interesting experience for these children.

We collected donations from two local businesses in order to fund the field trip to the stadium as well as lunch for the kids and trolley passes for the volunteers attending the field trip. Any leftover money will be donated directly to Monarch High School. In addition, we collected a variety of food items from local businesses which will assist Monarch in their day to day operations.

John Rawls said that “Each person has an equal right to the most extensive basic liberties that are compatible with similar liberties for others.” This theory of distributive justice would not be possible without organizations like Monarch High School. Monarch gives children a chance at life that they probably would not have had on the streets.