College of Business Administration

GROUP MEMBERS:

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Our group organized and planned an earth day fair at San Diego State University. The event took place on Tuesday, April 20, 2004 from 10am-3pm, in front of Hepner Hall and along Campanile Walk. The purpose of the event was to expose and educate SDSU students and the San Diego community to environmental issues including conservation, recycling, and the use of environmentally friendly products and alternatives. It was our hopes for Green Day to become an annual event. Through this event we wanted to have a variety of vendors exhibiting their products, ideas, or services to raise environmental consciousness.

We planned our event to be a festival/expo to provide attendees an opportunity to expand their awareness by interacting with champions of environmental causes. Our goal was to hold an event that resembles the set-up of the holiday craft fair, with music and vendors’ booths offering products and information. By creating a festival-like atmosphere, we provided a fun and inviting educational experience.

Green Day 2004 was an extremely successful event. The day went smoothly, students ventured by all day long, the vendors expressed their personal enjoyment with the event, and the African drummers were fantastic. We had 17 participants attend our booths: Action for Animals, Cal Pirg, Carlson Solar, Earth Works, Fund for Public Interest, Green Party of San Diego, Green Peace, House Rabbit Society, I Love a Clean San Diego, San Diego River Park- Lake Conservancy, SDSU Recycling, Student Environment Action Coalition, Surf Rider Foundation, Yerba Mate’ Teas, and the Verdic Club. We also had two African drummer groups perform throughout the day.

Our group secured funding for this event through the Cultural Arts and Special Events board. They gave us $1500 to rent canopies for the vendors and help publicize our earth day fair. We provided each vendor with a six-foot table and two chairs. We were able to rent 17 canopies with our funds so that the event looked professional and our vendors were protected from the elements. SDSU Physical Plant was kind enough to donate the tables and chairs for the event. This saved us a great deal of money. Thankfully two of our group members had close ties with people in Aztec Center, so we were able to store our canopies overnight for free. Meeting Services also let us borrow an electrical cart for the day so that we could transport materials and vendor supplies around. We received a $100 from the Health and Environmental Safety Board to help pay for the drummers.

Our group contacted over 59 vendors plus dozens of hybrid car companies. It was challenging contacting organizations and creating an effective line of communication. Fortunately, we had 28 vendors scheduled to show up to our fair, but only 17 did for one reason or another. We were privileged enough to work with the Student Environment Action Coalition (SEAC), an environmental club at SDSU, to help us with this event. Since we have laid the ground works for this earth fair, along with establishing the point of contacts within the University and the community, it will be easy for SEAC to take over this event and allow our vision to be experienced by students to come.

Green Day 2004 was the first event of its kind in the last decade on our campus. All day long we continued to hear positive remarks by all attendees, which reaffirmed our purpose in planning and executing the event. This was a phenomenal social change project and we are proud to say that we have started an annual event that will only grow with time.