College of Business Administration

GROUP MEMBERS:

Mari Bailey
Dan Coonnrod
Fe Gamble
Tammy Le
Maria Elena Martin del Campo
Cora McDonald
Marilyn Nazareno

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
One of the greatest gifts a person (adult or child) could ever receive is the opportunity to educate him/her self. People over the years have fought to preserve and to achieve this right. Some of the most impressive youth revolts have been to change some issue in the way the business of education is run in the world, to have access to more information, to know more about what actually goes on in other parts of the world, to be more free to express themselves both orally and through writing, in short to be more free to receive and give more education. Our project’s mission was to increase the opportunity that all people in our community have of educating themselves. We, as students, understand the importance of having access to Libraries that are fully equipped with up-to-date information. Things are changing throughout the world and in the many fields of research at such a fast pace that keeping a Library up-to-date is harder than ever before.

For this project, we chose to help a non-profit organization called The Friends of the San Diego Public Library (FSDPL). This organization helps our public libraries where they cannot help themselves: raising money. With the economic crisis our state has been suffering, the funding our public libraries used to receive from our state government has suffered as well. Donations are now, practically, the only source of revenue our public libraries have. The Friends accept and collect donations and arrange sales at each public library. The money collected from these sales is first reported to The City of San Diego since it has established a “Matching Fund” program with our public libraries. The program consists in doubling the amount of money The Friends collect after each sale, thus doubling the amount of money donated to the public libraries.

Our project’s main focus was to create awareness of the needs of our public libraries within local book stores and the community. Our goal was to establish relationships with three major book stores here in San Diego (Barnes & Noble, Borders and Waldenbooks) and to collect a minimum of 200 items (books, compact disks, video tapes) to donate to The Friends. Also, we set the goal to inform our community about our project and the importance of their donations by getting the media involved.

We are very satisfied with the response we received from the organizations and the community. Barnes & Noble and Waldenbooks agreed not only to donate this one time but to keep on-going donations with The Friends. The community was also very responsive as we did door-to-door collections in certain communities. A total of approximately 716 items were collected and donated to The Friends on April 13th (600 books, 100 cds, and 16 video tapes). We were able to get the News Cast of Channel 8 (KFMB) involved as they agreed to mention our project in their News Show. Also, Channel 8 (KFMB) and Channel 7 (NBC) both have posted our project in their specific local websites.

Two ethical frameworks have been identified that justify our project: Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice. Even though sacrifices have been made in order to do our project (time and money being the most important factors), we calculated that the overall benefits provided by our project made the sacrifices worth the try (utilitarianism). By donating books to The Friends we are making education be more available to everyone in the community of San Diego (distributive justice).

Utilitarianism requires that a cost/benefit analysis be made to ensure that the project’s benefits exceed its costs and thus that it is worth following through with it. The costs associated with our project include the following: time spent by the team in the project: ~100hours * lost salaries ($8.00 per hour) = ~$800.00; transportation expense: ~$30.00 (gas/mileage); cost of donating books to organizations: 350 books * cost of each book (calculated at $5.00 each) = $1750.00 (however, all donations are tax deductible). Total costs of project: ~$830.00. The benefits associated with our project include the following: 600 books sold at $1.50 each (average price) =$900.00; 100cds sold at $2.00 each = $200.00; 16 videos sold at $2.00 each = $32.00; money collected from donations = $1132.00, plus City’s contribution = $2264.00. The total quantifiable benefits the Friends will be able to donate to the Library from our contribution are of $1,434.00. Other benefits include: increased awareness in the community which leads to increase in donations and increase in people attending book sales; ongoing donations from Barnes & Noble and Waldenbooks; increase in the funding of public libraries to maintain and enhance them; our team member’s personal satisfaction of knowing that our project has helped in providing the means for education throughout the community.

To this moment, we consider our project to have been successful. Several things have been crucial to our success: the involvement, interest, and enthusiasm of the whole team towards the project and our common interest in education; the full cooperation and support of our contact person at The Friends; and the cooperation of Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, Channel 8, Channel 7, and the community of San Diego. A valuable lesson learned is that people are willing to help organizations in need, sometimes they do not because they are not fully aware of the situation. Communication, however, providing information to them, and enthusiasm from others towards helping can do the trick.