College of Business Administration

GROUP MEMBERS:

Tamara Cameron
Marie Clarke
Kristy Hall
Gia Jones
Leah Ngo
Kim Rakowski
Shane Whitmore

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

As a social change project, our group worked as student service learners for the Toussaint Teen Center (TTC). This Center, located in downtown San Diego, offers a comprehensive program to assist homeless teens in their transition to independence. It provides a place for them to live, and go to school. The classes and activities at the center help the teens develop mental and physical health, and a sense of identity, and teach the teens responsibility for themselves and others. The lessons the teens learn at TTC helps them build confidence and end the cycle of homelessness.

The staff and management of the TTC are in the process of changing the name of this establishment into the Toussaint Academy for Expressive Arts in effort to modify their image as a whole, and improve the self-image of the teens in particular. They would like it to be known as a boarding school as opposed to a group home or homeless center.

Along with their name change, they are also adopting a new focus on expressive arts, as the name suggests. The teens have begun practicing yoga and taking music lessons, among other creative activities. Since this new focus on expressive arts has been integrated into the program, a greater number of residents have graduated, and there has been a reduction in turnover of teens entering and exiting the program.

As part of the change from the TTC to the TAA, the staff would like to open a café in a large available space on the bottom floor of the center. This café would serve as a place in which the teens may work and earn money, gain invaluable work experience, and would serve as a space for them to express what they learn in their art school (poetry, art, music, dance, or acting). The café would have a stage where the teens and the public could perform during evening performances and open-mike nights. In addition to these benefits, the majority of profit generated from sales would be put into a scholarship fund for teens who graduate from the program to use toward college tuition.

In effort to gain assistance with the start-up of this proposed café, volunteer coordinators of St. Vincent de Paul Village (which is the umbrella under which TTC lies) sought-out SDSU business students who would be willing to contribute their business knowledge. Namely, they wanted us to help develop a business plan for the proposed café. Although we were unable to develop an entire business plan in the time allotted, we were able to draft a marketing plan -- including a market analysis, marketing strategy, and the costs of goods and equipment needed for the operation. They will be able to take this information and incorporate it into the business plan in the near future.

As a means to better understand their vision for this café we met with the project manager, other staff of the TTC, and a few teen residents. At these meetings we performed a SWOT analysis and brainstormed ideas about what they want the café to look like, the products they would like to serve, and whom they foresaw as their primary customers. We used these ideas and the SWOT analysis as guidelines, and conducted extensive marketing research to develop a Marketing Plan that we found viable and suitable for the strengths and culture of the organization.

The ethicial frameworks that our prjoect fulfilled are Distributive Justice, Ethic of Care, Land Ethic, and Social Contract Theory. Distributive Justice is applied by giving these underpriveledged youths the same opportunity that we all have, such as food, shelter, and education. By opening up a café, we can provide the teens with a paying job and prospect of future scholarships upon graduating from TTC. We are creating relationships with these teenagers through Ethic of Care. The café will also give them a chance to build relationships with others outside of the teen center in a business environment. We have provided products in our marketing mix that are environmentally friendly which fulfills land ethic. Lastly, we worked under a social contract with Father Joe and TTC. We were provided with a handbook and documents defining the policies we were to abide by as well as the parameters of our work assignment.

As most groups we had both successses and failures with our project. Our main failure was that our objective was changed from completing a business plan to completing a markting research plan. This was due to the fact that we were unable to receive information we needed from the director at the teen center. Although we view this as a failure it also led to a success in that we completed the marketing plan that will be a major component of the business plan.