GROUP MEMBERS:

Daniel Batchelor
Carly Brown
Erin Hudson
Robert Lodder
Naphtali Newby
Kyle Robinson
Charity Thomas

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Our social change project team worked with the Cocoon House this past quarter. One of our group members, Charity Thomas, was in intern at Milgard. Milgard chooses one non -profit a year to support;, this year it was the Cocoon House, we had angiving us an inside track to helping out the Cocoon House. We will provide a brief summary of our project by looking at the background of the Cocoon House, the deliverables of our project, ethical frameworks that we applied in our project, the pitfalls, and a testimonial from a Cocoon House employee.

Firstly, tThe Cocoon House, founded in 1991 in Everett, WA, provides shelter and counseling to homeless teens. The not-forn-profit company helps approximately 230 youth each year. As noted on their website, www.cocoonhouse.org, the company's mission is: “the Cocoon House fosters personal growth and healthy relationships to create connections and eliminate youth homelessness.” ” Charity has worked extremely closely with the Cocoon House and mentions that the employees wish they did not have to work there. Their goal is to get families to work together so the Cocoon House did not even have to exist. Their desire is to have no homeless youth.

Next, wWe then brainstormed ideas to help the Cocoon House after reflecting on the work that they did. Originally, Wwe agreed on the idea of all of usthe group members to going down to Everett, and enjoying a holiday party with the teens, and to takinge them teens out on a shopping trip. We liked the idea because Milgard had donated gift certificates and thought the teens would find the social interaction with college kids to be inspiring. We communicated our original goals to Robin Weinberg, Cocoon House Volunteer Coordinator, who (at the Cocoon House) but she responded by saying that this project would not be feasible. She said that we would all needCocoon House would have required all of us to have background checks and the cost and time would not work with the time frame of our quarterly system. We revised our goals and decided to supply all the food for a Thanksgiving dinner for all those at the Cocoon House., wWe made ten gift baskets (consisting of baked ham and all the fixings) for the Teen Advocate Program and the extra money that we raised was given as a monetary gift to the Cocoon House to do with what they wished. The logistics of the project consisted of everyone collecting money from donors and saving spare change to fund the project. The women in theMembers of the group then did the grocery shopping, prepared the gift baskets, and delivered the food.

Furthermore, tThe nature of the class focused our group to look at the ethical frameworks. By using the Ethical Framework grid as explained presented in the web streaming videos, we noticed that our grid marked “Yes” for our project conformed to all of the different ethical frameworks. We saw that Tthe project does conform to important principles ofby helping the less fortunate, and it does create more good than harm as explained in the positive benefit of our cost-benefit analysis,. In addition, it does lleads to fair outcomes tofor the less fortunate in society, as well as it does promote caring relationships by helping the homeless teens,. itThe project also does advances personal liberty of the teens by taking them away from trap of livingoff on the streets, and it does stimulates personal ideals by acting in good character of helping the needy. and Finally, it contributes to sustainability of the environment by keeping them off the roads.

Although this project was a morally worthy projectDespite the overall success of the project, our group did experience several troubles. First, Tthe location was a bit of problem because we would have preferred to make a positive impact on our local situation. AlsoIn addition, it was difficult not being able to do our original proposal because we would have liked to give the teens a contact and helped them out beyond physical/ monetary donations. There were also logistical difficulties due to the large group size. It was often difficult to find time to meet and to keep up withtrack of who was responsible for what. Finally, we almost had an ethical lapse. Milgard was willing to match the donations by their employees. We were tempted to give money to Charity and have her say that it was all her donation so that we would get even more money. After struggling with this ethical dilemma, we determined decided not to take this approach.

The project was a great success as Robinand Ms. Weinberg at the Cocoon House thanked us immensely. It was great to help those less fortunate and to know that the project did make a difference in many people's’ lives.