MBA Students Pursue a Safer Fairfield

As part one of our November-December capstone project for Organizational Change For Sustainability, students were put into teams and assigned projects to work on for the month. Our team worked with city council change agent Michael Halley to find out how to improve sidewalks in dangerous areas in Fairfield.

Our team of Ivan Garcia, student president; Miley Liu (Liuyanjie), MBA student; and myself, Himanshu Ramsamooj, MBA student, created and conducted a survey in different areas of Fairfield to 41 random people. We concluded that the most dangerous areas of sidewalk are around the high-traffic areas of Hyvee and Walmart. The main objective we proposed was to create sidewalks for people to get to Hyvee and Walmart safely while being Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant.

Michael Halley told us that we have a certain level of resistance coming from the city budget allocated towards sidewalks and that the budget assigned is currently held up to increase the borrowing power for the city. In other words, the city cannot give allocated funds to the sidewalk project due to many other projects that are currently under way such as the Fairfield Rec center, and the money they do have is put into bonds to increase Fairfield’s credit.

Another resistance we have is by home and business owners. Ten years ago, each individual home owner was responsible to repair or build a side walk 3ft wide in front their home and would be billed assessment fees by the city. Now, in order to be ADA compliant, the sidewalks need to be 5ft wide. Charging home owners 10 years later seems unfair to many.

In addition, business owners do not see it as their problem to add sidewalks because they are already paying business taxes. They feel that it is not their responsibility to create side walks, but the city’s responsibility. New sidewalks cost about $40 per linear foot for sidewalk. A typical block is 300 feet long, so it costs approximately $12,000 per block of new sidewalk construction according to city engineers.

Coming up with a plan to create change without money and with high resistance is challenging. The skills we learned from Professor Huang are invaluable strategies and skills we can use to create change. By using the ADKAR change model which focuses on Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Action/Ability, and Reinforcements, we can start to think outside the box and find solutions to our problems.

Because safety in Fairfield should be upheld and creating sidewalks in areas with high traffic seems logical, our proactive approach towards safety creates a number one priority compared to other projects for the city.

The following are points to create change.

• Create awareness through work shops or town hall meetings
• Communicate and share our vision and desire to have safe areas
• Share and gather knowledge to help the change happen
• Gain followers and people to work with this project and other companies
• Reinforce the change needed by providing incentives or pacify that internal question of what’s in it for the people of Fairfield
• Align individual goals with city goals (easier access to get to the stores to buy more things from businesses)

All of these points will help decrease resistance and even raise funds or donations from outside government allocations in order to create the change needed for everyone’s safety in Fairfield.

Himanshu Ramsamooj earned his BA in Business Administration from MUM and is now enrolled in the Sustainable MBA program. He will graduate in June 2016 with a specialization in process improvement. Himanshu has plans to run his family business, Enlight-N-scents, a sustainability-focused company.