Creative Campus

The Letter of Recognition in the Cultural Arts Program (LORCA) is a cultural arts awareness program for University of Alabama business school graduate students. The program also hosts a blog supervised by former Creative Campus Intern, Erika Pribanic-Smith. The purpose of the UA’s LORCA is to broaden business graduate student’s awareness and exposure to the cultural
arts emphasizing the importance of a role graduates play in economic development and in personal enrichment. The blog updates readers several times a month on cultural and artistic events and programs in the Tuscaloosa community.

LORCA encourages students to develop a greater understanding of the arts through a required number of scheduled events. LORCA students grasp the synergy of intellectual creativity, functional talent, and pragmatic business processes that result in concrete artistic output following attendance of events and discussion of such at planned social gatherings and on discussion forums such as the LORCA Blog.

The program is administered and monitored by the Manderson Graduate School of Business functions in partnership with the Creative Campus Initiative. The program has two levels of completion. Level 1 includes mandatory attendance at introductory and de-briefing sessions, as well as selective attendance at a minimum of six cultural events (a list of which will is
maintained on the dedicated Letter in the Cultural Arts website). Level 2 participants aremandated to attend introductory and de-briefing sessions, selective attendance at a minimum of six cultural events, as well as active involvement in two additional cultural events (such as assistance in production, marketing, staging of an event, board membership.)

LORCA also includes a social component (such as dinners, parties, or cocktail hours) that will be coupled with some of the available events. The interactive components to the program website (such as the web blog) are available to enable students to share their newly garnered knowledge, insights and experiences or simply pose questions.

In the ongoing partnership with Susan West of the MBA program, Creative Campus supports LORCA students’ endeavors to be more culturally aware as artisan supporters in their community. This year’s students indicated they would like more specifically recommendations on artistic activities to attend in Tuscaloosa.

For more information, please visit http://cba.ua.edu/lorca/.