LAW: Training law students with real-world immersion experiences, both within the classroom and outside in the community, and in the process providing legal assistance with pro bono attorneys to social ventures and early start ups.
CULTURE: Embracing, celebrating, and studying the rich entrepreneurial culture that is taking place in New Orleans.
INNOVATION: Supporting early stage projects within the University and in the community, providing virtual spaces to follow the progress of these projects at the Innovators' Alamanc, and creating research tools to support the development of businesses, social ventures, and the culture of New Orleans.
CULTURE: Embracing, celebrating, and studying the rich entrepreneurial culture that is taking place in New Orleans.
INNOVATION: Supporting early stage projects within the University and in the community, providing virtual spaces to follow the progress of these projects at the Innovators' Alamanc, and creating research tools to support the development of businesses, social ventures, and the culture of New Orleans.
Our Philosophy, Our Goals
When we first arrived in New Orleans, seven years ago, our then four-year old daughter commented, "Even the trees wear jewelry." New Orleans has become a special place for us, a place that has allowed us to develop simultaneously as academics and entrepreneurs. In the time we have been here, in addition to teaching students, we have had the great opportunity to build a company, thanks to the help and guidance of the Tulane University community and the larger New Orleans community. LCI is an attempt to give back, to find ways to help our adopted community thrive, and to find ways to bring groups and individuals together to assist in problem solving. But it also is a place to reflect and understand why indeed the trees here do wear jewelry, and what it is about the unique aspects of New Orleans that allows the entrepreneurial community to thrive.
We want to assist, to lend support to social ventures, to entrepreneurial startups, and to community projects within the vibrant and thriving post-Katrina New Orleans environment. We ourselves are a product of that environment. We also want to foster study of the elements that make up the social climate of our times, for it is through such study that collectively we can better understand what makes things most fully thrive in our unique region of the world.
-Drs. Ron Gard and Elizabeth Townsend Gard
Co-Directors, LCI