archive
Ramblin’ Around Student Dinner Crawl: Loyola Students Dined-the-Red Line!
In February of last year, Loyola’s Office of Community Relations launched the Student Business Engagement Project to both understand and improve student awareness of restaurants and other businesses in the proximity of Loyola’s campus.
The goal of the project was to incentivize student patronage of local establishments, and increase their interest in the local cultural scene of both the Rogers Park and Edgewater neighborhoods.
From the market research gathered as part of this project, including anecdotal feedback from both students and local business owners, the office of Community Relations learned that both parties supported the idea of a student dinner crawl, an event in which students would visit local restaurant and sample a food item at each establishment.
As in previous years, Community Relations partnered with the Rogers Park Business Alliance and the Edgewater Chamber of Commerce to plan an event that would serve the needs and interests of both students and the local business community.
On September 10th, nearly 300 students participated in the first Ramblin’ Around Student Dinner Crawl. This event drew a range of participants, from freshmen to graduate level students, and provided a unique and social way to showcase the local business community to the Loyola student body. To partake in the crawl, Loyola students took the red-line train or walked to 22 local restaurants in Rogers Park and Edgewater. Restaurants donated generous samples of delicious food and beverages from all over the world, including cuisines from Ethiopian, India, Italy, Thailand, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
This year’s student dinner crawl also served as the perfect complement to the Ramblin’ Around Student Guide, a directory of local businesses that is distributed annually to over 3,000 incoming freshmen. The crawl promoted use of this guide and encouraged students to patron the establishments listed in our directory.
Proceeds from ticket sales for the Ramblin’ Around Student Dinner Crawl will be donated to the Rogers Park Business Alliance and the Edgewater Chamber of Commerce. In the coming months, our Office of Community Relations will be working to further increase the online and social media presence of the Ramblin’ Around brand, as we are in process of creating a Ramblin’ Around Blog, on which we will provide advertising opportunities for local businesses and also publish “feature stories” on select businesses in Edgewater and Rogers Park.
To see pictures from this incredible event, please visit: https://www.facebook.com/luccommunityrelations/photos_stream.
