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At four years old, Samantha Parrish’s father sat her in front of a piano, an instrument she would classically train with for the next 10 years. She learned the ukulele with her grandmother, wrote songs and participated in musicals and a cappella groups. For Parrish, now a senior at Syracuse University, music has always been incorporated into her life. Going into college, she knew SU’s Bandier Program was the only choice for her.

“I’ve…come to realize the immense power of gathering and the collective energy that people bring when they are listening to music and they are resonating with the same sound,” Parrish said.

This year, Parrish created CrossRoads Collective as part of her capstone project. This student-run organization bridges the gap between SU and the local community by hosting fundraising events in the arts for local causes. Over the past four years, Parrish has realized the separation between the campus and community and hopes to instill sustainability with CrossRoads.

Parrish started building CrossRoads in the spring through the winter of 2023. At the time, she was working with her bandmate Vir Batra and two graduate students to host a festival in Thornden Park to grow community engagement. The group was unable to get all the moving parts together because they didn’t have enough time or money.

Initially, their mentors advised them to refrain from following through with the festival despite its community-building premise. But Parrish said that moment got her “gears turning,” and she spent last summer in Syracuse laying the groundwork for her vision of community involvement in the Newhouse School of Public Communications.

She began by going to youth centers and having coffee with community leaders to better understand Syracuse’s landscape. Parrish said this engagement led her to many different places and people that she would have never expected. Then, this past fall semester when Parrish was abroad in Osaka, Japan, she started to develop her capstone project idea more.

“I had in my mind (that) maybe it’ll be one show a month where it’s a fundraiser show and also, this could be a student organization,” she said.

She registered CrossRoads with the SU Student Association and it was approved through a semester-long process. When Parrish returned to campus this January, she “hit the ground running” with the school’s resources.

This semester, CrossRoads focused on music education and food access. Students brought free music lessons to inner city kids on Syracuse’s north side. CrossRoads also had about eight SU students who taught lessons in guitar, piano and voice at the Mundy Branch Library and at a youth center in Camillus.

In the fall semester, sophomore Anjali Engstrom and freshman Annie Knobloch started working with Rhonda Vesey at Food Access Healthy Neighborhoods Now to educate more SU students about food insecurity in Syracuse. After the three met, Parrish, Engstrom and Knobloch decided to make food insecurity a part of CrossRoads’ mission. Engstrom, who had done prior research about central New York’s food deserts, joined the organization’s e-board, collaborating with Parrish on how to combine music education with FAHNN’s work.

CrossRoads partnered with FAHNN to raise awareness about the lack of supermarkets on the south side and helped fundraise for FAHNN’s bi-monthly market, which is hosted at a vacant supermarket.

“We’re both very passionate people,” Engstrom said. “We’re both definitely creative and approach things from different angles, but I feel like our differences in approach help keep each other in check and keep each other balanced.”

Parrish said working with FAHNN was a cool opportunity this semester. A standout of FAHNN and CrossRoads’ partnership was during Bruce Springsteen’s performance in the JMA Wireless Dome on April 18. CrossRoads brought a team of SU students to represent FAHNN at the show, and they raised roughly $3,000 in donations.

“Standing on the side stage while Bruce himself, who shouted us out and our work out on stage at the end of the show, was the cherry on top,” Knobloch said. “We all broke down in such happy tears, hugged and got right back to showing the audience what CrossRoads is about.”

As a lifelong musician and the daughter of a chef, Parrish has always had a connection to music and food and felt both were essential. The best lesson she’s learned in her last semester at SU, she said, is that everyone loves music and food.

When CrossRoads and FAHNN talk about the lack of a supermarket and how people have to shop at a Dollar General to get nutrients for their day, the organizations don’t have to convince people to show their support because they understand the need.

Parrish said that while the journey of leading a large team has had its ups and downs, the opportunities have been fruitful.

“It took me an entire summer to even understand some of the things that were going on in Syracuse,” Parrish said. “But a really nice lesson that I learned is that people are always willing to give back or to listen.”

Like Parrish, CrossRoads Collective has drastically changed Knobloch’s perspective. Growing up in a lively city like Los Angeles, Knobloch said there are issues with food insecurity and homelessness and poverty, but there are several projects that exist already. With CrossRoads, she felt like she and her peers were starting from scratch.

Working on the team together took a lot of perseverance, creativity and collaboration as they navigated the complexities of working in the real world outside of their SU “bubble,” Knobloch said.

“From the beginning, (Engstrom) and I have made a point to not come off as trying to be ‘saviors’ with this project, so we have also made an effort to work directly with the people in the city and their ideas,” Knobloch said.

As Parrish closes out her time at SU, she hopes that through CrossRoads, people understand to leave the world a better place than you found it. While she said that sounds cliché, she believes it is something necessary for everyone to do.

“So often, we take for granted a lot of the things that are just given to us because we got lucky and we got to be put at a certain place in our life,” Parrish said. “A lot of the times, giving back to the community isn’t something that’s at the forefront of the conversations, but rather something that’s on the back end, and that’s not sustainable.”

As a campus leader, she advises her friends, especially those who are underclassmen and in CrossRoads, to make sure their passions always align with benefiting the community in some sort of way, because society wouldn’t be here without them.

“Take leaps of faith, embrace mistakes, learn from them,” Parrish said. “The universe will put problems in front of your face time and time again until you figure out the solution.”

Published on May 8, 2024 at 9:27 pm