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The third floor of Camillus’ Town Shop Youth Center looks more like a living room, filled with lamps, chess boards, books and other knick knacks one might find in a home. Paper whales strung along the ceiling sway above the room’s tight stage as audience members nodded their heads to Syracuse local Tyjhier Goodman’s R&B.

The Acoustic Evening concert — featuring Goodman, along with two other local artists and two Syracuse University bands — was organized by CrossRoads Collective. The new organization at SU is striving to bridge the gap between the city and SU. Acoustic Evening’s attendance consisted of university students, local performers and friends within the city’s music scene.

“What we did tonight was healing,” said CrossRoads Collective president Sam Parrish. “Whether it was connecting with others or finding out that this kind of space existed outside of Syracuse.”

The Town Shop Youth Center – an organization that provides a space for young people in the area to find a community that explores different forms of creativity — hosts multiple events every month surrounding poetry, music, outdoor adventures and more.

CrossRoads Collective is split into two branches – the restock project and the performance project. The restock project focuses on the food supply in the broader Syracuse community while the performance project provides music lessons to youth in and around the city.

Among performances from student bands Froggies and Luna and the Carpet, Jack Stinziano played an acoustic set with his guitar. It was one of Stinziano’s few times playing alongside SU musicians.

“There’s always been a slight divide in the university and the community,” Stinziano said. “It’s just because there haven’t been any properly built bridges to connect the two.”

After selling 40 tickets, Acoustic Evening raised $500 for Food Access Healthy Neighborhoods Now. FAHNN was founded in May 2021 and hosts an affordable, fresh food market for Southside residents twice a month.

“This is not a foreign language we’re speaking,” said Annie Knobloch, the chair of the restock project. “Everybody speaks and bonds through food. That is love, that is language. People don’t have a way to speak through that and to me, that breaks my heart. That’s how I’ve been speaking since I was a little kid.”

The same goes with music, she said. Everyone loves and feels music. All human beings who care about other humans want them to have food and music, it’s the “entirety of culture,” Knobloch said.

Last year, Parrish remembers trying to organize a community-driven event that ultimately failed. This year, she feels lucky to have a group of people by her side who are just as passionate and driven as she is in CrossRoads Collective’s executive board.

Anjali Engstrom, vice president of CrossRoads Collective, said the university and the city shouldn’t feel as separate as they do. She hopes that the organization will educate students about the city they live in.

“The hope is to educate. And with education, we hope to empower and I just hope that that in some ways drives change,” Engstrom said.

The organization does not want to act as “saviors” for the broader community. Rather, they want to form an active and engaged relationship between students and local residents.

At the event, the youth center’s regulars engaged with audience members as they listened to the music and entertained themselves. Ancillotti recalls one of them describing Acoustic Evening as resembling a large family gathering.

“She was like, ‘I feel like I’m at my house doing my own thing, but with a bunch of relatives I’ve never met,’” Ancillotti said. “‘Because this is where we hang out, but there’s like a bunch of people here and you can tell that there’s a holiday happening.’”

Published on February 5, 2024 at 12:18 am