Southside Connections: Reconnecting

Ella Roerden

Engaged humanities. What does that mean? Bridging the gap between Syracuse as a university and Syracuse as a city. As someone who has lived in Syracuse nearly all my life, and is a student of the humanities at Syracuse University, I am the human embodiment of the engaged humanities. I bring my friends home to my neighborhood, they meet my family and see my childhood stomping grounds. I attend community events in Downtown Syracuse and around campus. And I work as an undergraduate researcher for the Engaged Humanities Network. Specifically, I work with Southside Connections, an organization doing great things in an underprivileged sector of the city, right next door to where I grew up. 

I grew up in Strathmore, a historically white and privileged neighborhood in Syracuse on its southwest corner, where all my friends around the block looked like me and came from similar backgrounds. Directly adjacent to Strathmore lies Syracuse’s Southside, which provides a stark contrast to Strathmore. The Southside is home to a much more racially diverse population, and has also seen significantly more generational poverty than Strathmore, despite being right next to one another. But neither of these two neighborhoods exists in a vacuum. They share space in the local public schools, including the two that I attended, Roberts Pre-K-8 and Corcoran High School. These schools are home to many students from across both Strathmore and the Southside, and I found my grade school experience enriched because of that. I know many Strathmore residents whose parents elected to send them to the private catholic schools that are predominately white, so I am grateful to mine for putting me in the public school system. Growing up in a diverse community opened my eyes and my heart to the world, and I think that has made me a more empathetic adult. When I got to college and saw an opportunity to reconnect my current self, now at SU instead of in Strathmore, with the Southside, I took it. Working with the Engaged Humanities Network’s project in the Southside, Southside Connections, I have been able to learn more about the many people who keep the community going, and in turn provide enrichment to the people who helped me to have a more nuanced view of the world. 

Southside Connections is a strong network of a variety of leaders together with faculty, staff, and resources from Syracuse University. For a neighborhood facing a lot of marginalization, having support from a highly accredited research institution that strongly affects the city’s economy does not fix every issue present, but it isn’t meaningless either. University staff facilitate a space where these local Southside leaders come together in conversation and collaboration. They exchange information on events, resources, concerns, and questions, and uplift one another as they uplift the community. The organizations represented by these individuals provide various services to the Southside, ranging from youth extracurriculars to food pantries to social services and beyond. They shape the neighborhood and are part of daily life for many Southside residents. 

Communication between these organizations is crucial because it elicits increased access to opportunity. That’s where my role working with Southside Connections is. By collecting information periodically from Southside Connections partners about the programs, events, and services they are offering and hosting, I have been able to work on various projects revolving around spreading the word about these organizations. One of these projects is the generation of pamphlets with information on summer youth programs distributed in the public schools. Another is, as part of contributing to an overarching Southside Connections database, working on a digital mapping project, with an end goal of creating a resource map for the Southside. This in-progress resource map along with the summer youth program brochure will go out into the community to spread information to those who may not otherwise receive it. Access to information, or lack thereof, is a major issue when questions are raised about why some groups seem to have “more” or “less” opportunities than others. If we dedicate efforts to increasing access to information, we can increase access to opportunities for enrichment, self-betterment, and entertainment. This is why working with Southside Connections is so important to me.