Cedric Bolton walked into the South Side Innovation Center two years ago with a passion for barbecue and an idea for a business, but little direction.

Over time, Bolton, the coordinator of student engagement in Syracuse University’s Office of Multicultural Affairs, came up with a plan he could visualize: a food truck. After a few intensive workshops the SSIC pointed him toward, he was ready to submit his business plan to a competition.

He won.

The South Side Innovation Center (SSIC) was founded under former SU Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s charge of Scholarship in Action to help people like Bolton. On Friday, it celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Since then, the SSIC has assisted hundreds of Syracuse community members — along with some SU students, staff and alumni — in making their entrepreneurial dreams a reality.

“We are helping individuals explore entrepreneurship who may not have been able to before,” said El-Java Abdul-Qadir, the director of the SSIC.

Ally Moreos | Contributing Photographer

The SSIC works as both a business incubator and a services provider. It currently has 27 resident clients, which the SSIC’s team works closely with, and serves 300 program clients on an as-needed basis. More than 95 percent of clients come from the City of Syracuse community, Abdul-Qadir said.

The center is a part of the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. This has allowed it to serve as a bridge between SU and the greater Syracuse community, Abdul-Qadir said.

“Our affiliation with the university exposes individuals to the university in a different way,” Abdul-Qadir said. “These are people who lived in the community, and they’ve experienced the university in a certain way. We represent the university in a positive light.”

Courtnee Futch, founder of ThunderCakes and a graduate student at SU pursuing a master’s in entrepreneurship, said she thinks the university is somewhat detached from the city. She said programs like the SSIC establish a connection.

“It’s the stability of Syracuse University with the roots of South Salina Street,” she said.

Futch utilized the SSIC to grow her baking business, ThunderCakes, which she started in her freshman dorm during her undergraduate years at Syracuse.

She won a full year of residency at the center through a student business award, but had already been using the center’s test kitchen to make her baked goods. She also started using her office as storage, which she said alleviated some stress.

While Futch said she did not need the services the SSIC offered as much as the physical space, the center was able to provide much more personal attention to its clients than Whitman could. She also said the SSIC is much less intimidating for community members who might not think they were welcome to seek services on campus.

“You don’t want the kid growing up in a socio-economically deprived area to look up and see all this tremendous potential at the university but think it’s out of their grasp,” said Abdul-Qadir, the center’s director.

He said working for the center combines his passions for helping others and entrepreneurship. After earning his undergraduate degree and master’s in social work from SU, Abdul-Qadir returned to the city when he heard about the work the SSIC was doing. He came on as a consultant eight years ago, and has been the director of the center for three years.

The benefit to the community is closely tied with the ideology of Scholarship in Action, Abdul-Qadir said. A critical part of the SSIC’s mission is to provide SU students with real-life learning experiences, which they get by providing their skills to clients at the center.

Some students provide consulting services to clients through classes, and some businesses at the center reach out to students looking for interns or volunteers. Abdul-Qadir said it makes the relationship mutually beneficial.

Terry Brown, the executive director of the Falcone Center, said this hands-on experience is one of the SSIC’s biggest benefits.

“You’re going to forget most of your professors, and you’re going to forget 99 percent of the stuff that you’ve taken in courses,” Brown said. “But you will not forget those project-based learning experiences and the impact they have on you as a person and in your career.”

Ally Moreos | Contributing Photographer

He said the center has been very successful in fulfilling its mission over the last 10 years. It has gotten more financially sustainable as well, particularly under Abdul-Qadir. The SSIC is funded primarily by grants from New York state.

Although the center is working on developing exact figures about its growth, Brown said it costs $17,000 for every job the SSIC makes. Some government-funded programs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per job, he said, which shows how efficient the SSIC is with its limited resources and space.

The center has also won awards for fostering entrepreneurship. In 2012, it was named incubator of the year by the National Business Incubator Association, which has over 1,900 members in over 60 countries.

It won the 2015 Award of Excellence for Outstanding Program Performance and Achievement and Dedication to the Entrepreneurs of New York State for its Entrepreneurial Assistance Program.

Despite this success, Abdul-Qadir said the chancellor change in 2014 made him nervous because Chancellor Kent Syverud was not offering the same verbal commitment to the city as Cantor. He said the only major change that has occurred, though, is that he has been asked to be more fiscally responsible, which was his goal as director in the first place.

During the next 10 years, Abdul-Qadir said wants to see the connection between the university and the community grow stronger.

When Bolton thinks about the next 10 years with his food truck business, he gets choked up. He hopes to have franchises of his trucks in other upstate New York cities by that time.

Said Bolton: “I’m taking my story, but I’m also bringing the South Side Innovation Center’s story along with me, Whitman’s story along with me, because without them, I could not have accomplished all this.”

Published on April 4, 2016 at 9:04 pm

Contact Delaney: dovanwey@syr.edu