Sade Cadle remembers the day her mother turned off all the lights in their New York City home.
Cadle’s mother, Stephanie Cadle Osoba, was devising a surprise for the gaggle of children – Cadle and her brothers and cousins – who were about to return from a day of playing.
White powder covered Stephanie’s face as she jumped out and screamed, teasingly terrorizing the kids. They ran away in fear from the woman who spent her life making people smile and laugh.
Cadle, the Student Association’s treasurer, lost her mother to breast cancer as a freshman in college.
“With a mother, you just feel like they’re your backbone,” Cadle said. “They’ll pick you up if you fall. I guess when that happened, it was just like if I fall, there’s no one really there. It’s just me.”
The UB senior looks back at her mother’s “hilarious” white powder prank with a laugh. Stephanie’s memory fuels Cadle to be independent and driven. She has goals to open “enrichment centers” for children in countries with poor education standards and a small business in her hometown of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.
Stephanie was diagnosed with cancer when Cadle was in the eighth grade, but she was always willing to help her neighbors.
She always wanted her children to be involved with the community because it was a way to have a better quality of life, Cadle said. Her mother often helped teenagers and young men in their neighborhood stay in school and keep “off the streets.”
Cadle’s mother would invite children from the neighborhood to her home for dinner and family events like barbeques and trips to amusement parks. She’d shuttle them to church and help them find jobs or programs to help them be productive.
After her mother’s diagnosis, Cadle had to take on a larger role around her home. Her father, Olugbile Osoba, was often at work and her mother at the hospital. But Cadle didn’t want people to feel sorry for her. She didn’t give off any “negative energy” to those who surrounded her.
“I knew who I was from a young age,” Cadle said. “So I knew what I could deal with.”
Thomas James Victorian III, Cadle’s brother, said the two grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, or “Bed-stuy.” He said crime was visible in the Brooklyn neighborhood.
“There were so many negative influences around,” Cadle said. “From drugs to just people doing nothing with their lives.”
Victorian said he is proud of what his little sister has achieved. She could have gone on a completely different route and gone with the “trend” of the neighborhood, he said.
“I look at Sade as my mother in spirit,” he said.
He sees similarities between the two – like their ability to talk through problems.
Cadle is able to see different points of views in an argument, something he said their mother passed on to her. Even though Victorian now resides in Maryland, he said there’s no one else he’d rather talk to.
Cadle was a freshman at the University of Bridgeport when her mom died. But when she transferred to UB, her mother’s death impacted her more. She remembered her mother enforcing the value of community involvement and decided to become immediately involved at UB.
Cadle, a business and finance major, joined Black Student Union (BSU). She eventually became treasurer of BSU, which holds the largest budget in SA. Its budget was nearly $49,000 in fall 2013.
SA President James Ingram then asked Cadle to join the Value Party as its treasurer candidate. Cadle won the position in the spring 2014 election with 1,021 votes.
Ingram said he didn’t need to look further for someone to fill the spot because he felt Cadle was the obvious choice for the position.
“If she can do such a good job on BSU, I’m sure she would do a great job with SA,” Ingram said.
Before the academic year even began, Cadle had already rewritten the SA Financial Handbook, which was outdated, according to Ingram. He said Cadle started revising the SA handbook to reflect current policies. She wanted it to be easier for SA clubs to understand because finance is one of the more confusing and complicated aspects of a club.
Cadle said working for SA gives her the opportunity to gain experience, work with different people, grow the creative mind and prepare herself for the finance world.
She sees getting involved as not only a way to meet people, but also to grow as a person.
Cadle believes people should give back to a community. Parents always want better for their children, and everyone should follow this example to offer the next generation opportunities to succeed, she said.
Cadle wants to open enrichment centers for children around the world in the future. She visited her dad’s native Nigeria when she was 7. She said children in foreign countries, like Nigeria, don’t have opportunities like in America. She wants to change that and she said losing her mom gave her a better life perspective.
“When a tragedy like that happens in your life, you become more aware of what’s going on in the world,” Cadle said.
A large portion of Cadle’s family were teachers – including her mother, who taught special education students from the grades of six to eight. Cadle said teachers are able to impact youth the most and feels teaching is how she wants to “make a difference in the world.” That’s why she hopes she’ll be able to create education centers in impoverished countries.
But the student in the school of management also wants to help start-up designers with their budding businesses. She said it’s hard to get started in that industry and she wants to create a boutique in Brooklyn that will give the designers an opportunity to grow.
Chris Cadle, her cousin, said Cadle inherited her mother’s intelligence and honesty. Everyone in their family would go to Cadle’s mother for advice, he said.
He said Cadle’s present and future successes are what he tells other younger members of their family to strive for.
“She’s definitely a dying breed,” he said. “They don’t make them like Sade no more.”
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