A T-shirt offers a simple way to make an impact. It can proclaim an identity, communicate a social message, and spark a conversation.

Nick Papadopoulos has a business plan to launch Tremendous T-shirt Company, which aims to make a difference, one silkscreen at a time. He is planning slogans that include the funny and irreverent as well as the meaningful and topical. Synergies Works is helping him, through every step in the process, turn his creativity into successful entrepreneurship.

Papadopoulos, 43, has cerebral palsy, but it does not slow him down or cramp his imagination. He grew up in Queens, New York, where he worked in graphic design and spent his down time traveling the world. He came to Athens, Georgia, in 2006. Papadopoulos has spent the past four years in a nursing home in Royston. With this business plan, he hopes to achieve his goal of independent living in his own home.

Synergies placed him in our Idea-to-Incubation program, an intensive eight-week course that exposed him to mentors from Coca-Cola, Regions Bank, Blue Earth Network, and other Fortune 500 companies. He developed a business plan, and we enabled him to network with silkscreening companies and vendors in the garment industry.

“Synergies is introducing me to all kinds of contacts,” Papadopoulos says. “They’re also helping me get out of the nursing home and fully actualize myself.”

He envisions a quality product, priced at $22, with a portion of the proceeds going to help other people with disabilities. “I like the idea of showing a collage of images of people in wheelchairs doing normal, active things,” he says. Papadopoulos, an extrovert, describes himself as a “social connector.” He wants to create a corporate culture based on uplift.

“I want to show the world that anything is possible,” he says. “That even though I am classified as having a disability, I am not disabled, just differently abled.”

To learn more about Nick watch 6000 Waiting, a film about Disability Advocacy