Profiles of Changemakers: Bill Strickland

As President and CEO of the world-renowned Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild and Bidwell Training Center, Bill Strickland is a social entrepreneur who is committed to making the impossible possible for inner city youth and young adults in his home city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From getting kids off the streets and into the pottery studio or recording studio to put their energy and creativity to work to offering young adults the opportunity to train in vocational areas like pharmaceutical chemistry or Information Technology and get good paying jobs, Bill Strickland’s afterschool and vocational training is a model that education reformers and thought leaders around the world are following closely.

Strickland has a contagious enthusiasm for expecting excellence for other people’s lives. Walking into the Bidwell Training Center, visitors find a beautifully crafted environment of hardwood floors, stonework, and art galleries displaying students’ work. Fresh flowers are placed on the front desk every morning and beautiful music fills the atmosphere. Strickland believes if you surround people with excellence they will begin to see that excellence in themselves. Someone once had that same expectation for him and it forever changed his life

Art awakened young Bill Strickland to the thought of “Making the Impossible Possible.” As a high school student, Strickland was surrounded by impossibilities—living in an inner city Pittsburgh, his neighborhood was in decline and there didn’t seem to be a way out of that dark tunnel until he discovered the pottery studio at his high school one day.

As he walked by the art classroom that miraculous day—Strickland happened to look in and there was the instructor sitting at a pottery wheel, magically uplifting a mound of clay with his hands to shape a perfect vessel.

As Strickland watched the clay take shape in the potter’s hands, he not only became entranced by the art of pottery itself—but he was immediately struck by the metaphor of art and changing the world.

Strickland went on to college—armed with a vision for changing the world. Over the last three decades, he has developed a world-class training center reaching kids through adults—through the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild (MCG) and the Bidwell Training Center Inc. (BTC) in the Manchester neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Between the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild and the Bidwell Training Center, Inc.—Strickland’s arts and vocational training programs reach approximately 400 kids and 475 adults a year. Roughly 75 to 80 percent of the high-risk teens enrolled in the afterschool arts program go on to college. And roughly 78 percent of the adults enrolled in the vocational program go on to find jobs.

Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild is a state-of-the-art facility housing visual arts, design, ceramics and photography classrooms, a concert hall, and gallery all designed to showcase the roles of creativity and craftsmanship in learning, including a Grammy-producing MCG Jazz program.

Bidwell Training Center, Inc. works with local and national employers to train graduates for future employment needs in fields ranging from Chemical Laboratory Technician to Culinary Arts to Horticulture Technology to Medical.

Strickland says, “When you have world class facilities—people will act the same. Have art, fresh flowers, a beautiful environment—people are a function of little things—it awakens them to possibilities. You build prisons, you will have prisoners.”

“Environment drives behavior,” says Bill Strickland, an artist in his own right who sees the world through the lens of possibilities. “The biggest preventative measure of crime is to stop training kids to be criminals. We need to change the conversation—embracing life, not death.”

According to Strickland, the dropout rate for African Americans and Latinos is one in two (50 percent) in America. Strickland says, “This nation has no chance without a viable public school education. We can save young people’s souls with clay. Arts are a strategy to walk across into a new life. We need to unlock their imagination, and unlock a new way of learning. There is no excuse why we can’t use all the resources in the world to help these kids.”

Bill Strickland says, “You yourself have to look like the solution—not the problem. Demonstrate success. Articulate vision. Lead in a direction that is compelling. And people will get in line to support you.”

Books:

Making the Impossible Possible

Videos:

Learn more at: www.bill-strickland.org.