Genius at Work

Bill Strickland can tell you when his life began: It was a Wednesday afternoon in September 1963.

And he can tell you how it began: It started with a lump of clay.

Strickland, then a 16-year-old black kid, was bored by school and hemmed in by life in a decaying Pittsburgh neighborhood. He wanted a way out, but he didn't have a clue about how to find it - until that Wednesday afternoon, when he went wandering through the hallways of his high school. It's a moment etched so clearly in his memory that, 35 years later, he can still recall the quality of the sunlight streaming in through the school windows. That's the day he came face to face with hope.

Looking through an open classroom door, Strickland saw something he'd never seen before: a rotating mound of clay being shaped into a vessel by a man absorbed in his work.

"If ever in life there is a clairvoyant experience, I had one that day," says Strickland, now 51. "I saw a radiant and hopeful image of how the world ought to be. It opened up a portal for me that suggested that there might be a whole range of possibilities and experiences that I had not explored. It was night and day - literally. I saw a line and I thought: This is dark, and this is light. And I need to go where the light is."

So Strickland walked into the sunlit classroom, introduced himself to ceramics teacher Frank Ross, the man at the potter's wheel, and said, "I'd like to learn whatever that is." With Ross as his mentor for nearly 20 years, Strickland not only found the way out - one that led to college - he also found the way in: the path that lets one person make all the difference in the world.

He mastered the art of social entrepreneurship, applying his potter's hands to reshape the business of social change. As a result, the people who now work with him and come to his programs at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild (MCG) and at the Bidwell Training Center Inc. (BTC) - his Pittsburgh-based organizations for urban change - will tell you that the day Bill Strickland walked into that ceramics classroom was the day that he began reinventing this country's approach to social entrepreneurship.

For nearly three decades, Strickland has worked at his craft back in the same Pittsburgh neighborhood he grew up in - creating a model for turning people with dead-end lives into productive workers. And it's working.

In the Manchester neighborhood of Pittsburgh's North Side, Strickland has forged a series of programs to bring new life to the community. At one end of the lifeline is the MCG, which aims to rescue at-risk school kids by using the arts to teach them life skills. At the other end is the BTC, an innovative partnership with local companies to train displaced adults for real work in real jobs. Since their inception, the two programs have each grown into more than $3 million-a-year operations, with a combined staff of 110 people. Strickland serves as president and CEO, the linchpin that holds all of the parts together.

And there's more. Like any true entrepreneur, Strickland has filled the space between the two programs with other ventures: a jazz concert hall and an innovative Grammy Award-winning record label. Next year, he plans to roll out the Denali Initiative - a national three-year effort funded by the Kaufmann Foundation to teach nonprofit leaders how to think like entrepreneurs.

The source of it all is Strickland's single flash of insight on that long-ago Wednesday afternoon. "You start with the perception that the world is an unlimited opportunity," Strickland says. "Then the question becomes, 'How are we going to rebuild the planet?'"

The question may seem presumptuous, but plenty of people think that Strickland not only has the right to ask it, but that he has also discovered some of the answers. Although he isn't dealing in big numbers - his combined programs reach about 400 kids and 475 adults each year - Strickland is dealing in success: For the past five years, 75% to 80% of the high-risk high-school kids who've come to his after-school arts program have gone on to college. At the same time, 78% of the adults who graduate from his vocational program find jobs.

Just as impressive as the numbers are Strickland's supporters and believers. There's George Bush, who named Strickland to a six-year term on the board of the National Endowment for the Arts. And there's Hillary Rodham Clinton, who visited Strickland's center - and then invited Strickland to visit the White House.

There's the Harvard Business School - which hailed Strickland as a "social entrepreneur." And there's the Harvard Graduate School of Education - which invited him to share with its students his lessons on teaching.

There's San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and jazz musician Herbie Hancock, who teamed up with Strickland to replicate his Pittsburgh program in San Francisco - an undertaking that Strickland hopes will be the first of 100 "franchises" that he plans to set up nationwide over the next 30 years. And there's the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded Strickland a $295,000 "genius" grant in 1996.

Not bad for a man who, 30 years ago, set out to learn how to throw a pot.