Genius at Work

"This is my clay"

Bill Strickland's story starts in the 1950s, when the Manchester community he grew up in was filled with neat row houses and green trees. People in the neighborhood could find good jobs nearby in thriving small businesses and at prosperous industrial firms such as Allis-Chalmers, Steel City Electric, and Midland-Ross Corp.

The neighborhood was culturally rich, a melting pot of roughly 40,000 people. But in the early 1960s, hard times caused many local businesses to shrink or shut down. The character of the community began to change. And Strickland, a teenager, felt his world narrowing.

"I'd watched my neighborhood go from a healthy community to a ghetto. I needed to find a way out," he says. "But there weren't many examples of successful people in my community who could serve as role models." And then came that day in high school when Strickland discovered Frank Ross, ceramics, and the possibility that the world might have something more to offer.

"Mr. Ross brought a kind of gutsy quality to public education that said, 'Look, there's nothing wrong with you. There's a lot wrong with the circumstances that you find yourself in.'" Strickland says. "He said, 'You have the talent and the resources to take control of your life and to do something more than you've done up to this point.' And I believed him."

After that first encounter, Strickland devoted his remaining two years in high school to learning everything that Ross could teach him. When he graduated in 1965, Strickland went on to the University of Pittsburgh, entering on probation because he'd neglected his high school academics in favor of ceramics. But he quickly proved himself, landing on the dean's list by the end of his first year - and winding up on the university's board of trustees 32 years later.

Even as his world expanded during college, Strickland remained bound to the old neighborhood. Then, in 1968, when the social upheaval and rioting that were rocking the nation reached Manchester, Strickland decided it was time for him to do something to bring hope back to the streets. While still in college, he opened the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, an after-school program to teach neighborhood children the same pottery skills that had originally motivated him. A local Episcopalian church donated space for the program in the basement of a row house.

After college, Strickland continued his work with MCG, building a staff of volunteers, and earning a name for himself as a local activist. He ran the program on an annual budget of less than $50,000, cobbling together funds from small grants, and from contributions by community leaders who had begun to support his work.

Three years later, a second piece of Strickland's program fell into place: He was asked to take over the Bidwell Training Center, a three-year-old neighborhood vocational-training program. Like MCG, BTC had been started in response to the 1968 riots. But the Presbyterian church that had administered the program had run afoul of the Internal Revenue Service for failing to pay withholding taxes. The options: Shut down the program - or find somebody to take it over and rebuild it.

Strickland was the ideal candidate - and he accepted the challenge. The way he saw it, BTC offered him an opportunity to play out his ideas on a larger stage. On the surface, however, it was an unlikely marriage of programs: arts and kids on the one hand, vocational training and adults on the other. But to Strickland, combining the programs meant he could approach community rebuilding from two directions: by saving troubled kids and getting them on to college; and by reclaiming adults who'd been discarded and giving them the opportunity to make a second start in life.

For the next decade, Strickland worked at both programs, quietly forming his own vision of social change, and attracting people to his cause. By 1983, Strickland was ready to take a new leap, ratcheting up both programs to have more impact and more presence. The move was equal parts vision and audacity: With $112 in the bank, he launched a fund-raising drive to construct an $8 million building on the site of an abandoned industrial park.

What might have been a futile gesture turned into a natural expansion. For years, Strickland had nurtured relationships with business and community leaders; now that work paid off. In three years, he raised enough money from foundations, corporations, and government sources to build a showplace, a center for social innovation that would allow him to demonstrate exactly how his ideas worked - and what they could do.