Bill Strickland looks for future leaders in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. His "big city" approach is worth replicating in smaller communities

by Kathleen Martin

Bill Strickland is looking for coffee, but the metal grid around the café at Halifax's Pier 21 is shut. It's 9:30 a.m., and Strickland has already finished one meeting today. Dressed in a dark suit and butter-yellow tie, he takes one more resigned glance at the closed café before cheerfully waving me to the chair next to him. "Sit down! Sit down!"

The truth is Strickland doesn't need caffeine to talk about his work. Fueled by passion, he has been finding solutions to urban poverty and inspiring impoverished people for almost 40 years.

President and CEO of the world- renowned arts and vocational training organization Manchester Bidwell Corporation, Strickland's prescription of art, enterprise, and kindness has netted real results. It has earned him a MacArthur "genius" grant, a pile of honourary degrees, and audiences at Harvard University and the White House. He has talked with everyone from struggling single parents to the Dalai Lama.

Strickland was in Halifax at the invitation of Saint Mary's University's Sobey School of Business. He was also here because local business and community leaders—backed in part by IT company T4G—want to replicate Manchester Bidwell's success in Halifax.

Strickland grew up in a north Pittsburgh area called Manchester. Hit hard economically in the early '60s, it became a ghetto, damaging his hopes for the future. Then one Wednesday afternoon, as he wandered the halls of his high school, he glanced through a half-open door and saw teacher Frank Ross carefully shaping a mound of clay.

Strickland went into the classroom and said, "I want to learn to do that." Thanks to Ross and the transformative power of art, Strickland found a way to rise above the neighbourhood despair.

"Mr. Ross opened up a whole range of possibilities that had never occurred to me," says Strickland. "You can't teach kids algebra if they don't want to live. The first thing you've got to do is make them want to stay on the planet. The arts does that because it appeals to that hemisphere in the brain where the human imagination lives. If you unlock the imagination, you unlock ideas for human potential."

When Manchester was rocked by race riots in the late '60s, Strickland was determined to bring hope to his community. Then studying at the University of Pittsburgh, he opened an after-school arts program in a donated basement. He called his organization the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild. A few years later he took over the Bidwell Training Center, a vocational training program for the poor. And he started talking about his work to anyone who would listen.

Manchester Bidwell is a testament to Strickland's belief that environment drives behaviour. "You build a beautiful environment, you get great kids," he says. "You build prisons, you get prisoners. Shall we compare the cost of prisons to my centres? It's the little stuff, not just the big stuff, that matters. It's decent food, a beautiful environment, art, nurturing. It's caring. You create environments like that and you'll solve this poverty problem."

Nearly 90% of the students who pass through Manchester Bidwell programs go to college. Strickland asks industry members to help design vocational training to ensure that graduates attain skill sets that companies need. In 2007, 80% of graduates found training-related employment. Initiatives range from orchid growing to a jazz record label with four Grammy Awards.

"It seems almost scattered when you look at it from the outside," says Toby Stuart, a Harvard professor of business administration and author of the university's fourth case study of the organization. "But when you actually see the quality of it and understand how smart Bill has been in terms of defining activities for the centre, it is amazing. I know of few people who are as entrepreneurial as Bill, or as inspiring."

The success in Pittsburgh has been replicated in San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Grand Rapids, Mich. Another centre is well on its way in Chicago. If one does open in Halifax, it would be the first outside of the United States. (T4G is also helping support feasibility research into one in Vancouver.)

While there may not be as many people here as in Chicago or San Francisco, says Strickland, "the depth of the poverty in Halifax is real, and the despair of the kids is real." And as he has shown time and again, the kids' potential for success is real. "In 40 years, the only thing we've been able to find wrong with poor folks is that they don't have any money. We've developed an approach that reinvigorates people who've given up on life."

Strickland wants to become part of a new conversation in Halifax. "I want business and political leaders to get involved in this conversation. I want them to invite me to their meetings so I can give them my slide show. Tell them to email me at wstricklandjr@mcg-btc.org."

The coffee shop finally opens. Strickland gets a cup and adds sugar. He has achieved so much in his career he could be anywhere right now, including home. But he is in Halifax. He is here because he sees the untapped potential in those less fortunate than ourselves. The question is: do we?

Kathleen Martin is a freelance journalist based in Halifax. She can be reached at masthead@ns.sympatico.ca.