September 29, 2005 | Read Time: 2 minutes
In 1965, ceramics and jazz — and a high-school art teacher — helped to keep Bill Strickland from dropping out of school. Today, a nonprofit organization he founded is giving thousands of young people each year the same chance to come under the spell of art and music, reports Inc. magazine (September).
Relying on an annual budget of $10-million to $12-million, Mr. Strickland’s nonprofit group, based in his hometown of Manchester, Pa., is composed of two main branches, the Manchester Craftsman’s Guild and the Bidwell Training Center. The craftsman’s guild provides after-school and summer classes to middle- and high-school students in ceramics, photography, digital imaging, drawing, and painting. Bidwell Training Center offers adults, most of whom are black and have low-income jobs, training in culinary arts, horticultural technology, medical coding, and other fields.
But Mr. Strickland’s reach goes far beyond Manchester, writes Inc. magazine. In addition to the headquarters, Manchester Bidwell, as the organization is known, runs smaller centers in San Francisco and Cincinnati, and will soon open another in Grand Rapids, Mich. Mr. Strickland hopes one day to open 100 more “franchises” in inner cities across the United States, and he expects each of them to have budgets of $2-million to $3-million.
To win support for his cause, Mr. Strickland spends most of his time on the road, sharing his tale with audiences that include young M.B.A.’s and Silicon Valley executives.
“You’ve got to engage the people in positions of power,” he says. “You don’t go to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. You go to a community’s business leaders. You speak their language. You look the man in the eye, explain this is what you can do for him — you offer a partnership.”
Mr. Strickland is constantly dreaming up new ways to raise money and expand opportunities for his students, the magazine says. For instance, when he discovered that the local supermarket chain Giant Eagle relied on a nursery in California to grow its orchids, Mr. Strickland made the company a proposition: If his nonprofit group could provide orchids of equal quality at less cost, would the company underwrite a greenhouse and buy the flowers it produced? This year, Manchester Bidwell began supplying the company orchids from its new $4-million greenhouse grown by students in its horticultural program.
This article is available online at http://www.inc.com/magazine/20050901/bill-strickland.html.
