Besides the Pittsburgh flagship, Manchester Bidwell operates smaller centers in San Francisco and Cincinnati, and in November will open a center in Grand Rapids, Mich. Strickland's long-term hope is to open 100 more "franchises," federally funded, in inner cities throughout the United States. Projected to run on annual budgets of $2 million to $3 million, these new centers would be locally owned and operated but would follow the basic Strickland formula: In a bright, clean, attractive environment, mentor at-risk teenagers through engagement with the arts; under the same gracefully built roof, offer struggling adults job-training programs specifically designed by the region's leading employers. The San Francisco center, for example, has partnered with Hewlett-Packard and IDO, and the Grand Rapids enterprise will work closely with Steelcase.
You've got to engage the people in positions of power. You don't go to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. You go to a community's business leaders. You speak their language. You don't go in asking for a sponsorship. You look the man in the eye, explain this is what you can do for him -- you offer a partnership. Same thing with the public schools. You don't go in saying this is what you need from them. You start by asking, how can I help? With that kind of attitude you can build a center in a year, instead of 10 years. And man, with 100 centers like Pittsburgh, you can change the planet.
At a conference of Silicon Valley executives in San Jose in October 1999, Jeff Skoll was scheduled as the day's final speaker. Skoll would stand up and do a PowerPoint presentation about the foundation he had started, aimed at promulgating social entrepreneurship, i.e., the application of private resources and the best practices of for-profit management to the sphere of social change. Executives would listen respectfully because Skoll -- the first employee and first president of eBay, billionaire, valley legend -- was doing the talking.
After his presentation they would shake his hand, tell him, Great talk, Jeff, wonderful idea, let's get together soon. Standard networking rebop that would likely lead nowhere because, as Skoll knew better than anyone, he had not yet developed a clear identity and galvanizing image for his new organization. He had not yet done for the Skoll Foundation what he had so famously accomplished for eBay: forged a brand. As Skoll was sitting in the audience, brooding over this fact and awaiting his turn to speak, the conference host introduced a man named Bill Strickland.
The host explained that, over a period of more than 30 years in an inner city Pittsburgh neighborhood, Strickland had built his nonprofit arts and technology organization into a model for the empowerment of poor people. She noted that Strickland had served by White House appointment on the National Council on the Arts and sat on the board of directors of several institutions, including Mellon Bank and his alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh. The host observed that Strickland was almost certainly the only individual to have been both the subject of a Harvard Business School case study and a guest on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. In 1996, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Strickland one of its genius grants.
Skoll watched this big dude with his funky slides take the stage and start talking about Frank Lloyd Wright, fountains, and welfare moms preparing salmon almondine. He showed pictures of poor people learning organic chemistry to become pharmacy techs for Bayer, and neighborhood kids at computer monitors learning digital imaging. He told stories about the late Sen. John Heinz handing him a check for a million dollars to train food-industry workers. He showed a photo of the greenhouse he'd built to train students in horticulture and -- to make the greeenhouse self-supporting -- to grow orchids to supply a local supermarket chain.
Then he started talking about jazz, how he'd built a Field of Dreams-like 350-seat concert hall in the same building as the arts and job-training center. And sure enough the musicians had come -- Dizzy Gillespie and Pat Metheny and Wynton Marsalis and many others -- to perform and record at Manchester Bidwell. See, that's a shot of Dizzy right there.
Near the end of his presentation, Strickland told a story about meeting Mayor Willie Brown in San Francisco. It seemed that Brown heard Strickland talk and told him that he, Mayor Brown, wanted one of those centers in his city. So Strickland, Brown, and Herbie Hancock -- dig it, Herbie Hancock -- sat down over dinner and, on a place mat, drew out the plans for a center in Hunters Point, a San Francisco neighborhood similar to Manchester. And here it was: Strickland showed a slide, an artist's rendering of the Bayview Hunters Point Center for Arts and Technology (popularly known by the acronym BAYCAT), the Bay Bridge arching in the background, trees, fountain, plaza....
"Now, just a little bit ago I was showing this drawing to a group of schoolkids up in San Francisco," Strickland told the Silicon Valley audience. "And this girl raised her hand and said, 'Mr. Strickland, this looks wonderful. How long will it take you-all to build it?'
