What One Man Can Do

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Operating on a budget of $10 million to $12 million a year, the funding evenly split between public and private sources, Manchester Bidwell is a nonprofit corporation comprising two main divisions, the Manchester Craftsman's Guild and the Bidwell Training Center. The former provides after-school and summer programs in ceramics, photography, digital imaging, drawing, and painting to middle school and high school kids throughout the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. The latter offers adults training in fields such as culinary arts, horticultural technology, and medical coding, connecting its predominately African American low-income students to jobs with leading area employers such as Heinz, Bayer, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Under the MCG aegis, but operating independently, MCG Jazz presents jazz concerts in a theater located on the premises. It also produces recordings by leading jazz artists -- the Nancy Wilson-Toots Thielmann collaboration is an example.

MCG programs reach 3,200 schoolchildren a year, and more than 80% of its 500 regular students -- 70% to 80% of whom come from at-risk backgrounds -- complete high school and attend college. Bidwell, meanwhile, enrolls approximately 500 adults annually, placing 90% of its graduates in full-time jobs. MCG Jazz, for its part, has won three Grammy awards in the past four years and developed an important archive of recordings. Manchester Bidwell finds a place for every student, youth or adult, who agrees to meet its requirements for solid effort and responsible conduct. All classes and programs are offered free of charge to students.

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.

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