Dan's Thoughts

Vision #14 - June 30, 2006

This week, I met one of America’s most interesting and important people. His name is Bill Strickland, founder and president of the Manchester Craftsman’s Guild in Pittsburg, Pa. (I urge you to Google him!)

A group of us from Christ Church went to see Mr. Strickland because we wanted to see for ourselves what all the hype was about in the business magazines. Well, unlike many of the “puffed up” sort of stories one gets in those magazines, this story is for real.

After getting to Pittsburg, I gave the taxi driver Bill’s address. He looked at it and laughed. “You want to go where?” he asked, “that’s not exactly the best part of town!” And, in fact, Bill’s neighborhood has consistently been rated the worse area in the city for crime. It is filled with signs of despair, poverty and violence. Bill knew all of this when he built his highly successful businesses and training centers in that neighborhood. At least he should have known it. He was born and raised there, after all.

He may have gone to prison along with many of his buddies had it not been for a teacher in his high school. That teacher taught kids how to work with clay to make beautiful pottery (you know the kinds of programs that routinely get cut from school budgets because they are so “impractical.”) But as Bill learned about ceramics, he learned about two other things. He learned that some people will pay good money for great art and he learned that like clay, young human lives can be molded for good and for ill by a skillful artist.

After finishing school, Bill opened up a ceramics shop in his row house. After many, many years, it was doing well enough to move into larger facilities. With very little money, he trained young boys and girls in that row house how to make beautiful things. He did well enough that the leaders of a failing church program in the area asked him to take over their operation. That gave him a run down, crime ridden building and a legally incorporated training institute.

When he moved into that facility, he made a decision: poor people need beauty even more than rich people. “When one is trying to solve a problem,” he told us, “you have to look more like the solution than like the problem.” So he insisted that he would maintain clean facilities, would keep beautiful art on the walls and that only those who accepted those values and that atmosphere could stay in his program.

After long years, a few powerful people began to take notice of what he had been doing. One of them was Mr. Heinz, of Heinz ketchup. That corporation made a donation for Mr. Strickland to begin a first class culinary school in the neighborhood. Bill enlisted troubled kids for the new program by telling them that he could teach them to make a lot of money, legally and joyfully. He thought that a kid with enough creativity to paint amazingly complicated graffiti on a bridge at 2:00 in the morning would probably have the ability to become a great chef. So his culinary institute was placing chefs in Pittsburgh’s finest restaurants. Now they run the food services at the airport!

(I ate at his institute and can testify that the food is equal to that of the very finest restaurants.)

In the last few years, Mr. Strickland has built greenhouses so the people of his neighborhood can grow the best tomatoes you have ever put in your mouth. They also grow beautiful orchids. Furthermore, all of this stuff makes a profit – it’s not subsidized in any way. The people Mr. Strickland has been training are creating business after business and in the process, lifting young people from despair.

Well, Mr. Strickland’s work just keeps on expanding. He has assumed leadership of public schools that the education department couldn’t handle any more. He built a first –class recording studio that has now won three grammys for Jazz recordings.

I know that I am running out of room and probably running out of your patience as well but I had to tell you about what I saw.

While riding around with him in his car (a Volkswagen), I asked him what was driving him. “I just never could never master the art of becoming numb to human suffering, “he said. This is my neighborhood and people were dying. I had to do something. Now I know our entire country is dying. The bottom half is poor, struggling and giving up hope. If we don’t do something about it, we will lose our country. I am just doing what I can do and trying to inspire others to do what they can. That’s all.”

I want to belong to a church that has that kind of compassion and that kind of resolve. I think a lot of people want that.

Dan