Strickland’s vision

Manchester Bidwell is built to last, and grow

In 1996, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Bill Strickland one of its coveted, no-strings-attached “genius” grants to further his work using “the arts, education, job training, job creation, and economic development to reclaim neighborhoods from urban decay.”

He’d be just as deserving of the award today. Mr. Strickland, 70, remains in the trenches, although Manchester Bidwell Corp. announced this week that his role is shifting from president and CEO with daily management responsibilities to executive chairman with increased involvement in fundraising and outreach.

Few people commit themselves to public service the way Mr. Strickland has done or with such prescience. It’s increasingly apparent that many fine jobs in today’s economy do not require a four-year college degree and that workers, whatever their education level, will have to learn new skills to remain attractive to employers.

Mr. Strickland’s advocacy for job training programs dates to 1968, when he started ceramics and photography classes for city school students in an abandoned house in the Mexican War Streets. What became the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild was the 19-year-old’s response to the despair that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The classes offered practical skills and nurtured an appreciation for the arts.

In 1972, he also took over the 4year-old Bidwell Training Center, which offered training in the construction trades and now offers programs for laboratory technicians and in the culinary arts, horticulture technology and health care fields. The health care programs — medical assistant, medical claims processor, medical coder and pharmacy technician — help to create a talent pipeline that’s critical to growing the city’s eds and meds economy.

Mr. Strickland also is credited with forging the kinds of businesssector partnerships that the Allegheny Conference on Community Development championed in a 2016 report warning of a possible shortage of nearly 80,000 employees in various fields by 2025. “Changing skill sets across virtually all occupations means that a much tighter education and industry connection must be created to align supply and demand,” the report said.

Pittsburgh isn’t the only community to benefit from Mr. Strickland’s work. His programs, operating today under the umbrella of the Manchester Bidwell Corp., have been models for similar initiatives in other U.S. cities and Akko, Israel.

Mr. Strickland has served as an ambassador for the city, for the underprivileged, for higher education, for the arts and for workforce development. His resume is impressive. More important to him, though, are the thousands of Pittsburghers who bettered their resumes through his programs.