Make the impossible possible One man's crusade to inspire others to dream bigger and achieve the extraordinary

Community activist and MacArthur fellow Strickland explains the jazz expression "tell your story" as "playing that doesn't just display your virtuosity, but also gives the audience a glimpse of your soul." He succeeds in doing just that. We get the virtuosity: he was an African-American kid from Pittsburgh's inner city who at 19 established what became Manchester-Bidwell, the now famous arts and job-training center for disadvantaged kids and adults. And we get the soul: he was spurred on by a mother who taught him to polish a wood floor until it gleamed no matter what was going on in the streets outside; an art teacher who believed in the "aimless" boy; a classroom where coffee brewed, jazz played softly, and he had the transformative experience of throwing his first clay pot. It's the American dream with a twist: for Strickland, it was never about shedding his past and getting ahead but about following his bliss and making a difference. Which is not to say the skilled fund-raiser isn't savvy. He touts the value of a Brooks Brothers suit and knowing the right people. Unfortunately, we don't learn how Strickland's philosophy of making the impossible possible applies to his-or our-personal lives. (Dec. 31) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A MacArthur genius whose Manchester Bidwell centers in Pittsburgh have trained thousands of disadvantaged children and adults in everything from ceramics to horticulture here tells anyone who's emotionally impoverished how to have faith. With a national tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHAPTER ONE From the Ghetto to Harvard Business School It was a winter morning in 1996 and I was standing center stage in the pit of a jam-packed, wood-paneled lecture hall at Harvard University. Rows of wooden seats loomed above me in curving tiers. In those seats, with their expectant gazes bearing down on me, sat about one hundred razor-sharp young men and women-graduate students at the Harvard Business School-waiting to see what I had to offer. As a result of my work with inner-city kids and adults at the Manchester Bidwell Center in Pittsburgh, I had been asked to serve as an HBS case study, to share a little hard-earned business savvy from the other side of the tracks. As Professor Jim Heskett introduced me to his class, I positioned my beat-up old slide projector on a tabletop, then opened a battered cardboard box, held together with duct tape at the corners, and lifted out a loaded carousel of slides. The students looked me over. In recent weeks, such other speakers as Disney honcho Michael Eisner and Southwest Airlines chief Herb Kelleher had stood where I was standing to share their business philosophies and reveal their secrets of success. Now it was my turn in the spotlight. I knew the kids weren't sure what to expect from me. To tell the truth, I wasn't so sure that they could get what I had to offer. After all, I don't run an airline or an entertainment empire. If you wanted to be technical about it, you could say I'm not a businessman at all. As the founder and CEO of Manchester Bidwell, a community arts-education and jobtraining center in Pittsburgh, my mission is to turn people's lives around. We do that by offering them two distinct educational programs under the same roof. The first program, which we call the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, offers rigorous after-school courses in the arts that light a creative fire in at-risk kids and inspire them to stay in school. Classes at the Craftsmen's Guild are taught by a staff of established artists and skilled instructors, and the curriculum is designed to rival courses taught at the best private schools and academies. Our center also houses the Bidwell Training Center, which provides state-of-the-art job-training programs intended to give poor and otherwise disadvantaged adults the skills and direction they need to land meaningful, good-paying jobs that provide the foundation for a much brighter future. Our students include welfare mothers, recovering addicts, ex-convicts, laid-off manufacturing workers, and others who have had hope or even dignity snatched away by the difficult circumstances of their lives. Our younger students at the Craftsmen's Guild face similar struggles. Many of them are on a fast track to failure when they come to us, flunking courses, skipping school, on the verge of dropping out or being suspended. Some of them swagger in, angry, defiant, bristling with hostile attitude. Others hide behind a prickly shell of apathy and withdrawal. When we started out some twenty years ago, most of our students were African-Americans from the city's poorest neighborhoods. Today, almost half our student body is made up of disadvantaged white folks.We greet them all with the same basic recipe for success: high standards, stiff challenges, a chance to develop unexplored talents, and a message that many of them haven't heard before-that no matter how difficult the circumstances of their lives may be, no matter how many bad assumptions they've made about their chances in life, no matter how well they've been taught to rein in their dreams and narrow their aspirations, they have the right, and the potential, to expect to live rich and satisfying lives. It takes some time for them to adjust to that message and trust our faith in their potential, but once they do, the transformation is remarkable, and our success rates, compiled over more tha Excerpted from Make the Impossible Possible: One Man's Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary by Vince Rause, Bill Strickland All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.