E-mail a friendBill Strickland
airdate January 14, 2009
As president-CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation and its subsidiaries, Bill Strickland builds partnerships to help the disadvantaged build a better future. He's also the author of Make the Impossible Possible, which includes his story of how a kid from Pittsburgh's ghetto would go on to lecture at Harvard and serve on the National Endowment of the Arts board. The MacArthur Fellowship "genius" award winner is also founder of the Grammy-winning MCG Jazz, the most successful jazz subscription series in America.
Job training expert addresses why so many disenfranchised people believed they were not capable of learning competitive skills. (1:59)
Full interview. (12:10)
Bill Strickland
Tavis: We continue our "Road to Wealth" series tonight with a look at the need for job training in this difficult economy. Bill Strickland is the president and CEO of the Manchester Craftsman's Guild and Bidwell Training Center, located in Pittsburgh. He's also the author of the new book "Make the Impossible Possible." There's also a CD of music that goes along with the book, same name - "Make the Impossible Possible." Bill, nice to have you on the program.
Bill Strickland: Good to be here, Tavis.
Tavis: Happy New Year to you.
Strickland: Nice to see you, man.
Tavis: Let me start -- before I get to the text and to the CD, let me start by asking, since you're in this business every day, whether the economy is good or bad, you're in the job-training field, how bad are things?
Strickland: Things are bad. I'm from Pittsburgh, and we experienced a lot of this setback some time ago, with the loss of heavy industry, particularly steel. We sort of are beginning to recover, but the current situation has not improved at all. Infrastructure is deteriorating, jobs are being lost. It's serious, and in the African-American community, it is an habitual and continual problem of being engaged with economic opportunity. So I'd say that things are in need of improvement.
Tavis: What do you make of that irony -- you said a couple of things I want to come back to right quick. The first is, in no particular order, the irony that while Black people are celebrating, just days from now, the inauguration of the first African-American president, Black people are catching more hell than anybody else, given the biggest challenge on his agenda, the economy.
Strickland: Sure. Oftentimes, as the saying goes, last hired, first to be let go. And I think as this society becomes increasingly technical and more advanced in terms of the requirements of a workforce, the African-American community, because of the nature of our circumstances, the challenges of public education, the inability of the kids to be able to function in the 21st and 22nd century only widens the gap. And that is a severe probably that can, unfortunately, only get worse.
Tavis: So if you were unemployed and have no health insurance and are about to be evicted on January the 19th, the day before Obama gets inaugurated, chances are you're going to be in the same situation January 21, the day after he gets inaugurated. So what's a brother or sister to do?
Strickland: You have to start at the beginning, which is to be able to create opportunities to acquire the skills that are going to be necessary to function in this world and hopefully the next one. That we've really got to build institutions at the community level where people normally experience their life that will give them the technical skills they're going to need to participate to actually be a part of this conversation.
Tavis: When you say technical skills, unpack that for me.
Strickland: Let's start with basics like reading and math and science and language skills -- fundamental to a technical society. As the society gets more sophisticated in terms of the industries, IT being one of them, medical being another, manufacturing being a third, the ability of African-American kids coming from urban areas to participate with the requisite skill level that they're going to need has got to be fundamental to any serious conversation about rebuilding our communities.
Tavis: Because the economy is being hit at every level of the economy as a scale, doing anything right now is exponentially more difficult than it was just a couple of years ago. So if you are caught in a situation where you are unemployed or you, for that matter, are underemployed, where do you begin? Where do you start? Because right now, the situation seems so dire that I'm not sure that people even know where to begin, how to start, to get out of the economic malaise that we are feeling as individuals.
Strickland: Well, I obviously -- you've addressed exactly what I do for a living. I run a training center that is specifically focused in on that group of individuals who are dislocated, unemployed, low skills. We are able to demonstrate pretty effectively that we can provide the kind of system-level skills training that will allow people to be competitive in an increasingly technical society.
It can be done, and it can be done at a community level. We've got to address the critical issue of public education in our country. The African-American and the Hispanic community are experiencing 50 percent dropout rate with our kids. That is untenable and unsustainable number in terms of a society that claims to be advanced.
Tavis: Can that class of people right now in America who are unemployed and underemployed survive long enough to take advantage of job training programs and the jobs that are (unintelligible)?
Strickland: Not without aggressive intervention by the federal government. One of my hopes for President-elect Obama is that he will recognize that there are going to have to be financial resources, academic resources, social resources, intellectual resources, provided for people at the community level on a sustained basis, so that we can begin to have a serious conversation about remediation.
Not Band-Aids, but solutions, to begin to really start to actively demonstrate that we can take people who have been effectively disenfranchised out of the conversation or having never been in the conversation and make them productive citizens in the way that they will never have to need or have the same level of remediation in future years.
Tavis: Your new book is called "Make the Impossible Possible," as I mentioned a moment ago. It's hard to talk to you about this book without going back to the beginning, where it all started for you. Tell me about your mama, and where you grew up.
Strickland: I grew up in a poor neighborhood. When I grew up as a youngster it was a mostly ethnic neighborhood that became a poor neighborhood. And so in my middle years it essentially was an inner city poor neighborhood, not much employment, industry had left, and my mother was determined that her children were going to have some sense of dignity, some sense of a promise for a future.
And so we learned through discipline and hard work and management and basic life skills to feel that we had an investment, we had skills, and that we had the ability to learn. That came from her.
Tavis: There are so many people now trapped in those same situations. They're in the projects, they're in difficult situations. There are so many of those persons trapped who have single mothers now. What's your message to those single mothers?
Strickland: There's nothing wrong with you. You've just become the victim of unfortunate sets of circumstances, but you have the ability to learn, you have the ability to contribute, you have a valuable life. You just have difficult circumstances.
You can learn, you can contribute, you can raise a family, you can bring dignity to yourself and to your children, and you can have a future. We demonstrate it every day of my life in my center, where we're able to take those same single parents and demonstrate within 12 months that they are capable of becoming chemical technicians, medical technicians, culinary arts employees and so forth at a very high and advanced level of skill within 12 months, having no requisite background in any of those training areas.
Tavis: Let me ask this, then: What have you found, in all your years of doing this, at the center of, put another way, the primary reason why person X, Y, or Z felt before joining your program that they were incapable, they were unable of doing what you helped them ultimately to do?
Strickland: People are a function of the images that they have in front of their face. People are a function of experience. If your experience is in a difficult neighborhood, not many role models that are positive, poverty, anger, drugs, failed social institutions, failed public schools, the conclusions that you bring about life are not affirming.
If you change the environment and you change the assumptions, you can actually change behavior. So by building environments that affirm the human spirit, that demonstrate that people are capable of extraordinary things, that start off with the assumption that people can learn as opposed to not being able to learn, that see the world as a set of assets and not limitations, changes behavior every day of the week.
Tavis: A closing irony I want to get your thoughts on right quick, which is that while this campaign for the White House was so much about hope and change, and to Mr. Obama's credit a lot of people energized and excited about the future just a few months ago, and yet I get the sense that there's still people right now who are being -- how can I put this? -- frozen by their own fears about where this country is headed, where this economy is headed, how long it's going to be.
I guess the question is can you still, in these difficult circumstances, make the impossible possible?
Strickland: Absolutely. That's what the book's about, that's what my center's about, that's what I'm about. You don't have to have ideal circumstances in order to take control of your life, that's the point. And you can do it in the communities where you live every day -- it doesn't have to be on a grand scale, it can be on a very small scale, but you put left foot in front of right and over the course of time you begin to make progress, but you start with the assumption that people have value, that their lives are worth something, and you begin to demonstrate that in the social institutions that make up the neighborhood or make up the community or make up the circumstances in which you find yourself.
The genius, I think, of President-elect Obama is that he has demonstrated that you can make the impossible possible by starting with a campaign with people writing checks for $25 and $30 to creating one of the most fascinating IT strategies for actually becoming president of the United States by using the Internet, by using IT, by using college students, by using populations that normally were not considered valuable in terms of building a political campaign.
He himself represents the hope that I think all of us ought to take into account in terms of changing the nature of the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Tavis: I couldn't have said it better myself, and of course that's why he wrote the book and not me. (Laughter.) His name is Bill Strickland. His new book is called "Make the Impossible Possible." A complimentary CD of music to make the impossible possible, so book and CD. Bill, congratulations; nice to have you on the program.
Strickland: Thank you, Tavis, nice to be here.
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