Bill Strickland came to town to begin planning a New Haven version of a successful center to train urban teens and adults facing hard times.
Strickland, founder of a model arts and vo-tech center in Pittsburgh, offered his vision to 60 movers and shakers gathered at the Lawn Club for lunch Thursday.
The target of his vision: “the people everybody’s giving up on and have no hope.”
Central his vision: Orchids. In the inner-city.
The event was part inspiration talk, about the wisdom of treating poor people with respect when you want to help them. And it was part prescription, about how to build an institution that sends the most at-risk teens to college and turns the least employable urbandwellers into health techs, pharmacists’ aides, and gourmet chefs.
The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven hosted the lunch. The foundation has hired Strickland’s National Center for Arts & Technology to conduct a $150,000 feasibility study of building a “New Haven Center for the Arts & Technology” modeled on the Manchester Bidwell Corporation, which Strickland launched in Pittsburgh amid the inferno of the 1968 riots.
UI, Empower New Haven, William Graustein, and Yale-New Haven Hospital (whose president, Marna Borgstrom, pictured, attended the launch) joined the Foundation in funding the study.
Strickland told of how, during the riots, he opened up a clay studio in the Pittsburgh neighborhood where he grew up and continues to live to this day.
“I started dragging kids off the street to save their souls with clay,” he said. The program grew and grew. It had two parts: an arts center for “at-risk” teens 17 and below; and a vocational center for adults to learn new-economy jobs.
The goal of the arts center isn’t to steer most of the students to careers in the arts. Rather, it steers them to college — at a rate of 92 percent, he said. (Nationally the high-school drop-out rate among blacks and Latinos is 50 percent.) The arts program is “a hook to get the kids engaged in something meaningful so they can imagine themselves as productive citizens.”
The vocational program often begins with basic reading skills. “I have people in the program with high-school diplomas they can’t read,” Strickland said.
Soon they’re doing more than reading. Welfare moms within six months are gourmet chefs, he said. Or within ten months they’d be “doing analytical chemistry using logarithmic calculators.”
Strickland showed slides of his Pittsburgh center, which has become a “world-class” architectural campus filled with expensive art, a $1 million instructional kitchen, and boardrooms and banquet facilities that resemble Fortune 500 headquarters or luxury hotels. All this in the midst of a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood. Not once in 24 years has anyone sprayed graffiti or stolen anything, Strickland claimed. Four blocks away, the public high school has “steel doors, bars on the windows and metal detectors … Garbage cans are chained to the wall.”
The campus reflects Strickland’s philosophy that the poor will thrive in a culture of respect and high expectations.
And orchids.
The graceful colorful flowers kept showing up in his slides. He makes sure they’re grown and thriving at Manchester Bidwell. Plastic flowers, he said, won’t do.
Some of the vo-tech participant grow the orchids as one career path.
Strickland, who won a MacArthur “genius grant,” became a sought-after apostle of “investing in hope” in cities. His National Center for Arts & Technology has helped launch similar centers in Cincinnati, San Francisco, and Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s currently working with Cleveland, Columbus, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Austin, L.A., Charlotte — and, now New Haven.
Strickland said that if New Haven does decide to pursue such a center in the wake of his feasibility study, it needs to follow some important principles: Hire a local chief. Choose a smart and completely local board. Work closely with the public schools and community college.
Che Dawson, city government’s youth policy point man, attended the lunch and said he welcomes Strickland’s project. “His underlying message was developing a culture where kids feel comfortable, feel appreciated,” Dawson said. “I never say no to resources for kids.”
Anyone interested in getting involved with the project can contact Neal Smalley at this email address.