ORLANDO, Fla. – As the keynote speaker for CUNA's Future Forum last week, Bill Strickland, head of Pittsburgh's Bidwell Training Center and founder of the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, told the credit union figures attending that they are part of the solution.
Strickland took over the crumbling Bidwell in 1968 with the front door hanging from one hinge, students gambling out front, and discovered on his first day that it was deep in debt to the IRS. He has since turned it around, setting up state-of-the-art culinary, art, medical, and agricultural learning centers for adults and at-risk children in inner city Pittsburgh where he was born and raised and said he will die. He credited a public school teacher with saving his life and emphasized the philosophy that "Most people are born into this world as assets, not liabilities."
After a visit to a Frank Lloyd Wright house as a young man, Strickland set his mind rebuilding his school in the worst neighborhood with the highest crime rate in Pittsburgh in that likeness. He hired one of Wright's students and placed a fountain out front. If you want to work with poor people, "you want to look like the solution."
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The training center now serves gourmet meals and provides the city's welfare moms and ex-steel workers a new beginning along with fresh flowers in the lobby. "Why? Because I'm in the attitude business, not just the training business," Strickland explained.
He shook his head at figures showing that it cost more to keep someone in jail than to send them to medical school. Strickland said he could build 100 training centers for all the disaster recovery money wasted in Hurricane Katrina and sustain them.
He has obtained large donations from several wealthy contributors, like the million dollars he got from Senator Heinz of Heinz ketchup, to start a culinary school. The culinary students now cater events booked for doctors and other groups-who travel to the inner city to eat there-which helps fund the school's programs. "People are a function of expectations. Give them an environment of hope and they act that way," Strickland said. Ninety percent go on to college.
"It's not about public education being eliminated. It's about public education being saved.What I'm showing you today is what a school is supposed to look like," he stated.
Strickland has replicated his schools in San Francisco, Cincinnati, and West Michigan and is looking into Philadelphia and New Orleans. He also explained how Audrey Cerise, CEO of ASI Federal Credit Union, committed to finding the funding to build one of Strickland's training centers in New Orleans just three days before Hurricane Katrina hit. "If not for one woman in one credit union in one town the many students who are going to be the beneficiaries probably would never have happened," Strickland asserted.
"The people you represent are oftentimes the people I represent: poor people. People who have lost their aspirations," he said, adding that credit unions are part of the solution.
Strickland added, "There's a kind of depression that surrounds my work because I know we don't have to live like this any more." However, people like those in the credit union system give him hope. He closed to a standing ovation. [email protected]
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