William Strickland

For more than 55 years, Bill Strickland has been an innovator in the service of providing underserved people with learning and healing environments that inspire hope and shatter expectations for what they can achieve.

As a college student in 1968, Bill founded Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh to give the youth of his neighborhood a place to learn pottery as a safe alternative to the streets. In 1972, he assumed leadership of a struggling building trade school and ultimately combined the operations under one roof. Over the years, other operations were added, including five-time GRAMMY®-winning MCG Jazz, one of the longest-running jazz subscription series in America. Today, the center serves hundreds of under-resourced youth and adults every year in a host of vocational training and arts disciplines, including culinary arts, medicine, photography, and digital imaging.

Since founding Manchester Bidwell Corporation, Bill has guided the creation of more than a dozen centers. What started as a few pottery wheels in a basement in Pittsburgh has become a constellation of world-class vocational training & arts education centers in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Israel. In 2023, Bill founded the Strickland Global Leadership Institute (SGLI) to institutionalize and propel his vision into the future. SGLI facilitates the creation of new centers, supports the centers guided by his vision, and will go on to train & mentor people in how to start & run these centers.

Bill is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellows “Genius” grant (1996) and has been awarded the Skoll Award (2007) and Goi Peace Award (2011). He has earned more than 25 honorary doctorate degrees. His work transforming lives has been the subject of four Harvard Business School case studies to date. Bill is the author of Make the Impossible Possible with Vince Rause.