Bill Strickland, a world-renowned social innovator and founder and executive chairman of Manchester Bidwell Corporation, will discuss “The Art of Leadership” during the Richard G. Staley ’62 Visionary Entrepreneur Speaker Series, a program of Grove City College’s Center for Entrepreneurship + Innovation’s (E+I).
The lecture at 7 p.m. on Oct. 30 in Sticht Lecture Hall in the Staley Hall of Arts and Letters is free and open to the public. It will be livestreamed at gccentrepreneurship.com.
“Bill Strickland has an incredible story that has inspired millions of people around the world. He is an accomplished social entrepreneur and a gifted storyteller who has dedicated his life to changing the lives of underserved populations starting in Pittsburgh and now around the globe. This is an event that you won’t want to miss,” said Yvonne J. English ’97, professor of practice and executive director of E+I.
For more than 55 years, 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, Strickland founded Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild 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 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, Manchester Bidwell 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 MBC, Strickland 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 and cultural enrichment centers in the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Israel.
Strickland is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellows “Genius” grant and has been awarded the Goi Peace Award, as well as more than 25 honorary doctorate degrees. His work transforming lives has been the subject of four Harvard Business School case studies to date. He is the author of “Make the Impossible Possible” with Vince Rause and is the subject of a forthcoming documentary film produced by Wayfarer Studios.
E+I’s Richard G. Staley ’62 Visionary Entrepreneur Speaker Series brings experienced entrepreneurs to campus to share their insights and wisdom. Each semester, E+I, which strives to promote an entrepreneurial culture across the College, hosts successful business leaders whose compelling stories of success and failure have inspired and enlightened our audiences and provoked thought and stimulated conversation.
This series was endowed in 2013 by Richard G. Staley ’62 to enable E+I to bring guest speakers to campus to explore topics related to entrepreneurship and innovation. Mr. Staley founded Flavor House, Inc., a leading developer and manufacturer of unique flavors used by many well-recognized brands. He received the Jack Kennedy Memorial Alumni Achievement Award in 2019, an award presented annually since 1964 to alumni who have had distinctive success in their fields.
For more about the Center for Entrepreneurship + Innovation at Grove City College, visit gccentrepreneurship.com.