For our students at Manchester Bidwell, accepting the notion that dreams can come true often requires heroic levels of courage and faith, but we see that kind of heroism every day: a high school kid on the verge of dropping out turns himself around and goes to college; a welfare mother finds a good-paying job that allows her to build a better future; a homeless woman pulls her life together and buys a decent home. In each of those cases, a human being is finding the strength and the optimism to throw off a lifetime of destructive assumptions and refusing to be limited by false ideas of what is possible and what is not.

Of course, the ghetto has no monopoly on self-defeating assumptions. We all labor under false assumptions that have us living lives that are less than they could be. We all are too easily convinced that we lack the capacity to make our dreams come true.

“Impossible” is a frightening word, but my hope, my goal, in writing this book is to help each of you find the valor, the vision, and the conviction to stand up to it and to realize, as so many of our students have, in so many inspiring ways, that you can overcome all the obstacles that stand in your path and live the rich, fulfilling, and meaningfully successful life that all of us, if we are true to our hearts, dream of.

A while ago, some students from our horticultural program took a field trip to visit a large greenhouse in Canada. They spent the day touring the place with the greenhouse managers, discussing techniques and exchanging ideas with the professionals there. On the bus ride home, one of our instructors noticed that one of the students was crying. She was a young mother, an African-American woman, very poor, struggling to raise her kids on welfare. The instructor asked her what was wrong. Fighting off sobs, she said, “They listened to me. I had some good ideas, and they listened. It was the first time anyone treated me like I had something to say. It was the first time around white people that I felt like a human being.”

Those were her exact words: She finally felt like a human being. All her young life, that woman had been defined by the assumptions society had made about her and by the self-defeating assumptions she was making about herself. That’s the real evil of poverty: It diminishes you, it starves you of hope and vision, it forces you to define yourself in terms of what you cannot do or cannot have or cannot be. That insight lies close to the heart of why Manchester Bidwell works, but there is wisdom in it for us all, because once we accept the idea that poverty is, essentially, the acceptance of meager possibility, we can’t deny that all of us are in some fashion poor.

We all suffer some form of poverty—poverty of imagination, or courage, or vision, or will. We allow ourselves to be limited by our fears—fear of failure, fear of change, fear of being criticized or of looking like a fool. We convince ourselves we lack the resources, the education, or the talent to pursue extraordinary goals. We trust conventional wisdom more than our own intuitions, and we prize the narrow and partial aspects of success—money, power, prestige—more than the rich, whole, satisfyingly human success we imagine in our dreams. In the same fashion that poor folks are shaped and limited by the unforgiving world into which they were born, we all allow ourselves to be defined by the external circumstances of our lives, in terms of what lies beyond our reach, in terms of dreams that will never come true.

In the name of “common sense” or “being responsible,” we follow the path of least resistance, ignoring our true passions and potential and squandering the chance to live truly extraordinary lives.

Next up was a shot of the gleaming commercial kitchen that forms the heart of our culinary arts program. “We modeled our food-service curriculum on the Culinary Institute of America,” I explained. “The Heinz Corporation contributed most of the equipment and the expertise of some of their executive chefs. Legendary New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme also helped shape the program. You could pay $30,000 for the same training at a private culinary school. Our students get the training for free,” I told them.

“Our graduates are taking good jobs as assistant chefs in fine restaurants all over the city. These are people who came to us thinking a Big Mac was fine dining. But in a matter of months they’re turning out dishes like these. . . .” I called up a slide showing a young African-American woman presenting an elegantly garnished platter of trout amandine, followed by a plate of delicate pastries—fruit rolls, miniature scones—each one scalloped, fluted, or otherwise sculpted into a tiny work of art. “This is the kind of work they do after three months of training,” I said.

“All these are poor people who supposedly have so little to offer, people society has given up on. But if you give them a reason to believe in themselves, if you set the bar high enough and put them in an environment that enables them to perform, you see that they’re capable of producing something as fine as these pastries.”

The last slide I showed them was another shot of the fountain that flows in the courtyard behind our lobby, and in some ways, this is the most telling slide of all. When we were building the place, I insisted we have a fountain. People thought I was crazy. “Why do you need a fountain in a poverty center?” they asked me. And I told them, “Because this isn’t a poverty center, this is a center for success. I want the people who come here to know they deserve success. I start to make that point by letting them know we think they deserve a fountain, and the very fact that a fountain is not, in conventional terms, necessary here makes its presence all the more powerful.”

Next I called up a slide showing a bright, contemporary classroom. “This is a chem tech class in progress,” I said. In the slide, students tapped at logarithmic calculators as they labored to crack the complex mathematical equations written on the board. “These are people who had been saddled with limiting labels: ‘welfare mother,’ ‘drug addict,’ ‘unemployed,’ ‘homeless,’ ‘ex-con,’” I said. “Not one of them had any background in science or math. Yet after a few months they are mastering the skills they need to do complex computations and land jobs as chemical technicians for large local companies like Mylan Labs, Nova Chemicals, and Bayer.

Society doesn’t expect this kind of thing from people whose potential has been defined and diminished by one restrictive label or another, but when you see accomplishment like this, you can’t help but realize how hollow and damaging labels can be.”

My next slide showed an image of a sellout crowd filling the seats of an intimate, elegantly proportioned concert hall. “This is our music hall,” I said. “We host live jazz concerts here, featuring virtually all the top names in jazz music—artists like Billy Taylor, Dizzy Gillespie, Nancy Wilson, Joe Williams, Dave Brubeck, Milt Jackson, and Chuck Mangione, just to name a few. When I first conceived the idea of adding a jazz component to Manchester Bidwell, I got a lot of puzzled stares. I wasn’t surprised. After all, why does a school that teaches arts and job skills need a performance hall? What does jazz have to do with helping our students turn their lives around? At the time, I had no answer for those questions, but jazz music was one of my defining passions, and my heart told me the place wouldn’t be complete until jazz was an integral part of its fabric. I never would have predicted that our jazz program would grow to become one of the oldest and most successful jazz subscription series in the country, or that the presence of so much great music, and the relationships we’d build with so many great jazz stars, would lead to the creation of our own jazz label. I certainly never guessed that the albums we produced would win Grammy Awards.

But all those things happened, and in the process, jazz has enriched the culture of our school, enhanced our reputation, and earned us new allies and a level of recognition that has opened the doors to unexpected opportunities for growth.”

The slide show continued. I showed them shots of our sleek new digital arts lab, put together with expertise and state-of-the-art technology contributed by Hewlett-Packard, our world-class ceramics studio—the direct descendant of the original Craftsmen’s Guild—and our professional-caliber photography facilities.

“On the first day of the photography program, we give the kids an expensive camera,” I explained. “Some of the kids can’t believe it. Nobody ever trusted them like that before. They come in here hampered by certain assumptions about life, and by assumptions about the assumptions other people are making about them. But we hand them a camera, we show them our trust and high expectations, and just like that we get them to question some bad ideas that might be holding them back.”

The slide of the photo studio reminded me of another student whose transformation made a lasting impression on me. His name was Gabe Tait. I knew his father from the neighborhood. Gabe’s older brother was in prison serving a life term for murder. On the day his old man brought him in, he said, “Bill, I lost one son to the streets; I don’t want to lose another. See if you can help him.” Gabe signed up for the photo program. At first, he gave us the usual too-cool-for-school persona, but when they handed him a camera and he held it in his hand, he couldn’t hide his excitement. Like Sharif, Gabe had talent, and pursuing that talent soon became hipper, more enticing, and more important than any cheap thrill the streets could offer.

Today, Gabe is an award-winning photojournalist who has worked for several major newspapers, including the Detroit Free Press and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Recently, Gabe left journalism to become a missionary in Africa, and now is helping poor people there learn some of the lessons he learned as a student at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild.

There are lots of stories like that at Manchester Bidwell—students who become teachers, who start their own businesses, who get their college degrees and come back to work for us. These are spectacular successes achieved against long odds, but even the less dramatic successes strengthen my faith in the incredible resiliency of the human spirit. In my view, every single mother who lands a job, gets off welfare, and changes the future for her kids; every troubled kid who gets it together and graduates from college; every substance abuser who gets sober and builds a productive life; and every homeless person who gets off the streets is a success story of epic proportions.

Sharif was with us for many years, and before he was finished he proved himself to be one of the best ceramics students we’d ever had. And we weren’t the only people who thought so. In his senior year, Sharif received scholarship offers from the art departments of three different colleges. He eventually enrolled at Slippery Rock University, on a full scholarship, where he earned his B.A. with flying colors, then a master’s degree in fine art. While in graduate school, his talent and academic achievement earned him a Fulbright Scholarship. With his M.F.A. in hand, he went on to Penn State, where be earned a Ph.D. in arts education. Today, Sharif is an assistant professor of fine arts at Winston-Salem State University, and director of that school’s arts education program.

Recently, I heard from Sharif. “I might have looked uncommunicative, almost reclusive, when I showed up at the Craftsmen’s Guild,” he said, “but you have to understand, at that point in my life, I’d never even had a conversation with a white person. In the studio, my teachers were white, there were lots of white kids from neighborhoods I’d never been to. Some of them were from affluent families. Some of them were Ivy League bound. I didn’t know what to expect from them. I wasn’t sure how to behave. My teachers were telling me I was capable of more than I thought, and making it clear their expectations were very high. That was disorienting. I’d never had any context for interacting with people who treated me like that, or thought of their own lives that way. But the studio gave me the context, the clay gave me the context. It took me a while to get it, but eventually I saw that all the kids in the class—white, black, Asian, Hispanic, whether they were rich or poor—had moved beyond the superficial characteristics that made them different, and were relating to each other as fellow artists through the creative work they were doing. When I started working, I shared that rapport. Suddenly I had something to talk to them about; differences became unimportant, as the art became a bridge that led me out of my narrow experience and opened up my world. Each success I enjoyed at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild gave me reason to believe that more successes were possible. More than anything, it was that belief in my own potential that allowed me to build the life I lead today.”

I’m immensely proud of Sharif’s accomplishments, because his story captures, in an especially dramatic form, the kinds of successes we see at Manchester Bidwell all the time. Every time I think of him lecturing his classes, passing on his love for art and beauty to his students, I can’t help thinking of that shy, skinny kid sitting in his chair in the corner, staring into space, and the remarkable distance that young man was able to travel once someone gave him reason to believe he could.

Once we had a student named Sharif Bey. When I first laid eyes on him, I thought, This is going to be a tough one. Like so many kids who come here, Sharif seemed bitterly withdrawn and uncommunicative when he arrived. He was a ninth grader, a skinny kid who drifted down the hallways like a shadow, with his shoulders slumped and his head bowed down. He spoke only in whispers and kept his gaze riveted on the floor. It seemed he didn’t have it in him to look you in the eye.

After his orientation period, Sharif decided to enroll in our ceramics program. We have a bright, airy studio outfitted with state-of-the-art tools and equipment. Dozens of finished pieces, resting on shelves and racks, provide tangible examples of the rewards of hard work. The space is always buzzing with a soft, creative energy as kids move their pieces from the pottery wheels to the worktables and eventually to a room where they are fired in our kilns. Most of our students think of the studio as a magical place. But Sharif showed no signs of even noticing the space around him.

On his first day in the studio he dragged a chair into a corner, slumped into it, and stared into space. He seemed to be ignoring his instructors and the other students, and was apparently immune to the creative activity all around him.

But you never know what’s going on inside a kid’s head, so when his instructors asked me what they should do with him, I said, “Just keep giving him clay.” To be honest, I didn’t have high hopes for the kid. His only chance, I knew, was that the nurturing environment he was surrounded by, and the creative vibe that filled the studio every day, would change him on some level none of us could see. Happily, that’s exactly what happened.

One day when he was finally ready, Sharif quietly loaded some clay on a wheel and began to work. What happened next was one of the many small miracles that keep me doing what I do: The kid turned out to be a natural. Everyone saw it right away. The technique came to him quickly. More important, he had the touch, he had a sense of proportion, he had an artist’s eye for texture, color, and grace. In no time he was turning out beautiful pieces, getting better and better with each one. I knew what he was going through, because I had gone through it myself: He was getting his first taste of meaningful success, and success felt good to him, better than almost anything be had ever felt. He wanted more of that feeling, and he knew that in order to have it he would have to get better. So he opened up to the world.

He sought out the help of his teachers. He brainstormed with other talented kids. He studied the work of established artists and experimented with the clay, eager to find his own style. Working with clay had given him a sense of purpose and direction. It had given him a passion to achieve. That passion helped transform him, and after a few months with us he seemed like a whole new kid.

I remember seeing him in the studio one day, waiting for a piece he’d finished to be taken out of the kiln. For ceramic artists, removing a piece from the kiln is always an act of faith; so many things can go wrong while a piece is being fired. But Sharif was standing tall as he waited, smiling and chatting with friends, his face lit up with confidence and anticipation. I saw hope, humor, and enthusiasm in his eyes. It was the look of a kid who expects to succeed. When I saw that, I knew Sharif was going to be all right.

So why do they show our place such respect? Do they undergo some sort of biochemical change as they travel that short distance from Oliver to our place, some spontaneous realignment of their DNA? Or could it be that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the kids? Could it be that they’re only living up to the low expectations society holds for them and that they’ve been taught to hold for themselves? Is it possible, in fact, that poor folks of all ages, including our adult students at Bidwell, have spirits that, despite the ravages of poverty, still respond to and flourish in an environment that provides them with order, purpose, opportunity, and beauty?

To me, the answer is clear: We show our students trust and they learn they can be trusted. We treat them with respect and get respectful behavior in return. We put them in a beautiful place, give them a small taste of what a decent, dignified future might feel like, and that makes all the difference.

The beauty we’ve designed into our center isn’t window dressing; it’s an essential part of our success. It nourishes the spirit, and until you reach that part of the spirit that isn’t touched by cynicism or despair, no change can begin. You can’t show a person how to build a better life if they feel no pleasure in the simple act of being alive. That’s why I built this place, and why I fill it with art, and sunlight, and quilts, and flowers. So some black kid who thinks the whole world is as stale and gray as the ghetto, or some white kid from some hardscrabble blue-collar neighborhood ravaged by layoffs and chronic underemployment, can find out what an orchid smells like.

So when some poor single mother walks into our place, after hours at some miserable job, after scrambling to find someone to take care of her kids, after riding buses, bumming rides, or walking on her own two feet to get here, she gets to rest for a moment on an exquisitely made, one-of-a-kind Japanese bench handcrafted by a master craftsman just for her. How can she help but start thinking she deserves that beautiful bench? How can she stop herself from thinking she deserves even more beauty and order in her life? Small changes like that, small rich human experiences, are how you plant the seeds of a dream. You can’t inspire a person to live a better life if they don’t know what a good life feels like.

Flowers, clay, art, and sunlit spaces don’t work miracles, but they can set the stage on which miracles occur. At Manchester Bidwell, we see those kinds of miracles every day.

“That’s the power of art,” I said to Jim Heskett’s class. “Art is a bridge. It connects you to a wider world, to a broader experience. I don’t expect a bunch of poor kids from the streets to become overnight aficionados because they see a pretty picture, but don’t try to tell me that exposure to the arts doesn’t have the power to change a human being. It gets in their bones, man. It gets in all of our bones—that is the power of the arts in our lives. I’ve seen it and its magic. Our students stop defining themselves by what they can’t do and get the first glimmer of what a meaningful life might feel like.

“Speaking of magic,” I added, “this is not some Manhattan art gallery, this is where our students showcase their work.” The new slide showed a small but elegant exhibition space, enclosed by plate-glass walls and lit with crisp track lighting. “Can you imagine what it feels like to inner-city kids to have their work displayed in a setting like this?” I asked. “To have their efforts celebrated this way? We make a big deal about showing their art—there’s always an opening night, we serve refreshments, a live jazz combo plays. The kids invite whomever they want and we always get a good crowd—relatives, neighbors, everyone from the school. It’s a new experience for most of these kids to feel that kind of support and recognition, and my experience tells me it does wonders for their souls.”

The new Manchester Bidwell Center stands just a few city blocks from Oliver High School, my old alma mater. At Oliver High, students are greeted each morning by security guards who inspect their backpacks and march them through metal detectors. The windows are protected with iron bars. To me, the place feels more like a jail than a school, so it’s no surprise that so many students behave so badly there, vandalizing the place, disrespecting teachers and each other, and showing angry contempt for the process of learning. Administrators have installed all sorts of get-tough policies at Oliver, but the kids still run amok, and overwhelmed teachers often feel more like prison guards than educators. Many kids are afraid to walk the halls. Attendance is poor. The dropout rate is through the roof.

We don’t have armed guards at Manchester Bidwell. Our students don’t pass through metal detectors. We don’t make them empty their pockets and we don’t rummage through their bags. There are no security cameras keeping watch over our grounds. We feed our kids gourmet lunches prepared by students in our culinary program. We surround them with museum-quality art. We give them a place of sunlight and energy. The result is remarkable: Even though the neighborhood around us has one of the highest crime rates in the city, we have never, in all the years of our existence, had a single reason to call the police. There have been no thefts or burglaries, no violence, no vandalism. We’ve never had a car broken into, never had to scrub graffiti off a wall. The thing is, many of our students are the very same kids who have been branded as incorrigible or worse at Oliver High, and kids just like them from other schools across the city.

The screen lit up with an image of a brilliantly colored “story cloth” woven by members of Pittsburgh’s Hmong community. For centuries, the Hmong, from Southeast Asia, had no written language, so they created visual narratives of their history and legends on their exquisitely crafted works of cloth. “Hmong artists made these cloths especially for us,” I explained, “and now these wonderful pieces, reflecting an image of beauty crafted in a culture thousands of miles away, are part of their everyday lives.”

The next slide showed a massive bench, crafted in a rustic Japanese style from a single slab of thick, hand-hewn red oak resting on two sturdy posts. “I had a young Japanese guy working for me as a carpenter. I found out he was also a furniture maker who had studied under the great George Nakashima. So I had him build me this bench. He’s a successful furniture maker now and his pieces cost a small fortune. But before he left he built some sixty pieces just for us—all one-of-a-kind works of art, for all the public spaces. Now, when welfare mothers come into our place, tired from the couple of bus rides it took to get here, they find themselves resting on pieces of art. I want our students to get comfortable with art. I want them to be confronted by something beautiful every time they turn around. So all our hallways and public spaces are graced with the works of fine artists from all over the world: woven tapestries, African-inspired sculpture, fine-art photographs.”

Next, I brought up an image of the beautiful quilts that hang like tapestries on the tall walls of our main lobby. “These quilts cost a bundle,” I said. “They were hand-made by a craft cooperative made up of mostly elderly ladies who live in a very rural part of Pennsylvania. They make these quilts in their homes, as a cottage industry, using the styles and principles of the Amish quilt makers who are their inspiration. Amish-style quilts might not be the first decorative element you think of when you’re furnishing an educational center in the inner city, and I’m sure that none of the ladies in the cooperative had spent much time in a place like Manchester, but all I cared about was that the quilts these ladies produced were exceptional, and that they would add another layer of softness and beauty to my school. Still, I told them that I wouldn’t give them the commission until they visited us in Pittsburgh and convinced me that they understood the spirit of the center.

So one day they arrived in cars and pickups and walked inside, a group of very gentle-looking, very white little old ladies. I showed them around. At first they just gazed at the place, silent and wide-eyed. Our students were a little wide-eyed, too. These gentle country ladies couldn’t have seemed more out of place if they had dropped into Manchester directly from the moon. But as soon as we started to talk about the quilts—about materials, patterns, themes, and colors—all the strangeness went away and we became just a bunch of people talking about art and the enterprise of making a beautiful thing. Our students couldn’t help but see the passion those women had for their work, and all the things they needed to do that work well—the skills and vision to create a quilt that captures life and meaning and some measure of truth. They were the same things our students were struggling to master in their classes.

With a flash of insight, they saw beyond the superficial differences that made our visitors so foreign to them. Instead, they saw fellow artists with whom they had a common bent.

I wasn’t about to give those students a lecture on altruism, activism, or any other -ism; I wasn’t there to convince them they should commit their lives to others. I had a more radical notion to share with them, a new definition of success.

I wanted them to understand that success isn’t a destination. It’s not something you pursue like a racetrack greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit. Success is something you assemble from components you discover in your soul and your imagination. Authentic success, the kind of success that will enrich your life and enlarge your spirit, the only kind of success that matters, comes from knowing and trusting the deepest aspirations of your heart. If you try to live that way, in harmony with the real needs of your spirit, then you can’t help but craft a life that will automatically make the world a better place for everyone who lives in it, and, incidentally, you will dramatically increase your chances for success on all levels. That’s the insight I most wanted those Harvard kids to hear, but I knew mere words wouldn’t carry enough weight—they didn’t know me well enough.

So I asked Jim Heskett to turn down the lights and I started to show my slides.

“Here is the place I built,” I said as an image of the Manchester Bidwell Center flashed onto the screen. I could tell it wasn’t what they expected. The image was an exterior shot, taken at night, of a sleek and striking contemporary structure. Low-slung, inviting, and subtle, the center has walls of adobe-colored block. Golden light glowed in the tall picture windows and rooftop canopies; a floodlit fountain sat at the center of a courtyard.

“This building was created by the same architect who designed the Pittsburgh International Airport,” I explained. “He was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright—a hero of mine—and I think he captured some of the magic of the master’s touch. As a kid I’d spend hours looking at these kinds of buildings in books and architecture magazines. I wanted our kids to feel they deserved to study in such a building, and now I go to work in one every day.”

The next slide took them inside the center. The soaring lobby, done in more of the earth-toned block, was flooded with light from banks of tall windows. Accents of natural wood brightened the space, and intimately arched alcoves led the way to quiet halls. I pointed out the small touches—the rich carpets, the designer tile, the handmade stained-glass inserts in the office doors, the bouquets of fresh flowers.

“This place is my idea of a perfect human shelter,” I said. “It generates order and serenity and stability and optimism, things many of our students do not enjoy in abundance in their private lives. Poor people live in a world where beauty seems impossible. We make it possible. Then the world and eventually the future look very different to them.”

As I stood at the podium facing those bright-eyed Harvard students, I knew that before I could convey the message I’d come to share with them, I’d have to overcome some assumptions that people commonly make about me.

For example, many people immediately size me up as a guru type, an urban do-gooder who has devoted his life to selflessly helping the poor. In fact, I have dedicated my life to helping other people, and I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished along those lines, but you can’t really understand me, or what my life has been about, unless you grasp the fact that I didn’t do any of it out of selflessness.

I did it to be myself.

I did it to enrich my own life, to deepen the quality and meaning of my own experience. I did it because it was a part of what I had to do if I genuinely wanted to be me. If the MacArthur people are right, if I have even a small shred of genius in my soul, it’s only because I have an unshakable belief that each of us has not only the potential to live a rewarding and purposeful life but also the responsibility to do so.

It’s an obligation we bear as human beings, but it’s also the source of our greatest potential. Owning up to that obligation not only makes us more human, it also connects us to the bottomless reserves of passion, vision, conviction, and commitment that I believe are present in abundance in every human heart, and that are the fuel for genuine and deeply fulfilling success.

Thirty-four years later, the center and I are both still growing, but in a much larger and more sophisticated facility.

Today, Manchester Bidwell comprises three separate buildings covering 163,000 square feet, with 150 people on staff and some 1,200 students passing through our doors each year, not counting the 2,500 young people served by the programs we operate in public school classrooms as a cooperative venture with the Pittsburgh school district.

Running such a complex organization requires a pretty high level of organizational expertise, and today I feel very comfortable wearing the hat of CEO. But I’ll never forget that Manchester Bidwell wasn’t crafted out of corporate vision or business savvy. It happened because a clueless nineteen-year-old trusted his unspoken intuition that the human spirit is remarkably resilient, and that even in damaged and disadvantaged lives, and in circumstances where the odds seem hopelessly stacked against you, there is endless potential waiting to be freed.

What I wanted those Harvard grad students to understand, what I want everyone who reads this book to embrace, are the simple principles that have guided my life and enabled my success: that all of us have the potential to make our dreams come true, and that one of the greatest obstacles blocking us from realizing that potential is that we believe, or are told, the things we want most passionately are impractical, unrealistic, or somehow beyond our reach.

The story I have to share with you is the story of the pursuit of one unrealistic, impractical, outrageous dream after another, and the remarkable consistency with which those dreams have come true. That didn’t happen by magic. It happened because I refused to be limited by what conventional wisdom, or other people, or the cautious little voice we all have in our heads told me I couldn’t do. I haven’t accomplished everything I set out to do, but I’ve accomplished a whole lot more than I would have if I’d let myself be boxed in by common sense and “sensible” expectations.

To put it in simplest terms, I left the door open to possibility and, more often than not, opportunity showed its face. They gave me a genius award for thinking like that, but it’s nothing any clear-thinking person can’t manage. Each one of us, no matter who our parents are, where we live, how much education we have, or what kinds of connections, abilities, and opportunities life may have offered us, has the potential to shape our lives in ways that will bring us the meaning, purpose, and success we long for. That’s the essential lesson of my life and of this book: that each of us can achieve the “impossible” in our lives.

I want everyone who comes to this book, no matter what their age or accomplishments or the circumstances of their lives, to rethink their assumptions about what is and isn’t possible in their lives, and to convince themselves that they have not only the right but also the responsibility, and the capacity, to dream big and to make those dreams come true.

Then I christened the place the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild and opened the doors. Curious kids trickled in off the sidewalks to see what I was up to. I taught them how to use the wheels, how to center and shape the clay. I don’t know what I thought would happen. On some level, I knew I needed such a place as much as the kids did—a place where I could keep believing in the power of my own creative possibilities despite the darkness closing in all around me—and I hoped the place would shield them from all the poison that was in the streets.

At first it was enough just to see them being kids again, giggling each time one of their wobbly pots collapsed into a slippery lump. But some of them kept coming back. I worked with them until they could get the clay to rise and hold form, then work it carefully into a shape that would please the eye. It was an amazing thing to see the looks on their faces as they worked—the concentration, the sense of purpose and power, and the sudden glint of excitement as they watched the clay morph into the very pot they had pictured in their minds. I knew what that felt like—like you had the whole world in your hands. That was the magic I wanted them to feel. And I knew that, for those moments at least, the troubles of Manchester were far away.

From the start, I loved the work I was doing, the feeling it gave me to help others open their eyes and see the possibilities before them. But I had no long-term vision for the Craftsmen’s Guild. I saw it as a stopgap measure, a life raft for those kids. I certainly never thought it would lead to my life’s work. My plan was to get my education degree, then teach history to high school students. But life takes some odd twists and turns. I started hearing from teachers in nearby public schools. They noticed that the kids who came to the Craftsmen’s Guild were showing up at school more often. They were behaving better in the classroom, too. And their grades were starting to improve.

That drew people’s attention. Word soon got around that something interesting was happening on Buena Vista Street. Neighborhood leaders began to mark me as a guy who was doing some good in the community. Local artists lent us their support. I was introduced to all the right people, and sources of funding appeared before my eyes. I hired a staff and added programs. More kids walked through the door. The place was taking on a life and an energy of its own, growing rapidly in size, in complexity, and in the scope of its missions.

I had no choice but to grow with it.

And that meant developing my leadership and management skills, often on the fly.

I was nineteen years old in 1968 when I founded the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, the tiny neighborhood arts center that grew into Manchester Bidwell. Our first home was a derelict row house on Buena Vista Street in Manchester.

My plan was to use the space as a studio where I could teach neighborhood kids to make bowls and pots. I was a neophyte potter myself at the time, and making pottery was one of the great joys of my life. I liked the way the wet clay felt in my hands. Working with clay calmed me and excited me all at the same time. There was a sense of control, but also one of rich possibility. And there was a potent sense of accomplishment and pride once you developed some skill at it.

A high school art teacher had turned me on to the craft and has been my hero ever since. I was just another aimless kid, coasting through school, bored and disengaged, with no sense of what I’d do with my life after graduation, when Frank Ross invited me into his classroom and let me sit at his potter’s wheel. The magic I felt when I first laid my hands on wet clay gave me the belief that I could do something interesting with my life. It opened up doors to meaning and possibility that showed me, for the first time, that I had talents and capabilities no one had seen before and that I had never dreamed of. I’m convinced that those insights not only gave me a vision of my future, they literally saved my life.

In 1968, Manchester was suffering from the racial strife that rocked so many inner-city neighborhoods in the wake of the assassination
of Martin Luther King Jr. Homes were in flames, riot cops and armed National Guard troops patrolled the streets, there were shootings and frequent clashes between demonstrators and police, and in the middle of it all were a lot of terrified kids, wondering if someone was going to shoot them or set their house on fire.

I wanted to do something for those kids, but I had no experience as a social worker, teacher, or community activist. I was a know-nothing freshman at the University of Pittsburgh at the time, trying my best to keep from flunking out and to get my own life in order. All I knew was clay and what it had done for me. Intuitively, I knew it could do the same for them.

I knew what they needed—a safe, sane, quiet environment where they could escape the madness that reigned in the streets, work on some clay, find a way to shape something personal and beautiful, and spend some time in a bright, clean, nurturing place where it did not seem pointless to dream. With the help of local Episcopalian churches, I was able to secure a ramshackle row house, which I cleaned and painted, then furnished with potter’s wheels and stocked with clay.

All this unlikely and unexpected recognition has created an ever-widening ripple of interest in our operations, and for years I’ve been crisscrossing the country, sharing the Manchester Bidwell story with anyone who will listen—at conferences and seminars everywhere, with audiences that include influential leaders in the fields of business, education, government, and the arts, from laid-back, denim-clad technology tycoons in the Silicon Valley to the prim and pious parishioners of evangelist Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral.

I welcome this attention, because it means people are noticing that we are doing something special at Manchester Bidwell, acknowledging that our success here has something to say not only to the disadvantaged people we serve at the school but to people everywhere, from all walks of life.

Still, on a personal level, as a guy who never forgot where he came from, and who knows firsthand how the realities of race and circumstance, poverty and lowered expectations, can crush human dreams, it amazes me more than a little. I was certainly amazed when Jim Heskett at Harvard got interested in our work. He was intrigued with the news of our success and with the unconventional methods we use, and thought his students might learn something from the way I operate.

So he decided to make Manchester Bidwell the subject of a Harvard case study, an extensive, intensive business analysis of what we do and how we do it.

Over the next few months, his students studied every aspect of our organization with the same hard-boiled scrutiny they’d bring to bear if we were a software giant or cell phone manufacturer instead of an organization dedicated to shaping and guiding the human spirit. Then Jim invited me to his class to answer his students’ questions and offer whatever wisdom I’d gathered from my long years in the trenches. Or something like that.

To be honest, as I stood there in the lecture pit that winter morning I wasn’t really sure what Jim wanted from me. But one thing was certain: He wasn’t expecting me to spout a lot of conventional business wisdom; he knew enough about my story to understand that I don’t have much of that.

I’m no textbook CEO. I don’t have an M.B.A. Never took a business course in my life. The truth is, I never set out to be a corporate executive or to run any kind of operation at all. When I started out, all I wanted was to give some kids a chance to work with clay.

When we started out some twenty years ago, most of our students were African-Americans from the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Today, almost half our student body is made up of disadvantaged white folks. We greet them all with the same basic recipe for success: high standards, stiff challenges, a chance to develop unexplored talents, and a message that many of them haven’t heard before—that no matter how difficult the circumstances of their lives may be, no matter how many bad assumptions they’ve made about their chances in life, no matter how well they’ve been taught to rein in their dreams and narrow their aspirations, they have the right, and the potential, to expect to live rich and satisfying lives.

It takes some time for them to adjust to that message and trust our faith in their potential, but once they do, the transformation is remarkable, and our success rates, compiled over more than twenty years, show that we must be doing something right.

More than 90 percent of the kids who come to us get their high school diplomas and 85 percent enroll in college or some other form of higher education. Our job-training programs for disadvantaged adults are yielding similar successes: Almost 80 percent of our adult students complete their vocational training and 86 percent of them find employment after graduation. And I’m not talking about flipping burgers. These are good, substantial jobs—as sous chefs, chemical and pharmaceutical technicians, and the like—jobs that can lift an entire family out of poverty and personal inertia, and offer a real chance at a stable and rewarding future.

The success of Manchester Bidwell has won us a lot of respect and support from the business community across the country, and it has helped us forge dynamic corporate partnerships with companies like IBM, Alcoa, PPG Industries, Heinz, Hewlett-Packard, Bayer, Mylan Labs, Nova Chemicals, and many more.

Leading figures in politics, education, and the arts have also singled us out for praise (we’re one of very few programs, I’m sure, ever to draw the enthusiastic support of both Hillary Clinton and prominent conservative Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania), and our work here has brought me a humbling litany of honors and personal recognition. I’ve been appointed to the National Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Two presidents have summoned me to the White House to discuss our operations, and ten universities have awarded me honorary Ph.D.’s. In 1999, the MacArthur Foundation gave me one of their famous “genius grants,” and I am now a trustee at the University of Pittsburgh, the school that had to be coaxed to accept me as a probationary student thirty-four years ago.

Along with my staff, I’ve also received some remarkable attention from the world of music in recognition of the jazz program that has evolved at the center as part of the innovative mix that gives the place its creative spirit. Since 1987, Manchester Bidwell has hosted a live jazz concert series, which draws the top jazz artists in the world to perform here, in the intimate music hall that is part of our facility. Our music program, one of the oldest and most successful jazz subscription series in the country, has made Manchester Bidwell one of the most highly regarded jazz venues in the nation, and it has also spawned our own recording label—MCG Jazz—which produces and distributes jazz albums by some of the premier jazz artists on the planet, including Nancy Wilson, The Count Basie Orchestra, the New York Voices, and Brazilian superstar Ivan Lins. The quality of our recordings has been validated again and again by the music industry: Seven of our releases have been nominated for Grammy Awards in various jazz categories, and four of those nominated albums brought Grammys home to Manchester.

It was a winter morning in 1996 and I was standing center stage in the pit of a jam-packed, wood-paneled lecture hall at Harvard University.

Rows of wooden seats loomed above me in curving tiers. In those seats, with their expectant gazes bearing down on me, sat about one hundred razor-sharp young men and women—graduate students at the Harvard Business School—waiting to see what I had to offer. As a result of my work with inner-city kids and adults at the Manchester Bidwell Center in Pittsburgh, I had been asked to serve as an HBS case study, to share a little hard-earned business savvy from the other side of the tracks.

As Professor Jim Heskett introduced me to his class, I positioned my beat-up old slide projector on a tabletop, then opened a battered cardboard box, held together with duct tape at the corners, and lifted out a loaded carousel of slides. The students looked me over. In recent weeks, such other speakers as Disney honcho Michael Eisner and Southwest Airlines chief Herb Kelleher had stood where I was standing to share their business philosophies and reveal their secrets of success.

Now it was my turn in the spotlight.

I knew the kids weren’t sure what to expect from me. To tell the truth, I wasn’t so sure that they could get what I had to offer. After all, I don’t run an airline or an entertainment empire. If you wanted to be technical about it, you could say I’m not a businessman at all. As the founder and CEO of Manchester Bidwell, a community arts-education and job-training center in Pittsburgh, my mission is to turn people’s lives around. We do that by offering them two distinct educational programs under the same roof. The first program, which we call the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, offers rigorous after-school courses in the arts that light a creative fire in at-risk kids and inspire them to stay in school. Classes at the Craftsmen’s Guild are taught by a staff of established artists and skilled instructors, and the curriculum is designed to rival courses taught at the best private schools and academies. Our center also houses the Bidwell Training Center, which provides state-of-the-art job-training programs intended to give poor and otherwise disadvantaged adults the skills and direction they need to land meaningful, good-paying jobs that provide the foundation for a much brighter future.

Our students include welfare mothers, recovering addicts, ex-convicts, laid-off manufacturing workers, and others who have had hope or even dignity snatched away by the difficult circumstances of their lives. Our younger students at the Craftsmen’s Guild face similar struggles. Many of them are on a fast track to failure when they come to us, flunking courses, skipping school, on the verge of dropping out or being suspended.

Some of them swagger in, angry, defiant, bristling with hostile attitude.

Others hide behind a prickly shell of apathy and withdrawal.