 My story is the story of an inner-city neighborhood that sort of adopted and helped to groom a young man who was interested in the arts and interested in making a contribution with my life and my life's work to others who were not as advantaged. So it was really a community that was economically disadvantaged and I became one of the people that helped to create a solution to a lot of the problems that people in that neighborhood were facing and I'm still doing it for a living. Way way back when I was in high school I got excited about ceramics and Carnegie Tech had a big ceramics program and I used to get a port authority bus to go out after our high school close CMU Carnegie Tech had a big ceramics program run by a guy named Wesley Mills who was an iconic figure in contemporary ceramics and helped to revitalize ceramics in the region and he really liked me and so I would sneak in to the pottery shop out at Carnegie Mellon and after a while he got aware of the fact I was doing that so he put a wedge in the door so I could get in and so I owe a lot of my early education and opportunity in clay back to Carnegie Tech. Manchester started the community of Manchester and it was during the riots and I wanted to do something to help the students in the neighborhood and I knew something about clay so I started a program called Manchester Craftsman's Guild and the idea was to take the apprentice concept and apply it to kids so that they would become in effect apprentices at the arts program and that hence Manchester Craftsman's Guild it was based on the English craft guild model and so I viewed all these students as really apprentices and I started hearing back from the school that kids were starting to show up more regularly and after a while I figured it out there wasn't anything wrong with the kids. The school system was a problem not the kids. The people who ran Bidwell it was then called the Bidwell Cultural and Training Center were looking for somebody to kind of take over the program and that turned out to be me and so I rebuilt Bidwell. It was very it was struggling and the programs were kind of dysfunctional and they owed money to the Internal Revenue Service it was it was in pretty bad shape but they had heard about my work at Manchester and offered me the job at Bidwell so I took it over and in 1972 during some very troubled times there were massive demonstrations for racial justice and the city quite literally was on fire and there were a lot of protests particularly around labor unions that wouldn't take in black people so there were massive demonstrations during that period of time whose city was in trouble. Well, Tasso Cancelos whose work I knew because he designed the chapel at St. Vincent's Monastery I just was the commencement speaker there Saturday and I found out later that Tasso had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright so I ended up at Fallingwater and I was so taken with Fallingwater I said I really want to take some of the principles in that house and basically build a school based on the principles of that house and the whole facility is light it's very bright and has a very close proximity to nature and I thought I've got to build a facility that is bright and hopeful so that people who come here whose spirit oftentimes is in the dark will come to a facility that's lit and encouraging with great food and great music and down the street we have a Hort program so flowers has now become part of our culture as well so it was all of those things that really inspired me to build this facility because I really believe that kids everybody needs to have beautiful art in their lives all the time so the best way to do it is to build a space where they see art. It has a big influence on behavior you put people in beautiful spaces they become beautiful people you put them in prisons and become prisoners. Good food, sunlight, music those are all the ingredients that you need to have present in order to get people to reimagine themselves in places and areas that their minds had never contemplated you do that by exposure it's all exposure you can't imagine it if you can't see it so what you have to do is create a picture in their heads so they can see something you know guys walk in here their eyes are open but they didn't see anything because they don't know what they're looking at but with education they begin to slowly get it that the music and the art and the food the orchids and so forth they get the idea that this is a very special place that's the whole point and that can be scaled anywhere I don't care what country it is it's I believe it's universal. The Ted people heard about me because I have a speakers bureau and called a laven agency and they were connected somehow to Ted and David said to the Ted people you got to bring this guy Bill Strickland to do a Ted talk as it turns out Herbie Hancock who had played here became a good friend and he was at Ted the Ted conference when I was there and Herbie said why don't we go out and you talk and I'll play literally no rehearsal and he went out and played the piano and I did a little slide presentation on the center and it was got a huge ovation from the audience and that that is quite literally where it started I've learned from experience keep talking just keep telling the story over and over and over again and you know once upon a time I had a one center now I got 15 right well where they come from they came from talking and so I'm gonna keep talking I'll talk to anybody that's willing to listen and do something about what they heard so it it there this is not free there was a price the price is you have to do something with what if you think I'm inspirational then do something about it and don't tell me you can't because there's got to be a homeless shelter close to where you live right help out at the homeless shelter help out with indigent kids I mean there's centers that are devoted in their lives to getting people off drugs volunteer man I don't cost you nothing in fact you may gain more than you give and I believe everybody in the if we started doing that in the world we could move this needle I'm more careful about listening because everybody's got a story everybody and I've gotten very interested in hearing those stories I mean you know you you're born everybody's born the same you're born and from there you build your story and everybody's got a journey man and I'm very interested in these journeys how people got to be what they are