More than 1,000 visitors a year tour the nonprofit Manchester Bidwell Corporation (MBC) in Pittsburgh in search of ideas for their own organizations. They get an eyeful. In an after-school program called Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, at-risk teenagers produce stunning ceramics, paintings, and multimedia in studios that rival the best college facilities. In its sister program, Bidwell Training Center, unemployed adults nurture hothouse orchids and cook gourmet meals to prepare for technical careers. Another program brings in world-class jazz musicians to produce Grammy Award-winning recordings.

“No matter where your eye turns, there’s something cool going on,” says CEO and founder Bill Strickland. “That’s quite deliberate.”

Strickland, a MacArthur Fellowship (also known as a “genius award”) recipient, has spent the last 40 years in the same tough neighborhood where he grew up, honing MBC’s model of community change. And his model gets results: reduced high school dropout rates, increased college admissions, and adults placed in jobs that lift their families out of poverty.

Now, Strickland is spreading MBC’s lessons far beyond Pittsburgh. Funded in part by a $1 million grant from the Skoll Foundation, MBC has planted off shoots in San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Grand Rapids, Mich., and plans to launch another in Cleveland later this year. In so doing, MBC has refi ned the art and technology of replication. Central to MBC’s replication technique is helping communities tailor the model to their unique needs and preferences, rather than exporting its Pittsburgh formula wholesale. The nonprofit has also nailed down a clear order of operations for developing new sites.

Equipped with proven replication strategies, Strickland has set his sights high. His goal is to launch 100 arts and technology centers in high-poverty urban settings across the United States, and another 100 around the world. That would create the critical mass to “change the conversation” about what education should be, he says.

Local Flavor

Strickland’s replication strategy used to be showing a slideshow to anyone willing to watch. A charismatic speaker, he inspired plenty of listeners. But the lag between inspiration and action frustrated him. “I didn’t know how to shape what we’d learned in Manchester and package it into a concept that could be effectively rolled out on a grand scale,” he relates in his autobiography, Make the Impossible Possible.

That changed when community leaders in San Francisco asked MBC to help them start their own education center. After several years and more than a few false starts, the doors of the Bayview Hunters Point Center for Arts and Technology (BAYCAT) opened in 2004.

“That’s when we started talking about what it would take to [replicate] in a more organized way,” explains Georgina Gutierrez. She is vice president of the National Center for Arts & Technology (NCAT), a separate nonprofit dedicated to disseminating MBC’s model. With funding from the Skoll Foundation, MBC hired the Bridgespan Group to prepare a replication business plan. “That caused us to step back and ask ourselves, what do we have in Pittsburgh that could be planted like a seed in another city?” she says. The Pittsburgh team also sought advice from friends of the organization, including J. Gregory Dees from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and James Heskett from Harvard Business School. These far-reaching discussions eventually led to the establishment of NCAT in 2007 as a separate nonprofit under the MBC umbrella.

As Strickland and company became more deliberate about replicating, they distilled the Manchester model into four nonnegotiable goals for every new center: (1) A world-class environment for learning; (2) Ambitious arts programming for at-risk youth; (3) Job training for adults, calibrated to the needs of local employers; and (4) A culture that values poor people as assets, not liabilities.

NCAT then decided to leave the details of how to pursue these goals to each community. Communities fund and operate their centers as independent nonprofi ts, although all are affi liated with NCAT. As a result, the four existing centers look quite diff erent, though “they all share the same spirit,” Strickland says. “You feel very hopeful in any of these spaces.”

Rules of Engagement

Strickland hasn’t stopped giving his famous slideshow, which opens with the story of how a high school art teacher transformed his own impoverished life. “That’s where the interest usually starts,” says Dolores Sewchok, interim vice president of NCAT. “Somebody hears Bill speak and gets inspired.” To accelerate what happens next, NCAT has developed a formal replication process. The first phase is cultivation. “This is where we make sure the community really understands what this will take,” Gutierrez explains. Typically, interested parties travel to Pittsburgh to see MBC’s operations firsthand, and NCAT staff get acquainted with their potential partners.

Moving to the next phase—feasibility—requires potential partners to sign a formal consulting agreement with NCAT at a cost of $150,000. If a new organization is not yet formally in place to manage fundraising and other tasks, a local foundation might serve as the convener. “This is where we fi nd out, are they really ready for this? Is there a need for the kind of programs we can bring,” Gutierrez says, “and is there enough focus on those needs to raise the money required for solutions?”

The feasibility phase takes from 12 to 18 months and includes discussions between NCAT staff and about 100 local leaders. This outreach is time-consuming but necessary to ensure that support for the new nonprofit is strong on all sides, including the school district, corporations, government leaders, and existing nonprofits. The dialogues also reassure existing organizations that “we’re not coming in to duplicate or compete for funding with programs that already exist,” says Lillian Kuri, director of special projects for the Cleveland Foundation, which has been a local convener and major funder of the Cleveland replication. “By spending time on this early,” she adds, “you don’t get opposition later.”

If the feasibility phase ends with a green light, parties move on to a four-year process of planning and implementation, with consulting costs to NCAT of $150,000 annually.

Lee Carter, chairman of the board of the Cincinnati Arts and Technology Center (CATC), says it took his community about two and a half years to establish its program. Now in its fifth year, CATC serves 400 youths annually. Although nearly all of the teenagers in the youth arts program are at risk of school failure when they start, 95 percent graduate from high school on time and 70 percent go on to higher education. Meanwhile, the job training program is mentoring about 100 adults in automotive repair, construction, and health care.

Well-received by the community today, the vision for CATC didn’t grab hold in Cincinnati until people understood that they could adapt the program to their own needs. “The word ‘replication’ was turning people off at first,” says Carter. “But the minute we started talking about adapting instead of replicating, the same people who had been critical started saying, ‘Oh, that sounds like a good idea.’” CATC, housed in a refurbished warehouse, weights its budget toward youth programming because Cincinnati has other adult job training programs. “We don’t need to duplicate that,” Carter says. And instead of selling orchids or jazz albums as they do in Pittsburgh, CATC has devised a different income stream: a team of CATC youth artists that paints Cincinnati-themed storefront murals for a grocery chain.

Leading from Within

Each time a city considers joining the NCAT family, the question of leadership comes up. Stories of MBC and its founder are so closely intertwined that people often wonder, “How are we ever going to find our own Bill Strickland?”

Gutierrez has a ready answer. “We’re not looking for another Bill Strickland. We’re looking for a person who can be disciplined enough to follow someone else’s idea,” she says. The executive director must also be from the local community. Being an artist isn’t required, Sewchok says, but candidates “have to be passionate about helping people who have been left out of other systems.”

NCAT is hands-on about guiding the executive director search. “We have a profile,” Gutierrez says, “but we have learned that capable directors can come from very different backgrounds.” BAYCAT Executive Director Villy Wang, for example, is a seasoned attorney, whereas 27-year-old Luisa Schumacher, the executive director of the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology in Grand Rapids, has a background in political fundraising, nonprofit marketing, and community relations.

NCAT is also very involved in guiding site selection and board development. “Being able to learn from their expertise has helped speed our decision making,” says Kuri. “It’s true collaboration. They aren’t telling us what to do. We use their expertise to fi gure things out together. We couldn’t do it alone.”

Potential new art and technology education centers are now in their early stages in Israel, Rwanda, and Ireland, along with several U.S. cities. “The model may look a little diff erent in these places,” Sewchok says, “but our goal will be the same: bring people together, fi nd common ground, and collaborate for the greater good.”

Suzie Boss is a journalist from Portland, Ore., who writes about social change and education. She is coauthor of Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age.

Read more stories by Suzie Boss.