When Jeff Johnson read
Making the Impossible Possible by Pittsburgh social entrepreneur Bill Strickland, he didn’t know it would lead him to a new career.
Strickland’s rise from poverty with the help of an artistic mentor resonated with Johnson, a Goodyear executive raised by his single mother in Alexandria, Va. So when Johnson learned the Cleveland Foundation wanted to replicate Strickland’s successful Manchester Bidwell program, which provides arts education to teens and market-driven job training to adults, he reached out enthusiastically to foundation president Ronn Richard.
Last January, Johnson, 44, left Goodyear to become executive director of the Cleveland Center for Arts and Technology, a Cleveland Foundation-funded nonprofit that aims to open its doors in Midtown and accept up to 100 students and up to 50 adults this spring.
“I feel I’ve been trained my whole life to do this,” Johnson says.
>> What have you found in your trips to Pittsburgh to see the Manchester Bidwell program in action?I found hope. I found positivity. I found world-class facilities. I found people who were behaving in a world-class way. I found tremendous professionalism. I found an organization that was really in tune with affecting the lives of the community it participates in. I found a wide-ranging and diverse group of students. I saw the passion for learning and growing.
>> There are plenty of arts programs and vocational programs. What makes this one worth importing to Cleveland?The beauty of what we’re doing here is we’re identifying the needs of the community [and providing] market-driven training. If I go out to corporations and they say, “Here’s where my needs are,” and we build a training program around those needs, we can ensure that the outcome is directly related to what they need.
>> Why art? Art connects us to many different parts of our sensibilities. It helps us with our creativity. It requires focus. Bill’s experience around the arts, how it helped channel him, how it helped give him the vision to start Manchester Bidwell — that all started with clay, with his mentor Frank Ross, music in the background, the wheel spinning and trying to focus on this piece of earth.
>> How will we know if your program is a success?One of the things we want to know is: Are we getting adults jobs? If we train adults properly for targeted jobs so that they get those jobs, they can change their life, the lives of their kids and ultimately the life of the community.
Also, are we keeping students who may have been at-risk in school? And after that, are they going on to postsecondary education to improve their careers or getting meaningful jobs that allow them to have meaningful careers?
>> What have you done in the past that prepared you for this job?First, serving on nonprofit boards like the Urban League in Lancaster, Pa., and Akron. Earlier, starting a volunteer tutoring effort in the Lancaster, Pa., area, The Tutor Kids. … I wasn’t always a corporate executive. I was that kid. The bottom line here is I see me in them. That’s the passion that ignites my excitement in doing what I do.
>> Who were the mentors in your life?Oscar P. Ryder, a senior vice president at Dean Witter Investment. I worked for him as a handyman. I got to see what he did. He encouraged me to go further and gave me the confidence to believe I could be a vice president before 40, which I was.
Another man in my neighborhood owned a local convenience store: Tom Hawkins. At an early age, he inspired something in me. He wanted to take me on as a mentee in the store. He let me work the cash register. That was a symbol of trust and accountability. When I came back from college, I’d help him with his janitorial service, cleaning government buildings in the Washington, D.C., area.
In college, I was very close to graduating, and I was just short of tuition and fees by not very much, probably $500. I remember the men’s fellowship at the church he went to got together and gave me a scholarship. I vowed to them, if I finished school and got to where I was going to, I’d fund that scholarship. I’ve funded that scholarship privately ever since.