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 Like so many kids who come here, Sharif seemed bitterly withdrawn and uncommunicative when he arrived.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.