Marshall Ganz
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Marshall Ganz speaking about movement organization at Occupy Boston, 2011
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| Born | (1943-03-14) March 14, 1943 (age 81)
Bay City, Michigan, U.S.
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| Education | Harvard University (BA, MPA, PhD) |
| Occupation(s) | Practitioner and professor of community organizing and grassroots organizing |
| Years active | 1964-present |
| Employer | John F. Kennedy School of Government |
| Spouse | Susan Eaton (deceased 2003) |
| Website | marshallganz |
Marshall Ganz (born March 14, 1943) is the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of GovernmentatHarvard University. Introduced to organizing in the American civil rights movement, he worked on the staff of the United Farm Workers for sixteen years, became trainer and organizer for political campaigns, unions and nonprofit groups, and returned to Harvard where he earned his PhD in Sociology (2000). He is credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing model and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign.[1][2][3]
Marshall is the founder of the Leading Change Network NGO.[4][5]
Ganz was born into a Jewish family in Bay City, Michigan, in 1943. After the family moved to California, they lived in Fresno and Bakersfield, where he attended local schools. His father was a rabbi and his mother a teacher. For three years after World War II, his family lived in occupied Germany, where his father served as a US Army chaplain working with displaced persons. Having encountered survivors of the Holocaust, his parents taught Marshall about the dangers of racism and anti-Semitism.
Ganz entered Harvard in the fall of 1960. He left before graduating in 1964 to volunteer for the Freedom Summer project, where he worked in a freedom house in McComb. He helped to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. He stayed on in Mississippi as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating CommitteeinAmite County.[6][7][8]
In fall 1965 Ganz returned to California to work with Cesar Chavez to organize agricultural workers. He served in a variety of positions for the United Farm Workers of America, including organizer, field office administrator, negotiator, director of the grape and lettuce boycotts, and director of organizing. For eight years, from 1973 to 1981, he was an elected member of the union's national executive board. Chavez's background in the community organizing tradition shaped Ganz's understanding of organizing.
Saul Alinsky had hired Fred Ross in 1947 to develop the Community Service Organization (CSO) to organize Mexican AmericansinLos Angeles and California's Central Valley. Chavez and Dolores Huerta learned community organizing working for Ross and CSO. When Chavez shifted his focus to farm workers, he asked Ross to join him as director of organizing. As Chavez's National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), as it was then named, battled the Teamsters for its first contract with the DiGiorgio corporation in 1966, it was Ross's methodical and disciplined approach to tracking each farm worker supporting the union that helped Chavez win.[9] Chavez also took from CSO the idea of service organizations for the farm workers, to supplement the standard union activities.[10]
Ganz's experience with the farm workers led him to formulate his concept of “strategic capacity.,” He says this explains how Chavez's farmworker organizing succeeded, while earlier efforts by radicals, and contemporaneous campaigns by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) sponsored by the AFL-CIO, and by the Teamsters, failed. Ganz defines strategy as "how we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want."[11] Strategic capacity, for Ganz, consists of three elements: motivation, access to relevant knowledge, and deliberations that lead to new learning. Chavez's efforts eventually prevailed because his organizing team had stronger motivation, deeper knowledge of the Mexican-American culture of the Central Valley, and diverse perspectives that generated fresh tactical ideas.[12]
At the peak of its success in 1977, the UFWA stopped its aggressive organizing and turned inward. Chavez worked with Chuck Detrick, founder of the Synanon drug treatment cult, to transform the internal life of the union. As Chavez purged the union of its long-term leaders and loyalty to Chavez became the primary criterion for employment, the UFWA lost its strategic capacity. Over the next three years, members of the Executive Board opposed to the direction Chavez was taking the union resigned, including Ganz in 1981.[13] Union membership has dropped from a peak of 60,000 in the late 1970s to around 5,000 in 2009.[14]
After leaving the UFWA in 1981, Ganz began working on California political campaigns—directing field programs, training organizers, and leading strategic planning for such candidates as Nancy Pelosi for Congress, Alan Cranston for Senate, Tom Bradley for governor, and governor Jerry Brown. He also worked on campaigns of such unions as the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the Screen Actors Guild. In 1987 he formed and served as executive director of two groups to develop organizing programs, Services for Organizing and Leadership, and The Organizing Institute. He led voter registration, get-out-the-vote, and organizer training. He also conducted research on voting, leadership development, and community organizing.
Ganz returned to Harvard in 1991 (after a 28-year absence) to finish his undergraduate degree in history and government, graduating in 1992. He received a Master in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government in 1993 and a PhDinsociology in 2000.[15] He became an instructor for the Kennedy School in 1994. Since completing his doctorate in 2000, he has been a lecturer in public policy, teaching courses on organizing, leadership, civic engagement, and community action research. He has collaborated with Harvard professors Theda Skocpol on African-American fraternal organizations, and with Lani Guinier for a course on law and social movements.
Marshall Ganz teaches four courses at Harvard Kennedy School of Government:
In addition to his teaching load, Ganz continues to be active in local politics. On June 11, 2014, Ganz endorsed Don Berwick for Governor of Massachusetts.[18]
In contrast to the structural emphasis of the once-dominant resource mobilization and political process schools of social movement analysis, Ganz emphasizes the subjective agency of social movement participants, whose values, intentions, and narratives constitute the essential material of analysis. Ganz begins with the famous three questions of Hillel the Elder, "If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am for myself alone, what am "I"? And if not now, when?" Ganz relates these questions to "the story of self," "the story of us," and "the story of now."
For the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, Ganz maintained that campaign workers approaching potential voters needed to be able to quickly tell their story of self to establish a relationship with the voter. The story of us connected the values and interests of the campaign worker and voter with candidate Obama. What Martin Luther King Jr. called "the fierce urgency of now" focused the voter's hopes on the imminent election. The importance of relationships, rather than campaign platforms, dominated the Camp Obama training program for campaign workers. Ganz has continued to develop this model in "Camp OFA" for Organizing for America, the successor organization to the Obama campaign, and for "Camp MoveOn," a training program for leaders of MoveOn.org's local councils.
The Camp Obama model was based on the model first developed and used in a project for the Sierra Club. Ganz teamed up with Harvard psychology professor Ruth Wageman in an effort to improve the volunteer programs of local chapters.[19]
Ganz has been accused of harassing Israeli students in his "Organizing: People, Power, Change" course. In a lawsuit filed against Harvard University by the Brandeis Center, Ganz told the students they could not use the term “Jewish democracy” to describe Israel – stating that using the words “Jewish” and “democracy” in regard to the Jewish state was akin to a project promoting white supremacy. When the students decided to stick with their project as designed, Ganz threatened them with academic consequences. “Professor Ganz admitted he had never told students in any other class that they could not present their work, even when it centered on controversial topics. During the final class, two of Ganz’s teaching fellows taught a lesson on how to recruit support for Palestinians,” the complaint from October said, noting that while the topic itself was not objectionable, “it led to students making hostile claims, inaccurate characterizations and false accusations against Israel and Israelis. Ganz refused to let the Israeli students provide a response or any counter-arguments to the wildly inaccurate data presented.” [20]
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