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Marshall Ganz
Marshall Ganz (born March 14, 1943) is the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard 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.
Marshall is the founder of the Leading Change Network NGO.
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 Committee in Amite County.
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 Americans in Los 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. Chavez also took from CSO the idea of service organizations for the farm workers, to supplement the standard union activities.
Ganz's experience with the farm workers led him to formulate his concept of "strategic capacity." He said that explains how Chavez's farmworker organizing succeeded, and 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 defined strategy as "how we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want." 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 a stronger motivation, a deeper knowledge of the Mexican-American culture of the Central Valley, and diverse perspectives that generated fresh tactical ideas.
At the peak of its success in 1977, the UFWA stopped its aggressive organizing and turned inward. Chavez worked with Chuck Dederich, 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. Union membership has dropped from a peak of 60,000 in the late 1970s to around 5,000 in 2009.
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Marshall Ganz
Marshall Ganz (born March 14, 1943) is the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard 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.
Marshall is the founder of the Leading Change Network NGO.
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 Committee in Amite County.
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 Americans in Los 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. Chavez also took from CSO the idea of service organizations for the farm workers, to supplement the standard union activities.
Ganz's experience with the farm workers led him to formulate his concept of "strategic capacity." He said that explains how Chavez's farmworker organizing succeeded, and 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 defined strategy as "how we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want." 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 a stronger motivation, a deeper knowledge of the Mexican-American culture of the Central Valley, and diverse perspectives that generated fresh tactical ideas.
At the peak of its success in 1977, the UFWA stopped its aggressive organizing and turned inward. Chavez worked with Chuck Dederich, 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. Union membership has dropped from a peak of 60,000 in the late 1970s to around 5,000 in 2009.