Marshall Ganz
Summary
Marshall Ganz is an American organiser and Harvard Kennedy School professor whose career runs from the United Farm Workers (UFW) of the early 1970s through decades of Harvard teaching and the founding of the Leading Change Network practitioner programme. His two principal contributions to the wiki’s organising pillar are the public narrative framework (Story of Self, Story of Us, Story of Now) and the strategic capacity theory of how movements build the leadership base they need to win.
Key idea in this wiki
- The Leading Change Network — Ganz’s practitioner network at Harvard — hosts the wiki’s source page, which documents the network’s resource centre as a teaching infrastructure for the public-narrative method [source: leading-change-network].
- The public-narrative concept page is the wiki’s primary distillation of Ganz’s three nested stories, linking commons-library, training-for-change, beautiful-trouble and leading-change-network as the sources that document the method.
- His earlier UFW organising work is the lineage the wiki’s organizing pillar treats as the deep-organising root of community-organising practice.
- The Story of Self / Us / Now structure is the wiki’s working canon for narrative-strategy design; the public-narrative page cites Ganz’s practitioner writings as the entry point [source: leading-change-network].
Why campaigners read him
Campaigners read Ganz because he did both sides of the line: he organised in the fields with Cesar Chavez in the 1970s and 1980s, then translated what he learned into curricula that the Obama 2008 organising and training models drew on directly. The Story of Self / Us / Now structure is the most copied organising narrative scaffold in the contemporary U.S. left, and the Leading Change Network has run it in adapted form across climate, immigrant-rights, and faith-based organising since the 2010s [source: leading-change-network]. The companion idea — strategic capacity — argues that campaigns win not by a single charismatic act but by building the leadership base of motivated, trained members who can exercise a sequence of strategic moves; this is the working backbone of the wiki’s relational-organizing and organizing conceptual pages.
Related
- leading-change-network
- public-narrative
- organizing
- commons-library
- training-for-change
- beautiful-trouble
- thinkers/saul-alinsky
- thinkers/ella-baker
Learn more
- On Wikipedia: Marshall Ganz — CC BY-SA 4.0
Sources & verification
- sources/leading-change-network — grounding: secondary — RAW (2917 chars)