Marshall Ganz

““Organizing begins not by asking what is my problem? but who are my people?”

Marshall Ganz is a renowned community organizer, educator, and senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, best known for his pioneering work on leadership, social movements, and civic engagement. Born in 1942 in California, Ganz’s path into activism began early—he left Harvard College in the 1960s to join the Civil Rights Movement, working alongside figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). His deep belief in grassroots empowerment led him to spend over a decade with César Chávez and the United Farm Workers, where he helped design successful strategies for union organizing and collective action.

After returning to Harvard to complete his degree and later earn his PhD in sociology, Ganz turned his practical experience into academic theory. He developed influential frameworks for understanding how people can mobilize collective power through storytelling, strategy, and leadership. His concept of public narrative—the idea that effective leaders connect “the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now”—has become a foundational tool for activists, educators, and organizations worldwide.

Ganz’s teachings emphasize that leadership is not about authority, but about enabling others to act on shared values in the face of uncertainty. His influence extends far beyond academia: his methods have shaped political campaigns, community organizations, and movements for climate justice, education, and human rights around the globe. Through both his scholarship and his activism, Marshall Ganz continues to inspire a generation of changemakers to see leadership as a practice of hope and collective agency.

Strategy is figuring out how to turn what you have into what you need to get what you want.

People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal

Written in English

At a moment when our democratic abilities seem to have eroded, and political, economic, and technological forces have weakened the capacity for collective action, People, Power, Change is a once-in-a-generation book for anyone who wants to create real and lasting change.

Marshall Ganz is one of the world’s leading authorities on democratic organizing, and this book is the culmination of his decades of teaching, research, and work. In People, Power, Change, Ganz distills for students, practitioners, and activists the principles he has gleaned over the last half-century of creating collective action.

Ganz explores the forces, craft, and learned skill of organizing and provides an actionable framework for how to actually do it. He focuses the book on the creation and substance of relationships, the fuel of values and narrative, the resources and power of strategy, the necessity of structure, and the accountability of action. Across these five organizing ideas, Ganz weaves in his personal experiences from a lifetime of organizing in iconic social movements and campaigns to illustrate how collective action actually works and to build the practices and skills that must be developed to do it with intention and with success.

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Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement

Written in English

Why David Sometimes Wins tells the story of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers’ groundbreaking victory, drawing important lessons from this dramatic tale. Since the 1900s, large-scale agricultural enterprises relied on migrant labor–a cheap, unorganized, and powerless workforce. In 1965, when some 800 Filipino grape workers began to strike under the aegis of the AFL-CIO, the UFW soon joined the action with 2,000 Mexican workers and turned the strike into a civil rights struggle. They engaged in civil disobedience, mobilized support from churches and students, boycotted growers, and transformed their struggle into La Causa, a farm workers’ movement that eventually triumphed over the grape industry’s Goliath. Why did they succeed? How can the powerless challenge the powerful successfully?

Offering insight from a longtime movement organizer and scholar, Ganz illustrates how they had the ability and resourcefulness to devise good strategy and turn short-term advantages into long-term gains. Authoritative in scholarship and magisterial in scope, this book constitutes a seminal contribution to learning from the movement’s struggles, set-backs, and successes.

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