By Tom LoBianco
Rooted in his Practicing Democracy Project at the Center for Public Leadership, Marshall Ganz and his collaborators teach students that because the muscles of democracy have atrophied over time, now is the right time to start building them anew.
And building the democratic muscle starts with doing.
“It’s pedagogy of practice: How do you acquire the tools to practice democracy? Now we focus on the development of leadership equipped to do that,” said Ganz, who has long taught at the Harvard Kennedy School and is currently the Rita Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society.
It is important, he said, not to let planning bog people down and to simply do. To build those democratic muscles, “understanding flows from action.”
Since 2001, Ganz and his students, collaborators, and colleagues have developed those democratic muscles in courses, workshops, and campaigns. More than 5,700 people have been trained through the coursework and roughly 10,000 municipal, health care, educational and social movement leaders trained through workshops worldwide.
Ganz is deeply rooted in the kind of social justice organizing to which he was introduced in 1964, after dropping out of Harvard with a year to go as a volunteer in the Mississippi Summer Project. In 1965, he committed to what would become 16 years working with —and learning with—Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers. He then turned his skills to electoral and union organizing, mostly in California.
The challenge of working together to achieve a shared good has been taught across cultures going back to antiquities. Ganz sums up his approach to leadership as rooted in 3 questions, asked by 1st century Jerusalem scholar, Rabbi Hillel”
- “‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me?’ It’s not selfish, but it’s self-regarding.”
- “‘If I’m for myself alone, what am I?’ … It is to recognize we exist in relationship with others. Our capacity to realize our objectives is inextricably wrapped up with the capacity of others to realize theirs.”
- “‘If not now, when?’ It’s not advice to jump on a moving track, but it’s recognition that rarely can we learn what to do well until we actually begin to do it.”
Ganz spoke with the CPL newsletter in April, shortly after the White House targeted Harvard and other universities with threats to end critical research funding unless the government could dictate key elements of what is taught.
“The first thing is to be very clear about how bad this is: a rock bottom moment!,” Ganz said of President Trump’s efforts since his return to office. A rock bottom moments teaches us that what we have been doing is not working, so we have to change. Thus, it can also be an opportunity to take fresh approaches.”
In teaching others how to lead in organizing, taking the raw energy and turning it into a sustained movement, Ganz cites the Five Practices of democracy he teaches: relationship building, storytelling, strategizing, action, and structuring.
“What we do in our pedagogy is introduce people to those practices. It's like making a lot that's implicit, explicit,” Ganz said. “And we can get to scale by enabling learners to become teachers, and followers to become leaders. Because as you learn these practices, then you begin to acquire the capacity to develop others in those practices. It can create a cascade of leadership development—what some call the ‘snowflake’ approach.”
He developed the “snowflake” approach during the 2007-2008 race for the White House, contributing to the development of then-Sen. Barack Obama’s successful organizing efforts, which helped carry the nation’s first Black man to the Oval Office. “It was neither top-down nor strictly bottom-up, but a style of team leadership,” he said, “akin to how a soccer team plays or a string quartet performs.”
“People commit to interdependent work with each other, holding each other accountable, and having investment in the success of the other,” he said, “And these are all muscles anyone can build. As human beings, we have enormous capability.”
Ganz recalled the Montgomery Bus Boycott as an example. The bus boycotters discovered that if they walked to work and denied the bus company their bus fare, their individual dependency on the bust company could be transformed into the bus company's dependency on an organized community. For Ganz, turning resources we have into the power we need is what organizing is all about.
Now, he emphasizes that leaders must step up to face new uncertainty with a hands, head, and heart approach.
Hands are the skills and the tools, head is the knowledge, and heart is the courage.
Ganz teaches organizing as leadership but also teaches public narrative—something he says is a critical element of organizing. And this year, with colleague Chris Robichaud, he started a new, fundamental class they call “Being Human.”
“It's through narrative that we do the values work. That's how values are made. Narrative is a way of communicating. Values are feelings; they're not concepts,” Ganz said. “‘It is one thing to know the good, it is another to love it. Loving it is what enables us; knowledge does not equal action without motivation. And motivation comes from the heart.”