Marshall Ganz

Marshall Ganz, the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, narrative, strategy and organization in social movements, civic associations, and politics. He is the Faculty Director of the Practicing Democracy Project (PDP) at HKS’ Center for Public Leadership. 

Marshall grew up in Bakersfield, California where his father was a Rabbi and his mother, a teacher. After entering Harvard College in the fall of 1960, he left a year before graduating to volunteer with the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. Marshall found his “calling” as an organizer with the project's Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and over the following 28 years, it continued to find its shape through the civil rights movement. By the fall of 1965, Marshall returned to California to join Cesar Chavez in his effort to unionize California farm workers through the United Farm Workers (UFW). Over 16 years with UFW, Marshall gained experience in union, political, and community organizing, eventually becoming the Director of Organizing and then was elected to the UFW national executive board from 1971-1981. After leaving the UFW, he worked with grassroots groups in California to develop new organizing programs and designed innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. By 1991, his hunger for deeper intellectual understanding of his work fueled his return to Harvard College. After a 28-year "leave of absence," Marshall completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He was awarded an MPA by HKS in 1993 and went on to complete his PhD in sociology in 2000.

Marshall has published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, American Prospect, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and elsewhere. His newest book — People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal (2024) — explores the values, ideas, and craft core to the practice of organizing and offers an actionable framework for how to actually do it. He also authored Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (2009), earning the Michael J. Harrington Book Award of the American Political Science Association. In 2007-8 he was instrumental in design of the grassroots organization for the 2008 Obama for President campaign. In 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity by the Episcopal Divinity School. 

In association with the global Leading Change Network of organizers, researchers and educators he coaches, trains, and advises social, civic, educational, health care, and political groups on organizing, training, and leadership development around the world, and serves on its Board of Directors.