Marshall Ganz

So, you know, so I think I have a lot of thoughts right now.

The first of which is that I'm currently enrolled in Professor Marshall Ganz's public narrative class through Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education Program.

And so the entire class is really about leadership and about how leaders can engage inspire others to take up the same kind of fight that we all are trying to work toward by talking about the values that unite us.

And so, you know, so I part of that is talking about what's called your story of self.

And that part of the story is often missed in this current moment and the headlines and the speculations about the midterms and the rest of it, but that part is really, really important.

Marshall Ganz, the great movement theorist whose, whose organizing model was adopted first by Obama in 2008 and also had a profound effect on the Bernie 2016 crew, and Zoran Mamdani's campaign also used.

Uh, Marshall Ganz, Marshall Ganz's first experience of door-to-door canvassing was with my grandfather, David Lewis, in the 1974 election campaign.

Hmm.

Not a successful one for my grandpa.

Uh, he lost his own seat.

But Marshall Ganz first, you know, the originator of a lot of the techniques being used by the DSA today, got his taste of door-to-door in the NDP.

And so that focus on one-on-one conversations with neighbors, mass participation, base-building politics, is something that we follow very, very closely and is actually an attitude towards politics, a politics for the 99% that actually lives that rhetoric by building mass participation at the base.

But that was the most inspiring reaction to that, with this community coming together, um, that I think lifted everyone up.

Um, so that's, that's really interesting and compelling and, and it kind of dovetails into my next question, is just, like, um- How does this kind of narrative or this, this strategy, uh, deviate or share strategies with, like, Marshall Ganz's public narrative or George Lakoff's work? I mean, you've been digging into this a lot.

There's...

I, I can already see some parallels, especially to public narrative, but, um, you know, uh, w- how, how does it work together or, you know, or differently?

I'll talk a little bit about the Ganz piece, and then if you wanna chime in, Jiggy.

Um, I'd say there are two very important pieces in our report specifically that draw on Marshall Ganz's work.

One is our reference to the hero's journey and the importance of storytelling, the importance of centering your audience as the hero and having a shared story of now and us and, you know, making a choice to overcome a challenge together.

That's, like, very much, you know, the basis of public narrative that Ganz has really, um, made popular across the progressive movement and has just been so vital to, like, every success the progressive movement has had.

And I love that she said, as a great actor, to be believable, I have to understand the stories of my character's past because it is those stories of the past that illuminate our path to the future.

A great leadership professor at the Harvard Kennedy School is Marshall Ganz.

He says we need to know only three stories.

The story of self.

The late Clint Riley managed it.

Marshall Ganz, who was a very skilled organizer, has a history with the United Farm Workers, was part of it.

And they divided up the city very strategically into groups.

They sent separate mailers to different communities.