Marshall Ganz: Lighting a Fire
by Karim Bardeesy on February 12, 2008 in Features
Kennedy School students who want to learn from sociologist and activist Marshall Ganz get a flavor of Barack Obama pretty early on. On the first day of his “Public Narrative” class, Ganz shows a video of Obama’s 2004 Democratic Convention speech, pointing out how Obama’s story of his parents’ “improbable love” sets the stage for an inspiring call to action. (He’s not politicizing the classroom - students see Ronald Reagan later in the semester.)
Later, Ganz shows a short video of Susan Christopher, a California mother of three, who was skeptical about politics. She was a new attendee at “Camp Obama,” one of dozens of volunteer organizing and recruiting sessions held across the U.S. last summer. Ganz was there. Christopher tells:
“Men wept when they spoke about the hopes and dreams of their generation, killed alongside Bobby Kennedy. When Ganz and these men shared about this loss, and how Obama was the reclaiming of that hope and the symbol of the rebirth of those dreams…I began to realize that this campaign might actually be something special.”
Christopher is a new recruit, and a committed one at that. It’s all rooted in Ganz’s academic work on motivation, narrative and action, which draws on psychology, literature and case studies of successful activist movements. The more particular the story, the more the listeners are likely to be drawn in, identify with their own experience and want to get involved.
Ganz, a civil rights, labor and farm worker organizer in the 1960s, compares the excitement around the Obama campaign to 1968. “It’s an extraordinary moment of flux and opportunity.”
Although Ganz only met Obama at his April 2007 Boston rally, he says, “I felt like I had met him in 2004 when I saw his convention speech. The campaign had the potential to turn into a movement.”
And that’s just how Ganz is helping get Obama elected. “We’re
training a whole bunch of new leaders,” Ganz says
One of them is Jeremy Bird, a former Divinity School student and course assistant for Ganz’s class on organizing, who became the field director for Obama’s South Carolina campaign.
He and other activists eschewed the usual model of gaining votes by targeting the existing community leadership. They used Ganz’s approach, organizing house parties to allow potential voters to tell their story, and moving from those stories to encouraging people to get involved in the campaign.
Ganz spent almost a week in January in South Carolina, coordinating and motivating volunteers, and getting out the vote from the campaign’s base in a funeral home.
“Bill Clinton came down to our region on voting day,” Ganz says, laughing. “He had no idea what was happening. We won almost 80 percent of the vote in that county.”
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