Marshall Ganz

Marshall Ganz is the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at Harvard Kennedy School, where he teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, organization, and strategy in social movements, civic associations, and politics. He also teaches two online programs, Public Narrative: Leadership, Storytelling and Action and Leadership. Organizing and Action: Leading Change, designed to strengthen participants' leadership capacity. Ganz entered Harvard College in the fall of 1960. In 1964, a year before graduating, he left to volunteer as a Civil Rights Organizer in Mississippi. In 1965, he joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers; over the next 16 years he gained experience in union, community, issue, and political organizing and became Director of Organizing. During the 1980s, he worked with grassroots groups to develop effective organizing programs, designing innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. In 1991, in order to deepen his intellectual understanding of his work, he returned to Harvard College and, after a 28-year "leave of absence," completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He was awarded an MPA by the John F. Kennedy School in 1993 and completed his PhD in sociology in 2000.