Manny’s: The Organizing We Need in the Election Aftermath

Join us on Sunday, November 17 for a conversation with Marshall Ganz at 2 pm to discuss his new book on how to make change in the context of the recent election.

Marshall is the Rita T. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society at the Harvard Kennedy School where he teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, public narrative, and organizing. He was introduced to organizing in 1964 as a volunteer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer. In 1965, he joined Cesar Chavez to unionize California farm workers, where he spent the next sixteen years. Throughout the 1980s, he led organizing programs in union, community, and electoral campaigns – many of which were in California, including Jerry Brown and Nancy Pelosi.

He currently works with the Leading Change Network and dozens of other grassroots groups in the United States and around the world to develop critically needed organizing capacity.

Ganz has distilled a half-century’s worth of insights into an urgent call for strengthening democracy, People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal (published August 1, 2024). Written in the tradition of classics like Saul Alinsky’s 1972 Rules for Radicals, Ganz’s transformational book is at once a practical guide on how to reclaim democratic power and an inspiring manifesto for collective organizing as an essential driver of democracy.

Today’s threats—the climate crisis, the housing crisis, racism, xenophobia, socioeconomic inequality, transphobia, gun violence, and more—demand that we go back to the basics of how to work together to achieve change and shape a better world. With People, Power, Change, Marshall Ganz compellingly demonstrates that the only way through is by building power together.