Marshall Ganz | |
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Marshall Ganz speaking about movement organization at Occupy Boston, 2011
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Born |
Bay City, Michigan |
March 14, 1943
Nationality | United States |
Alma mater | Harvard University |
Occupation | Practitioner and professor of community organizing and grassroots organizing |
Years active | 1964-present |
Employer | John F. Kennedy School of Government |
Website | marshallganz |
Marshall Ganz (born March 14, 1943) is a senior lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He worked on the staff of the United Farm Workers for sixteen years before becoming a trainer and organizer for political campaigns, unions and nonprofit groups. He is credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing model and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign.
Ganz was born into a Jewish family in Bay City, Michigan, in 1943. After they moved to California, they lived in Fresno and Bakersfield, where he attended local schools. His father was a rabbi and his mother a teacher. For three years after World War II, his family lived in occupied Germany, where his father served as a US Army chaplain working with displaced persons. Having encountered survivors of the Holocaust, his parents taught Marshall about the dangers of racism and anti-Semitism.
Ganz entered Harvard in the fall of 1960. He left before graduating in 1964 to volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project, where he worked in a freedom house in McComb. He helped to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. He stayed on in Mississippi as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Amite County.