Organizing Obama

The Department of Urban Studies and Planning had the pleasure to welcome Professor Marshall Ganz, Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 for a lunch discussion sponsored by the seminar series "Spaces of Contention and Competing Citizenships" and the Housing, Community and Economic Development group.

Ganz was once a National Organizing Director of the United Farm Workers and is now a sought-after advisor to political campaigns, unions and NGOs. In 1968, Marshall Ganz dropped out of Harvard to join the civil rights movement, returned to his hometown of Bakersfield, California with "Mississippi Eyes" and was able to see for the first time the poverty, racism and injustice that had been around him his whole life. He then joined Ceasar Chavez as a farm worker organizer and was mentored by figures from Saul Alinsky's community organizing movement. He also helped organize a Get Out the Vote campaign in the 1968 California Primary for Robert Kennedy.

Since January, 2007, Marshall Ganz has worked as one of the lead organizers of the Obama campaign, training youth and other campaign volunteers around the country working for the election of Barack Obama. His talk in DUSP (Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT), "Organizing Obama: Leadership, Story and Strategy", focused specifically on how this grassroot campaigning and organizing work drew committed and continued support from a variety of volunteers and political activists united around the values and stories that Barack Obama developed during his campaign and how the Obama team worked to put an end to political campaigning centered on marketing and advertising towards voters as passive consumers. The team's goal was to create a long-lasting sense of purpose, action, and commitment around the volunteers who worked relentlessly around each State of the country towards and beyond the election of Barack Obama.