People, Power, and Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal

At a moment when our democratic abilities seem to have eroded, and political, economic, and technological forces have weakened the capacity for collective action, People, Power, Change is a once-in-a-generation book for anyone who wants to create real and lasting change.

Marshall Ganz is one of the world’s leading authorities on democratic organizing, and this book is the culmination of his decades of teaching, research, and work. In People, Power, Change, Ganz distills for students, practitioners, and activists the principles he has gleaned over the last half-century of creating collective action.

Ganz explores the forces, craft, and learned skill of organizing and provides an actionable framework for how to actually do it. He focuses the book on the creation and substance of relationships, the fuel of values and narrative, the resources and power of strategy, the necessity of structure, and the accountability of action. Across these five organizing ideas, Ganz weaves in his personal experiences from a lifetime of organizing in iconic social movements and campaigns to illustrate how collective action actually works and to build the practices and skills that must be developed to do it with intention and with success.

Marshall Ganz is Rita T. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Harvard Kennedy School. He teaches, researches, and writes on leadership and organizing. His book Why David Sometimes Wins (Oxford University Press, 2009), earned the American Political Science Association’s Michael J. Harrington Book Award. Ganz 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. In 1965, Ganz joined Cesar Chavez to work to unionize California farmworkers, where he spent the next 16 years. Throughout the 1980s, Ganz led organizing programs in union, community, and electoral campaigns.