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HOW TO BUILD A CULTURE OF ORGANIZING: A CONVERSATION WITH MARSHALL
GANZ  
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Steve Dubb and Marshall Ganz
November 19, 2024
Nonprofit Quarterly
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_ A lot of mobilizing is tactics in search of a strategy. There is no
strategic context to it because there is no organizational venue in
which that strategy is being developed. _

, Book cover by Oxford University Press

 

_Truth to Power_
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series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls
of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism
to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular
uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about
the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better
world._

STEVE DUBB: YOU INDICATE IN YOUR BOOK THAT YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT THE
“WHO, WHY, AND HOW OF DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE.” COULD YOU EXPAND ON
THIS?

MARSHALL GANZ: Democracy is not something you have; it is something
you do. If you’re not doing it, it’s not real. Sadly, in our
country, there is less and less of it being done.

Take the replacement of self-governing organizations with nonprofits
or NGOs: there is nothing democratic there. It is almost like unions
are one of the few remaining forces where people are actually
practicing self-government.

It is kind of hard to have any real understanding of what democracy
means in terms of how we interact with each other and how we govern
ourselves when it is not part of your daily experience. It hollows out
any real understanding of democracy.

SD: YOU MENTION A SHIFT FROM SELF-GOVERNING ORGANIZATIONS TO NGOS AND
NONPROFITS. HOW HAS THAT HARMED DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE?

MG: There is an interdependence between our political structures and
our civil society structures. It was typical, really up until the
1960s, that large organizations in the United States were
representative organizations. There would [be] a local, it would pay a
per capita up to the [regional] level, and then [the regional would
pay] up to the national level. [This meant that power was rooted at
the local level.]

That all comes apart in the 1960s and 1970s. [Harvard political
scientist] Bob Putnam
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the social capital crisis. But that’s not a cause. What really
happens is there is a very dramatic shift in the dynamics of
membership growth and funding.

It starts with direct mail. We did a study of the Sierra Club. We saw
this so clearly. Up to a certain point, chapters drive membership
growth. Then, there is an inflection point, and membership growth goes
way ahead of the growth of chapters.

The difference is that at the national level, new technologies make it
possible…to reach so many more people, raise money that way, [and]
conduct elections that way. All of a sudden, the local groups that had
been the source of power for the organization become a client of the
organization.

You see this pattern of professionalization in advocacy groups in all
this stuff. That is part of it.

The other part of it is a boom in philanthropy. It is the other side
of the inequality: “All these people out here are suffering, so now
we are going to be philanthropists.”

So then comes the _donorocracy_. Nonprofits are governed by boards.
The boards are usually chosen by the wealthy. They are not elected.
And then the boards hire people, and they are employees, and they do
whatever they do. And there may be beneficiaries, but they are not
beneficiaries that have any voice.

In some ways, yes, we want participation. But we decide what happens.
When you separate participation from governance, you have—like the
institution of the Catholic Church for so many years—high
participation but tightly held governance. That is typical of how NGOs
are structured.

The problem in the organization world is that then when you become
dependent on donors for your operations, then your constituency falls
into second place. Your success depends on your donors, not your
constituency.

With 501c3s, you often take the most active people that care the most
and you put them in a nonpartisan ghetto. It is a ghetto, because
parties matter in politics. Politics is the means through which people
connect with each other to govern themselves.

People say, “I don’t like politics; I like purity.” Purity is
fine but has nothing to do with power. And politics has a lot to do
about power. The conservative assault on government is really an
assault on democracy, and it has been going on for many years.

SD: IN YOUR BOOK, YOU IDENTIFY BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS, TELLING
STORIES, STRATEGIZING, ACTING, AND STRUCTURING AS “FIVE KEY
PRACTICES OF ORGANIZING.” COULD YOU DISCUSS THIS?

MG: I think of organizing as a form of leadership. Our approach is
posed by the three questions Rabbi Hillel
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“What do I do with my life?”

In response, Hillel offered three questions: _If I’m not for
myself, who will be for me? _It’s not selfish, it is
self-regarding. To see others, you need self-awareness. The
second: _If I am for myself alone, what am I? _It’s about the fact
that we are relational creatures. Finally, he says: _If not now,
when? _It’s not about jumping into moving traffic; it is a caution
against what Jane Addams called the snare of preparation
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I have become a big fan of [General Dwight David] Eisenhower. Somebody
was interviewing him after D-Day and said, “Boy, planning must have
really been important.” Eisenhower replied, “Yeah, planning was
important, but plans are useless.” Point being that until you get
into action, you can’t learn. You need to learn to be effective. So,
to me, leadership is the interaction of self with others in action.

Then there are the challenges of hands, head, and heart. A leader who
faces a challenge asks themselves, _Do I have the tools to deal with
this?_ That’s a hands challenge. _Can I use my resources in new
ways?_ That’s a head challenge. _And where do I get the courage?
Where do I get the hope? How do I inspire hope and courage in
others?_ That’s a heart challenge.

Leadership, I’d argue, is accepting responsibility or enabling
others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty.
Organizing is a form of leadership in that spirit. Only the first
question is not, _What is my issue?_ It is: _Who are my
people?_ Second: _What are the changes they need because of lived
experience?_ Finally:_ How do we work with each other to turn the
resources we have into the power we need to achieve the change we
want?_

And it is also about power. There is so much confusion about power.
Power is not something you have. It is influence created through
interdependence. Where we have an alignment of needs and resources, we
can combine to create a credit union or co-op because of our capacity.

But if someone else has resources that we need to meet our needs and
our resources are not relevant to theirs, then we can wind up in a
situation where theirs will substitute ours because of the dependency
that is created. That’s domination. That’s power over. Then, we
have to figure out how to turn resources we do have into power that we
need to get what we want.

SD: YOU MAKE A DISTINCTION BETWEEN RESOURCES AND POWER. COULD YOU
ELABORATE ON THIS?

MG: I got involved in organizing originally in the Civil Rights
movement in Mississippi. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was seminal for
the Civil Rights movement. What they discovered was how individual
resources could be turned into collective power. It is a very dramatic
story, but basically what they discovered is that feet could be a
source of power. If you use your feet to walk to work instead of using
your feet to get on the bus, your individual dependency on the bus
company turns into the bus company’s dependency on a united
community.

That’s really at the heart of it: How do we transform the resources
we do have into the power we need to get the change? When I was
working with the farm workers, [the employers] were breaking the
strikes. We discovered that grapes could become a source of power.
That is, eating them and getting supermarkets to stop selling them.
All of a sudden, a grape becomes a resource that leads to power
through organization.

The American colonists did the same thing with tea. [Mahatma] Ghandi
was doing the same thing with salt.

When I came back to school and started my PhD, I came across an
article called “The Insurgency of the Powerless
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It was about the farmworkers in the sixties and seventies. It argued
basically our success was due to structural factors, and that we [the
United Farm Workers] had nothing to do with it. It pissed me off.

It put me on the path of writing my first journal article and my
dissertation, which became my first book, _Why_ _David Sometimes
Wins_
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It is about how to leverage your resources in ways that can disempower
those who are oppressing you.

And yes, the resources matter, but the _use_ of resources also
matters. That’s what puts leadership and creativity back into the
picture.

SD: YOU ARGUE THERE IS A TREND TOWARD THEORIES OF CHANGE THAT ESCHEW
POWER ANALYSIS AND INSTEAD FOCUS ON DATA, MORAL SUASION, OR
STORYTELLING. WHY DOES THIS TREND EXIST?

MG: I’m a big fan of storytelling. But you need understanding of
what it is, and what its role is. When I was with the United
Farmworkers, we had to have a story, a strategy, and a
structure. _Why are we doing this?_ That’s
story. _How?_ That’s strategy. _How do we organize ourselves to
do it?_ That’s structure.

The dynamic between strategy and story is really important. Because if
there is no story, then the value becomes just the strategy. It is not
in service of something more significant that we can weigh the
strategy against.

There is a new book out called _Hospicing Modernity_
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Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. She argues basically that the whole
capitalist project is not sustainable and that we are seeing that. So,
we better give things a decent burial while we get busy creating what
we need to survive as humans. It sounds really radical. It feels like
where we are.

In terms of why things are the way they are, there is also a new book
by Daron Acemoglu, who just got the Nobel Prize [in Economics]. His
new book, _Power and Progress_
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is about power and technology.

What his studies point out is that when a new technology is
introduced, it often makes most people poorer, not richer. It makes a
few people richer. It takes a while for people whose position has been
destabilized to figure out how to use political structures to counter
the impact of the concentration of wealth that is associated with new
technology.

It is the opposite of “the internet will make use free.” We have
an economic system and economic model that dehumanizes. It turns us
into users. It turns us into data points. [The late Harvard political
scientist] Sid Verba
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to say that liberal democracy is a gamble that voice can balance
wealth. In other words, political power—citizenship—can balance
ownership. We are kind of [on] the losing end of that and have been.
But that’s not to say we’re done.

SD: MUCH OF WHAT GOES UNDER THE NAME OF ORGANIZING IS MORE AKIN TO
MOBILIZING. COULD YOU ELABORATE ON THE DIFFERENCE AND WHY IT MATTERS?

MG: Mobilizing is a tactic. And social media has facilitated that by
reducing the cost of information sharing.

So, instead of building commitments to each other and building real
organization, we engage in these transactions where we show up and
then we go home, and nothing is built. And so, the mechanisms through
which you develop strategy are not there because there is no
continuity. And the only continuity tends to be provided by the people
who can keep the funding going so then they can strategize. But it’s
not based on having a real base of people.

And so, with the mobilizing, one thing that happens is—well you know
the cartoon figure, Wile E. Coyote, who runs off the cliff, looks
down, and there is nothing there. That’s what happened to Sunrise
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mobilizing. They looked down and there was nothing there. They are now
trying to recognize themselves in a way that is there is something
there.

Consider also, for example, the 2024 election campaign: There were a
bunch of people with a lot of money giving money to community
organizations to canvass. The donors’ item of value is how many
doors you have knocked on.

What does that even mean? There is a decoupling of inputs and outputs.
There is a gap in the middle where there is no theory of change. It is
just input, input, input. And then how is that supposed to connect?
It’s substituting money power for people power. When you have a
genuine organized volunteer-based operation, it is a different deal.

I know community organizations that are struggling with this. Because
they want to be organizing. But all this money comes in and then they
are running these mobilizing operations. It is because the sources of
money want something that they can count.

SD: HOW CAN MOVEMENTS TODAY EFFECTIVELY NEGOTIATE THIS REALITY THAT
THEY OFTEN RELY ON EXTERNAL RESOURCES THAT MISDIRECT THEM?

MG: It is going to take sacrifice. It is going to take risk-taking.
If you look for energy sources, probably the biggest energy source for
change globally is the women’s movement.

I see it in my classes. We work with people in the Middle East. We
work with people in India. My classes tend to be two-thirds women. We
are talking people in their thirties, but from all these different
cultures. That’s a powerful energy. It’s happening. It’s there.

Now the question is: What to make of it? How to equip the energy with
the structure that it needs to be as powerful as it can be?

The same thing with young people and the young people’s energy
around climate justice. There it is a similar challenge. If the energy
is there, that’s a huge piece of it. Because you can’t manufacture
energy.

With immigrant communities, the Dreamers are an interesting example:
they got highly energized because there was some hope. You don’t
generate energy without hope. Grievance does not produce energy. There
has to be this other element. I like the Maimonides
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belief in the plausibility of the possible as opposed to the necessity
of the probable. In other words, it is always probable Goliath will
win, but sometimes David does.

It is that place of possibility between certainty and fantasy. It is
the domain of “could be.” And that takes courage and it takes
imagination. And it doesn’t happen in a consulting firm.

SD: YOU NOTE THAT WINNING AN ORGANIZING CAMPAIGN IS TYPICALLY ONE GOAL
OF THREE, AND THE OTHERS ARE STRENGTHENING THE ORGANIZATION AND
BUILDING LEADERSHIP. COULD YOU DISCUSS HOW CAMPAIGNS SEEK TO BALANCE
THESE GOALS?

MG: What is typically missing is organization. In other words,
what’s gone along with the [focus on issues] is campaigns,
campaigns, campaigns.

Campaigns—they are about change. They are the rhythm of change. They
have a specific objective. And they may accomplish the objective or
not.

But what is being built? That’s often missing. That is where
organization comes in, which is the rhythm of continuity. When I was
working with the farmworkers’ union, we had lots of different
campaigns, but we were building a union.

So, that’s the missing piece. To the extent that we can bring
mobilizing back into the context of organizing, then it becomes a
tactic, which is all it is. A lot of mobilizing is tactics in search
of a strategy. There is no strategic context to it because there is no
organizational venue in which that strategy is being developed.

So, yes, it is a balance. Since [the theorist] Robert Michels
discovered the iron law of oligarchy
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which states that there is a tendency for continuity to suffocate
change, it is the challenge of democracy generally. Unless there are
mechanisms of accountability, everything breaks down.

To me, accountability is one of the most moral, psychological,
political, and economic realities about how humans work. We can’t
just rely on virtuous people—we have to create virtuous
institutions. And that’s what the whole democratic experiment is
about. Can we do that? Can we actually balance power? The jury is
still out.

SD: YOU WROTE THAT FROM THE STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE,
YOU LEARNED THE DANGERS OF A RADICAL DIFFUSION OF POWER, WHILE THE
UNITED FARM WORKERS TAUGHT YOU THE DANGERS OF TOO MUCH CONCENTRATION
OF POWER. WHAT DOES A HAPPY MEDIUM LOOK LIKE?

MG: There is a book by Roberto Unger called _Democracy Realized_
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Democracy is a practice; it’s not a thing. The key is flexibility.

Once, I worked with a Jordanian woman organizer who said, “I see
that this is not a blueprint. This is a roadmap of where to look
within our own cultures, our own histories, and our identities for
these sources of solidarity and love and courage and all of that.”
And I think she really got it right.

So, this problem—radical decentralization, radical
centralization—you have to look at the power dynamics.

Sunrise believed in radical decentralization [using self-governing
activist cells] based on a theory of DNA
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“We now have our DNA, and all will go forth based on that.” They
look back now and say, “Oh, that was nuts.” There was no mechanism
to coordinate to exercise scale, or even to learn. Because you have
all these isolated groups out there doing their own thing. So, that is
one extreme.

But then the other extreme is where it is all consolidated at the top.
In the book, I talk about strategy and where it comes from—_strata_,
the Greek word. The general, the _strategos,_ is up on the
mountaintop overlooking the field. He develops a theory of change
about how to deploy. And the soldiers in the field, they are
called _taktikos_. That’s where you get strategy and tactics.

When a cloud gets in between the two, that’s when you have problems.
The local people have intimate knowledge of context—no question.
They need each other. If there aren’t mechanisms for
decision-making, communication, and legitimacy within the
organization, then they fight each other. The world is littered with
that.

How resources are structured and how work is structured have a lot to
do with whether it works or not. Authority, if it is all centralized
to make decisions, if resources depend on the fundraiser who has
access to the donor, then you’re not going to have widely
distributed power because that is where the resources are coming from.
If they are generated locally, then it is more democratic.

If the work is organized like these canvassing operations—like
Charlie Chaplin in _Modern Times_
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discipline—it will be centralized too. If you look at the dynamics
of how the work is done, how authority is structured, and where the
resources actually come from, then you can see how the organization
works and not get caught in just reading the bylaws.

How you strike that balance? In the UFW, we allowed power to become
too centralized, too distant. We were very democratic at the base.
Committees were elected by workers. That was all good. Then we had an
executive board at the top. And there was nothing in between.

What that meant was there were no local unions and no regional level
where somebody could consolidate enough power to hold the board
accountable. There was democracy at the base, but it was so scattered
and diffuse that it could never challenge the center.

It really is a question of how we structure things. It is also a
question of what the narrative is, what the culture is, and the values
that we are trying to enact.

With [Harvard sociologist] Theda Skocpol
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whole study of representative organizations in the United States from
the American Revolution up to the 1960s. There were 65 we identified,
all of which had at least 1 percent of the eligible population in
them.

Many were fraternal organizations
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the Women’s Christian Temperance Union
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the Farmers’ Alliance
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often started when somebody someplace tried something. And it works.
Then they find a way to scale, which rarely involved getting a grant.
The scaling was usually people from the first project go elsewhere and
start it. It was an evangelical process through people.

[Harvard business professor] Rebecca Henderson
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study of diffusion of innovation in Silicon Valley. The dominant
literature said that there was a model, and they replicate it. But
what she found actually happens is that new firms hire people from the
original firm to bring their understanding with them.

SD: IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU WOULD LIKE TO ADD?

MG: We over-complexify things by making them abstract. When you get
down to the nitty-gritty, it is people. I am not saying it in a
romantic way. But people can be pretty creative to develop ways to
exercise power—for good or evil.

I think whether you mobilize around fear or hope is fundamental. When
you mobilize around fear, what you are doing is you are robbing people
of their agency. You’re locating the source of the fear outside of
them. It is out there. All you have to [do] is get rid of “them.”
It is the opposite of agency.

When you organize out of hope, you’re saying there is a possibility,
and you have possibility, and we build out of that sense of
possibility, which aligns with having some power. Barack Obama was a
hope mobilizer. And Donald Trump is the opposite.

One of the sad things about the 2024 elections is that both candidates
were really “Yes, I can” candidates [versus
“Yes, _we_ can”]. Trump was, “_I_ am your avenger.” Kamala
Harris was the protector: “_I_ will protect you.”

Neither one acknowledged the fact that we, the people, are agents. And
that unless that _we _is part of the solution, it’s not going to
happen.

_Steve Dubb is senior editor of economic justice at NPQ, where he
writes articles (including NPQ’s Economy Remix column),
moderates Remaking the Economy webinars, and works to cultivate
voices from the field and help them reach a broader audience._

_Marshall Ganz is the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership,
Organizing and Civil Society at Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government. He teaches, researches, and writes on leadership,
narrative, strategy and organization in social movements, civic
associations, and politics. Ganz began organizing as a volunteer with
the Mississippi Summer Project in 1964. In the fall of 1965, he joined
Cesar Chavez; during 16 years with the United Farm Workers, Ganz
engaged in union, political, and community organizing._

_The Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ) envisions a world in which we live in
an active democracy whose values are fully grounded in human rights,
economic and social justice, racial equity, and thriving communities.
Our mission is to advance conversations and practice in civil
society—as manifested in nonprofits, social movements, and
philanthropy._

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* strategy and tactics
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* United Farmworkers
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