Organizing, Advocacy and Change
Marshall
Ganz Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard
Kennedy School
Alexis de Tocquville wrote
that in a democracy, knowledge of how to combine is the
mother of all forms of knowledge. He was talking about
organizing: developing leadership, building community, and
mobilizing power to balance inequality of resources with
equality of voice. Organizing is about neither providing
services to clients nor selling products to customers, but
about bringing citizens together to act on common concerns.
The practice of organizing can be useful in diverse
settings: community organizations, faith communities,
public health, unions, electoral politics, education,
advocacy and government.
I discovered my call to organizing through my experience in
the civil rights movement, bringing people together to
build the political, economic and moral power to claim
their rights. I learned the craft of organizing working
with Cesar Chavez to build a migrant farm workers union in
California. But I only came to fully appreciate the
“science” of it when I returned to school to learn and to
teach. Because organizing is about how people can change
institutions, I found historical study, social analysis,
and political understanding key to learning why our key
institutions work as they do, where they came from, and how
they can change. But I also found that courses in how we
actually work together – in organization studies,
negotiations, social psychology, and leadership necessary
for learning how we can make the changes we want. And I
found that courses in sources of our values critical for
learning how to access the sources of moral energy that it
takes to make change at all. Finally, the combination of
experience and academics to which I have had access taught
me that unless we learn to theorize practice, we learn
little from it; but too, unless we ground our theory in our
practice, it is of little practical value.
In selecting courses, students
may consider the interests of their classmates as well as
the experience of the instructor and the content of the
syllabus. Related courses offered at the Divinity School,
Graduate School of Education, Law School, Faculty of Arts
and Sciences and MIT Urban Studies program can also be
explored.
Masters of Public
Administration (MPA) degree candidates at the HKS,
as well as cross-registrants from other schools or
faculties:
ion (MPA) degree candidates at the KSG,
Essential Courses
PAL-177 Organizing: People, Power and Change
PAL-101 Exercising Leadership: Mobalizing Group Resources*
(*For Masters of Public
Administration (MPA) degree candidates.
)
API-703 Understanding
Democracy Through History
STM-221 Introduction to
Negotiation Analysis
STM-502 Managing People: Self,
Relationships, and Teams
PAL-154M Public Narrative: Identity, Agency, and Action
PAL-127 Moral Leadership: Self, Other, and Action
Other
Recommended Courses
Useful
Practices
API-214 Public Opinion, Polling and Public Policy
API-701 Reasoning from
History
STM-199 Doctoral Seminar on
Public Management and Leadership
PAL-119 Organizational
Leadership and Governance
PAL-142 Persuasion: the
Science and Art of Effective Influence
PAL-155M Public Narrative: Conflict, Continuity, and Change
Valuable
Frameworks
NPS-100 Introduction to the Nonprofit
Sector
PAL-150Y Seminar: Politics and
Advocacy
STM-480 Leadership for a
Networked World
PAL-216 Democratic
Theory
PAL-218 Innovations in
Democratic Governance: Solving Public Problems
NPS-202 Accountabiliy and
Policy: Challenges in the Public, Nonprofit, and Private
Sectors
Social
Change Venues
PAL-107 Civil Rights Innovations
PAL-122 Religion, Politics,
and Public Policy
ENR-205 Environmental Justice
as a Public Policy Issue
HCP-382 Health Policy Reform:
Comparative Perspectives
PAL-229 Driving Forces in
American Politics
PAL-265 Leadership, Democracy
and Conflict: the Politics of the Developing World
STM-334M Innovation and Reform
in Twenty-First Century Democracies
BGP-405 “On the Balcony of
History?” The European Union in the 21st Century
HLE-201 Poverty and Social
Policy
HUT-100 Policy Making in Urban
Settings
ISP-103 Global
Governance
ISP-209 U.S. Security, the Law
and Justice
PED-130 Why Are So Many
Countries, Poor, Volatile, and Unequal?
PED-376 Civil Society and
Development