Kennedy School lecturer Marshall Ganz MPA 1993 is a people person. While an undergraduate at Harvard, he volunteered for the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project and became field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC (pronounced “snick”). For years he worked alongside Cesar Chavez, helping to grow the United Farm Workers union and coordinate migrant laborers. He organized voter registration drives, labor strikes, and lettuce boycotts.

So when former students from PAL 177, his “Organizing: People, Power, and Change” class, started popping by his office looking for advice or e-mailed questions they were grappling with in their new jobs, he didn’t mind. Learning while doing — what Ganz calls “reflective practice” — is something he wholeheartedly encourages.

“It was turning into a whole lot of mentoring relationships,” he says, smiling.

But he also knew that it would be more valuable for everyone if the graduates of his class — many now working out in the field as activists and community leaders — could mentor each other. It would allow learning that was started in the classroom to continue long after graduation.

Ever the ultimate organizer, Ganz had one obvious thought: there’s got to be a better way to organize this.

That way turned out to be the Web.

“My first idea was a straight e-mail list, but the Web made more sense,” he says. “Instead of me being the ‘hub’ or the ‘answer man,’ I realized that a three-dimensional Web site would be more like the class. We could learn from each other. I would just serve as the facilitator.”

With the help of the Kennedy School’s information technology team and a small grant from the Provost’s Office, Ganz and Jennifer Fey, one of his students from the Harvard Divinity School, created a Web site called the Peer Learning Network (www.ksg.harvard.edu/organizing/). Designed to serve as an online meeting space, the site was launched in February 2002. Although it’s primarily geared toward students and alums that have taken Ganz’s class — nearly 500 by now — anyone interested in organizing would also find the site useful.

“So many people get isolated doing this kind of work. Then you lose the motivation and the learning,” Ganz says, explaining why it’s important to have a place for organizers to stay in touch, bounce ideas off of each other, or just get inspired.

“The site gives them a community to contact and explore. It helps them build on relationships.”

The “spotlight” feature, for instance, highlights a former student every couple of weeks with a short profile, information on where the person works, and a real-life question that the person wants to pose to the community. In May, the spotlight was on Heather Harker MPA2 2000, a consultant with a nonprofit in Boston. She was concerned about addressing issues of diversity at her company. Would her efforts have “real value,” she wondered, or just serve as a “mouthpiece?” Users of the site logged in and shared ideas.

The “profiles” section offers an individual page for each community member, complete with background and contact information. Users can also click a button to set up a real or virtual “one-on-one” meeting with those who are profiled — a feature that excites Ganz.

“This section is about not being anonymous,” he says, noting that most of the profiles include photos. “In organizing, the first thing you learn is how to work one-on-one with people. We think of organizing as big groups but a lot is actually one-on-one relationships. It’s the opposite of anonymity.”

Lisa Boes, a fourth-year doctoral student at the Ed School who has been a teaching fellow in Ganz’s class for the past two years, finds the profiles section particularly helpful when she teaches an undergraduate version of PAL 177 at Harvard College and Tufts University.

“I’m often helping students find resources while they do their class projects,” she says. “The ‘profile’ page allows me to find current contact information for people who are still doing community organizing after the class ends. These people have an understanding of what we’re trying to teach in the course and what the expectations are. I also browse through the site with students and help them see the kinds of projects that have been done in their interest area. It helps them think creatively about the possibilities for their own work.”

What keeps the site interesting, says Ganz, are the mixed experiences brought by the range of students who have taken his course. Although the majority are women (“Organizing is most appealing to people struggling to get more power,” he says. “You’re not as interested if things are going well for you.”), the class attracts students from all over Harvard, including the Kennedy School, Ed School, Divinity School, Harvard College, and the Law School. Approximately 11 percent also live outside the United States in 20 different countries.

The diversity is evident in the “reflections” page, which includes poems by E. B. White and Marianne Williamson and motivational quotes by Soren Kierkegaard and Alexis de Tocqueville, including “In democratic communities, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all others” — a favorite that Ganz refers to often.

Other features include a “tools” page, which includes class notes and other organizing resources. The “careers” section lists current organizing job announcements, viewable by sector and location. And the “discussion” chat room-like option, currently open only to community members who have taken Ganz’s class (although Ganz said they may change this), is being revamped so that discussion threads can be better grouped to make reading easier and more intuitive.

“We keep trying to push the envelope,” Ganz says. “The site is designed to be a lifelong learning mechanism so that people can extend their reflective practice beyond the class. The doing and the learning — that’s where the real gain is, where the real leaning is.

“People start with their own stories. If people don’t tell their own stories, it never gets relational,” he says. “This site isn’t a substitute for real relationships. The exchange of information is very different from forming relationships. But this site allows us to enhance and amplify the community we’re building.”

So what happens now when students drop by looking for answers?

“I say, have you gone to the Web site?” Ganz says, then asks them to sit down. — LH