BETWEEN 2 MILLION and 3.6 million undocumented people were brought to the United States as children, according to estimates. Over the past decades, these so-called “Dreamers” have advocated for protections and a path to citizenship, most notably through the proposed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. While this act was not passed into law, it inspired Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012—a workaround that temporarily protects such Dreamers. Currently more than 500,000 people in the United States are actively protected by DACA.
The Dreamers made progress, in part, by finding the courage to tell their personal stories about their undocumented status. Such narratives were a strategic element of their campaign. Organizing and sustaining movements is challenging, but to make sustained political progress, articulating a clear narrative can make a difference. Renowned organizer Marshall Ganz, who teaches at the Kennedy School, has helped advise and train people creating a movement, not only in organizing and strategizing, but in developing stories that mobilize people. His frameworks helped in raising awareness for the Dreamers—and many other grassroots organizers in the United States and around the world.
Having spent decades on the ground as a community, labor, and electoral organizer himself, Ganz now teaches people the practice of leadership, organizing, and collective action in which public narrative plays a critical part. Inspired by the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, Ganz left Harvard before graduating (he would complete his undergraduate degree 28 years later) to volunteer for the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project in support of Black organizers fighting for the right to vote. It turned out to be the experience in which he found his calling as an organizer and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). After passage of the Voting Rights Bill of 1965, he returned home to Bakersfield, California, and for the next 16 years worked with Cesar Chavez to unionize California farm workers, mostly Mexican immigrants. In the 1980s he put his organizing skills to work in local, state, and national community, labor, and electoral campaigns. In 1991, looking for deeper ways to meet growing challenges to effective democratic organizing, he returned to Harvard College. He completed his undergraduate degree in history and government and graduated in 1992. (His 81-year-old mother finally got to see her son become a college graduate.) After earning his MPA at HKS in 1992, he completed his PhD in sociology in 2000 and joined the HKS faculty full time.
As the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society at HKS, Ganz teaches executive education and degree program students the skills of leadership, organizing, and public narrative, a storytelling practice leaders can use to communicate their own values, enable others to experience values they share, and access the motivational resources rooted in those values for the courage to confront threats with hope, not fear; solidarity, not isolation; and self-worth, not self-doubt: a story of self, a story of us, and a story of now. Ganz and his students have worked with some 6,000 former students—and their students—in 35 countries in politics, health care, education, labor, faith, gender equity, and more. In 2007 and 2008 Ganz was instrumental in the design of Barack Obama’s grassroots presidential campaign.
The mayors and city leaders who come to learn at the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative have also learned the tools of public narrative from Ganz. These students included Pete Buttigieg, who was then mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Buttigieg, who was part of the initiative’s first cohort of mayors in 2017, brought the power of public narrative back to South Bend. He convened city workers and members of community organizations together for a two-day workshop to begin learning how to put this leadership practice to work, enabling others to work together to achieve goals with a public purpose. For example, the director of the public library surprised himself by finding the wherewithal to secure a $5 million investment. A representative from the education department found it useful for winning a seat on the school board. Buttigieg, himself, honed his public narrative, drawing on his experience growing up gay in the Midwest and evoking the hope, compassion, and courage that enabled people to “get him” when he launched a presidential campaign run in 2019. He would later become secretary of transportation in the Biden administration.
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Banner image by Alex Wong/Getty Images; faculty portrait by Martha Stewart