Marshall Ganz Quotes

Hope is the belief in the probability of the possible rather than the necessity of the probable.

The sooner you can begin working with a team, the sooner your “I” can become a “we” of an organization. You can structure a regular rhythm of meeting, decision-making, accountability, and learning that enables real progress. No one can build a real organization of five hundred people by recruiting them all on their own. Instead, you build it by recruiting people willing and able to commit to building it with you. If you can’t recruit them, it may be that they don’t need you.

organizers create collective capacity through the purposeful formation of civic relationships to enable democracy to work.

I only understood the real power of the one-on-one in 1984, after I had left the United Farm Workers (UFW), when at an Industrial Areas Foundation training in San Antonio, I observed veteran organizer Ernesto Cortes model one.

Respect is what you do, not what you have. First, listen, and hear; second, ask, and learn; third, show respect, and you will get it; and fourth, don’t try to be anyone different from who you are. Be yourself.

Perhaps the most important criterion for a strategy team, then, is that it has a combination of people who have learned, or are open to learning, that there is more than one way to look at things.

Without structures for peer organizational learning, local groups missed opportunities to learn from each other’s failures and successes.

understanding flows from action, rather than preceding it.

leadership is about practice rather than position.

Issue-based identities can fragment people; values-based identities can unite people.

By the time I left the farmworkers, I had learned that to try organizing without a story is to try organizing without a heart—

Since we build civic relationships with intentionality, with whom do we build them?

making the improbable possible, is at the heart of strategic leadership practice, especially in highly volatile social movement settings.

Organizing is usually about change, but organization requires continuity. Organizing a campaign requires urgency, focus, capacity building, and adaptation. It moves from a status quo condition to a future and different condition. Organization requires predictability, stability, and coherence.

Charity asks, 'what's wrong, how can I help?' Justice asks, 'why is it happening and how can I change it?' And that's when people get uncomfortable. Because it is often the case that these people over here have less, because these people over here have more. And when we try to change that, there's resistance & there's conflict and struggle.