People, Power, Change

Summary

Marshall Ganz distils five decades of organising and teaching into five practices: relationships, narrative, strategy, structure and action. Organising, for him, means enabling a community “to turn resources it has into the power it needs to get what it wants”. His example is a bus boycott: “Almost everyone had feet”, and walking together turned “individual resources into collective power”.

Rationale

We ask what holds current contexts in place and who that serves. Ganz answers with dependency, and a craft for reversing it: a grip on power cultural work can lack.