Marshall Ganz

I ‘discovered’ Marshall Ganz when his work on ‘The Power of Story” formed the basis of the annual Hillel Institute, the professional conference. I wrote about this in an earlier post. Today, I want to focus on Professor Ganz and his own story.

Marshall Ganz

Ganz grew up on the West Coast, in Fresno and then Bakersfield. The first remarkable chapter in his life was when, as a child, his family went to post World War Two Germany, where his father, who was a rabbi, served as an army chaplain working with displaced persons. The impact of meeting Holocaust survivors had a powerful influence on the whole family and Ganz grew up learning about the dangers of racism and Antisemitism.

Ganz began his undergraduate degree at Harvard but left the year before he graduated in 1964 to volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project, where he worked in a freedom house in McComb and helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. He also joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers of America and over the next decade and a half gained experience in union, community, issue, and political organizing and became Director of Organizing for the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA).

The Union of Farm Workers is smaller today, but its significance has not lessened.

He left the UFWA in the 1980’s and began to focus on political organizing for a number of candidates including Nancy Pelosi for Congress, Alan Cranston for Senate, Tom Bradley for governor, and governor Jerry Brown.

Twenty-eight years after leaving, Ganz returned to Harvard where he finished his undergraduate degree, received an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2000.

Since completing his doctorate in 2000, he has been a lecturer in public policy, teaching courses on organizing, leadership, civic engagement, and community action research at the Kennedy School for Government

While preparing to facilitate the workshops at the Hillel Institute, I learned that Ganz offers a unique perspective on community organizing and activism. In contrast to institutional mass mobilization, Ganz stresses the need to tell the story/

He stresses the need for personal investment through what he defines as “the story of self.” Here the individual shares something of him/herself, something that offers a moral or insight to whatever the message is. This can then be fused with “the story of us,”which is essentially the party line or goal that the activist is trying to suggest. Finally, Ganz concludes that there must be a call to action, which he encapsulates in “the story of now.”

Activism Is About Telling the Story

Finally, Ganz stresses that the communication cannot be one-way, but must involve genuine listening to understand the other person’s perspective through their own personal narrative.

Ganz illustrates this through the famous three questions of Rabbi Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?”

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Alon Shalev is the author of The Accidental Activist (now available on Kindle) and A Gardener’s Tale. He is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Hillel Foundation, a non-profit that provides spiritual and social justice opportunities to Jewish students in the Bay Area. More on Alon Shalev at http://www.alonshalev.com/and on Twitter (#alonshalevsf).

The Power of Story

I have just finished attending the annual professional conference for Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, the organization for whom I work in San Francisco.

The theme of the conference was Collecting & Connecting Stories and I was honored to be one of the facilitators for the 5-workshop seminar that unfolded throughout the conference.

Marshall Ganz - his own story is a powerful lesson

The workshops began by focusing on why we tell stories, focusing on the work of Marshall Ganz. While there was the obvious and sometimes surreal fusion of my life as a ‘Jewish professional’ and as a social activist writer, I was just as struck by how much you learn from a person when you listen, really listen, to their story, including the spaces between the words.

I remember a writing coach saying that the reader not only learns from the words on the page, but from the white spaces (what we don’t say). For example, when someone tells you a story about their children, they are telling you how important their family is in their lives. They are sharing their values and priorities.

We learned how when you share a personal story with someone you are making a commitment towards friendship as you share a piece of yourself and you are honoring them by offering a level of exposure. Likewise when people share their story with us, they are inviting us to get to know them on a deeper level.

In a conversation with a colleague at the conference I explained that I write novels that highlight social injustices and promote individual empowerment to create change,  and she tied this into a model of how I envision my work in the San Francisco Hillel Jewish Student Center.

My biggest takeaway from these workshops was the realization that to compartmentalize stories within the pages of a book is only one facet of storytelling. We use our personal stories to reach out to others and offer an insight into our character, a lesson from the moral of our stories, and the opportunity to bear witness to the stories of others, validating their experiences and values. Stories are all around us. They form an integral part of the fabric of social interaction.

Stories are all about delivery, but they are also about listening. How much better can we make our world if we can find the comfortable space to tell our stories and learn to truly listen and learn from those of others.

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Alon Shalev is the author of The Accidental Activist (now available on Kindle) and A Gardener’s Tale. He is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Hillel Foundation, a non-profit that provides spiritual and social justice opportunities to Jewish students in the Bay Area. More on Alon Shalev at http://www.alonshalev.com/and on Twitter (#alonshalevsf).