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?”

Please click here to vote.

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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).

D-I-Y Composting

I remember proudly taking my mother around the environmental center that we had developed on my kibbutz. She was very impressed until we arrived at the composting area. Being primarily an educational center in a part of the world where ecological awareness was considered a luxury, I showed her a wide array of composting methods, with different containers and techniques.

My mother grew up in England during World War 2. She is part of a generation who have the Dig for Victory psyche deeply entrenched. She has always grown vegetables and has always composted. She has never read an article or book about how to make compost, she just has.

But most of us are estranged from the near mystical process of turning waste into fertile earth. Here is a great how-to video on how to start composting. It’s very cool. Enjoy.

or if you don’t fancy rolling your compost bin…

Yumm!
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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 www.alonshalev.com

 

Community Gardens – Greening the Revolution One Neighborhood At A Time.

I am a child of the generation who fought World War Two.  England was a country hemmed in by Hitler’s armies with only 20 miles of water between them. The British entered a siege mentality. In the cities, they took empty plots of land and began growing vegetables. Dig for Victory was the mantra.

Thirty years on, when I grew up in London, these parcels of lands – allotments – commanded a waiting list of people still trapped in that siege mentality. The ability to grow your own crops was a reassuring subconscious feeling of freedom.

Fast-forward to today and we are seeing another agricultural grassroots consciousness. Community gardens are springing up all over the place. Here in the Bay Area, they are particularly prolific. But the motivation is different.

Today people seem to derive great satisfaction leaving their screen -dominated worlds for an afternoon to get dirt under their finger nails, want to make a connection with their food source, and are relieved to bear witness to a pure (organic) form of growth for the nourishment they will put into their mouths.

It doesn’t matter if you have no knowledge. There will be others ready to show you. Some go to the gardens to work, others to buy their produce.

And above all, it helps create an organic (pun intended) community. Perhaps there is a historic psyche, remembering the closeness of human bonds in our agrarian pasts.

For an oversight of community gardens, please visit the American Community Garden Association. (http://www.communitygarden.org/). They have a page for how begin a garden.

If you are in the Bay Area, here is a good source for community gardens near you. (http://www.sfgro.org/sfgardens.php)

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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 www.alonshalev.com