Marshall Ganz is Rita T. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Harvard Kennedy School. He teaches, researches, and writes on the practice of leadership, organizing and action. His book Why David Sometimes Wins (Oxford University Press, 2009), earned the American Political Science Association's Michael J. Harrington Book Award. Ganz works with the Leading Change Network and dozens of other grassroots groups in the United States and around the world to develop critically needed organizing capacity. Introduced to organizing in the Mississippi Freedom movement, In 1965, Ganz joined Cesar Chavez to work to unionize California farmworkers, where he spent the next 16 years. Throughout the 1980s, Ganz led organizing programs in union, community, and electoral campaigns. Having dropped out of Harvard College in 1964, he retuned to complete his undergraduate degree in 1992, an MPA in 1993, and a PhD in sociology in 2000. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity by the Episcopal Divinity School in 2010.
